Two Way Street - Chapter Two

She tidied her face in the hallway mirror, not wanting Owen to see her in a mess. Or did she? She wondered even as she wiped up mascara on a tissue. No. She would behave with dignity and not dissolve into a black-teared monster. She smoothed the hair back from her face, gave her ash-blonde pony tail a yank to tighten it, and opened the door, mentally preparing for a continuation of the conversation with Owen. They would talk about it, get to the bottom of the problem, have sex and it would all be...

“Oh. Daniel.” The disappointment was crushing.

Owen’s friend from university, Daniel, flushed, hectic points of colour on his cheeks. “Hi Em. I guess I can’t say it is nice to see you. I am sorry. I am just an errand boy. Owen thinks it is better if it is a clean break for a few days, so… I am here to get some stuff he has forgotten.”

“Oh,” it was like a knife to the heart. “He really doesn’t want to see me, at all, then?”

“It is not that,” Daniel was apologetic as he edged past her and down the hallway. “I don’t know, really,” he added, reading the expression on her face. “It is no use asking me, Em. We are blokes, we don’t talk about stuff like that. My friend asked me to pop next door to pick up some stuff after a break-up, I don’t ask the details, I just do it.”

“It is a break-up?” Emily’s voice trembled. “Not just that we are not getting married?”

Daniel reached under the bed and came out with Owen’s spare guitar and a shoe box. “Em…” He grimaced. He really did not want to get involved.

She sighed. “You don’t know the details.”

“No, I am sorry.”

“Has he said anything at all to you about this? You know… in passing, before?” She wondered, grasping for anything, anything at all to explain where this heartbreak had come from.

He stepped around her and paused in the doorway, his back to her. “Maybe a bit here and there,” he admitted, his pity for her written all over his face and posture. “It wasn’t entirely… unexpected.”

“It was to me.” She said tightly, her chest tight and her stomach in her throat. Tears threatened to overflow again, and she fought them back pridefully. The tremble of her bottom lip betrayed her. “What did he say?” It was so painful to plead for the information.

“Em,” he did not want to say anything. “Just, you know… You have both been sort of perfect. No drunken binges and one-night stands, no major relationship dramas, no adventures. Just what is sensible, all the way from childhood through to now. He has sort of said he is going to be thirty in two years, and he is the only almost thirty-year-old he knows who has no stories to tell. That he thinks he is dull.”

“I don’t find him dull,” Emily replied, woebegone.

“Em, I have already said more than I should,” Daniel winced and flushed, embarrassed to be caught in the middle of a breakup. “Forget it.”

As she closed the door behind him, Emily wondered how she was meant to forget it when in one afternoon her entire life had been uprooted.

She stood by the kitchen sink, the window looking out upon the neat and tidy galvanized iron fence with its prettily blooming honeysuckle that divided the two properties and thought it a fitting view. Divided was how she felt. Divided in half.

She heard music start - the volume turned right up. Rock music, the bass of it shaking the glass in the windows, and distance distorting it into a crash of sound and drumbeats. Not a band she recognised, but then, she had never understood rock music. Oh, some of it was alright, but most of it was just… noisy. Owen had always liked it though. Whenever she borrowed his car, there was something in the cd player, and she knew he listened to it in his ear-pods when they ran together, same as she listened to opera.

It was one of those quirky things about them as a couple, that their musical tastes were so opposite, something that had always been a source of amusement. A prime example, they had said, of how opposites attract. But it had made choosing a wedding song a nightmare… She gripped the edge of the bench as she realised that after all that too and fro-ing, the song they had picked to share their first dance as Mr and Mrs would not be played.

They would not have their moment, on the vintage dancefloor, strings of fairy lights overhead, in the pretty garden they had booked for the venue, in their wedding finery, gazing into each other’s eyes as Mrs and Mrs… “Oh, god.” She spent fifteen minutes crying into the dishwater and washing the same coffee mug over and over before she pulled herself together.

She made herself a pot of tea and took it into the lounge room, but every show seemed to be a romantic comedy, and that was just salt in the wound. In the end she just sat there, in the silence, with the tea growing cold before her, untouched, and stared at the pictures of Owen and herself laughing down at her, waiting to wake up from the nightmare where Owen did not want to marry Emily and had moved out of the house they shared.

She considered calling her mother, but quickly discarded the idea. She loved her mum, beyond all things, but her mother would interfere. She would call Owen’s mother, who was her best friend, who would then call Owen, and both mothers would probably end up coming around together, to go speak to their respective child and things would just get unpleasant with four people involved in something that really just concerned two… No. Calling her mother was a bad idea.

She realized that she had left her phone in the spare room when she had answered the door to Daniel. What if Owen had messaged…? She retrieved the phone, her heart hammering in her chest. No messages. Not a single one. No quick sweet: “Thinking of you” as normally kept her phone busy. No “Do we need milk?” or “Did you pay this bill?” Or “Shall I grab takeaway on my way home?” Nothing. The silence was deafening.

She sent a quick message to Megan. “Don’t tell mum. Don’t tell anyone.”

A reply came swiftly. “As if I would.”

Emily held the phone in the palm of her hand. It would be pathetic to message Owen, she told herself. The screenshot was a photo of them, laughing together. She touched his face. He had been happy there, his dimple on full display, his laugh wide and his eyes dancing. What had happened in the interim, she wondered, to make him want to end what they had together? Surely Megan couldn’t be right… Could she?

She felt at an utter and complete loss for what to do, who to reach out to for help and support. Every other time she could remember in her life where she had been this upset, he had been there for her. When she had lost her first pet. When the girls at school had been mean. When she’d had her first car accident. When she had not gotten the honours mentor she wanted. Her first rejection letter from a literary agent. When she had not gotten the job position that she had wanted…

The biggest thing in her life had happened to her, now, and she did not have his shoulder to cry upon. His absence when she needed him, and the fact that she needed him because of his absence, rendered her impotent, unable to take action, almost numb from the shock.

She typed: “I miss you.” And then deleted it.