Fawn
It was amazing, disturbing, even, how quickly things could go from great to painfully awkward. I was carrying Dax's baby in my belly, and yet as he stomped around my condo, I felt like we were only one step above being total strangers. He checked each room of my place to make sure there was nobody waiting to jump out and kill me, and I stood in the living room, hands clasped over the place where my baby now lived and wishing I could go back in time. I had handled it all wrong. Everything I had done and said from the time I'd heard Dax say marriage wasn't on the table to now had been a mistake, and now I was going to have to try and fix it. The thing was, with a guy like Dax that was easier said than done. He was pissed now; even a blind person could have told that, and he wasn't an easy guy to talk down off the ledge. It was far from being the ideal time to talk to him about what was on my mind, but I knew that if I didn't do it now, I might never do it at all. It was the easiest thing in the world to let an important conversation slide. All you had to do was not open your mouth and then keep not opening your mouth for long enough that instead of a conversation there was a boulder wedged between you and your guy. Once it got to be that big? Once it turned into the elephant in the room? At that point, you were basically screwed.
“Hey, killer, everything look good?”
“Yeah, looks clear. Do you need anything else?”
“Will you sit down? Please?”
“Shit, Fawn, I don’t know. I know you said you wanted to talk now but I don’t know if I’m up for it.”
“Please? I’ll even let you play the hormone card next time I act like a bitch. Although I can’t promise that I won’t lose my shit when you do it.”
That at least got a smile out of him and using what little leverage I might now have I took his hand gingerly. I felt him flinch a little at my touch, which made me feel sick to my stomach, but he didn't pull away, so at least there was that. I led him to my couch, all the while wondering how the hell I was going to come out with the things I needed to say. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing more terrifying than telling somebody how you felt about things. I would have taken a day in an ER over that any day of the week.
“Alright, Fawn, we’re sitting. Now what?”
“Now I want to talk to you.”
“You sure? Because the talking we did in the car, if that’s what you want to call it, didn’t go so well for me.”
“I know, I’m sorry. I told you, Dax, I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s fine,” he answered quickly, stiffly so that I was pretty sure it wasn’t really fine at all, “I just don’t want to do it anymore.”
“Neither do I. It’s part of why I’m trying to talk to you now.”
“Okay, I can dig that. Talk away.”
"So we've talked about Frank, right?" It was an awkward way to start, and I could see the confusion register on Dax's face. I still wasn't sure that I was taking the right approach, but I was in it, and that was something. I could have tried to backpedal, but it would only have made the situation worse, and I knew it.
“Sure, we’ve talked about him. Why, are we about to talk about him again?”
“Sort of. So when I was with Frank, in the beginning at least, I really did think it was a rest of my life kind of a thing. I thought I had found my person. That I was done looking.”
“I’m familiar with the feeling.”
“I know you are, Dax, believe me, I didn’t forget. I really am sorry for what happened to her, I am, but it’s different.”
"Okay." He was almost completely impassive, unreadable, and a jolt of fear shot through me that there was nothing I could say that was going to make things any better. I knew the shutdown Dax, and it wasn't pretty.
“I don’t mean it’s different in that mine was harder, but it is different. Because Lilian didn’t choose to leave you, Dax. She died, she didn’t wake up one day and decide you weren’t good enough anymore.”
“You don’t know -”
“What, that that’s what Frank was thinking?”
“Exactly.”
"You tell me what else a man is thinking when he does something like that? Besides, it doesn't even really matter if that's what he was thinking or not because inside of my head it is. Inside of my head, that's still what he's thinking, even all of this time later. I still dream about him, Dax."
“Perfect. Just what every guy wants to hear.”
"No," I said loudly enough that he raised an eyebrow at me. It wasn't a great expression for me to have caused, but at least he was looking at me now, which was progress. It was actually kind of helpful, too. This was turning out to be harder to talk about than I had expected it to be and any kind of contact I could get with Dax was helpful to my being able to go on. "No, don't do that. I don't mean I dream about him in a good way. It's not like I'm having sexy dreams about a man who left me."
"Well, then what kind of dreams are these?"
"Hard ones. They're dreams where I get left. I have these dreams where I have to learn all over again that not only am I not worth staying with; I'm also not even worth having that conversation with in person."
“Ok, you lost me. What are you talking about?”
“When he left. I told you he left over a weekend when I wasn’t around. What I didn’t tell you is that he never bothered to talk to me in person about it. He sent me an email detailing the things he’d taken out of the apartment we shared and left instructions for how I could contest anything I didn’t agree with. That was it. Never called me, never saw me again.”
“Jesus. So he’s a bigger asshole than I thought.”
“Right, he’s an asshole, but that’s not all I’m trying to tell you.”
“Then what are you trying to tell me? I swear to God, Fawn, I'm trying to follow you, but I'm just not getting it, I don't think. I don't get how this stuff as anything to do with what went down in the car."
“I know.” I was very close to tears, desperation threatening to overwhelm me. It was shockingly painful to relive all of this stuff for Dax’s benefit. The only thing that would make it worth it was if I could convey just how badly all of that mess with Frank had screwed me up. “I swear I’m getting to it. I just need to make you understand first. Or to try to.”
"Okay, I gotcha. But babe, I'm not trying to hurt you. I'm not going to lie; I don't like the way you acted on the ride over here. I don't like it, and I don't understand it. But I can tell you're fucking with your own head telling me whatever you're trying to say. If that's what it takes for me to get where you're coming from, maybe we should just leave it."
"No, I want to tell you. It's just that having somebody go from asking you to spend the rest of your life with them to showing you that you mean so little you don't even deserve a proper goodbye? It messes with you. It was just about the hardest thing that ever happened to me, and it made it so that marriage is kind of a touchy subject for me."
“Okay?”
"Back at the clubhouse. My dad asked you about marriage, and you told him no so fast it was like you were going to have a heart attack. Like getting married to me was the worst thing you could possibly imagine."
“Oh. Oh. Shit. I think I see where this is going. Shit.”
Dax had looked like he was on the verge of calming down when he started to get the gist of what I was saying. To say that his demeanor changed when he realized what our conversation was really about would have been the understatement of the century. If he'd gone diving off of the couch and hidden behind my television stand, I wouldn't have been surprised. This was exactly why I hadn't wanted to talk to him about what was bothering me. A girl could hope that her man wasn't going to behave like a stereotypical man when it came to the marriage talk, but the fact of the matter was, most of them did. I reached for his hand, and although he let me take hold of it, it was like holding onto a clammy, dead fish. Now he was in self-protection mode, and I had no idea what kind of things that would make him do.
“I know it’s not like, an awesome thing to talk about, but when you told my dad no so quickly, it hurt my feelings. We’re having a baby together, Dax.”
“Right, I know. And I’ve been there for you since the beginning, right?”
“Right, of course. Nobody’s saying that you haven’t been.”
“Okay, so then it shouldn’t matter what I said to your dad about Getting married. What should matter is that I already made you a promise that I’m not going to leave you to take care of this baby by yourself.”
“This baby? Not our baby, just ‘this’ baby?”
“You know what I mean. Don’t try and turn this around so that I’m the bad guy. You know I’m here for you, that’s all I’m trying to say. I told you I would be around for whatever you needed. Christ, Fawn, I told you I would move to this complex. To be closer to you and the kid. Is that something somebody who wants to run out on you is going to offer up?”
“No, but that’s part of what I was trying to tell you. I’ve had guys make me promises before. It doesn’t necessarily mean -”
"I'm not Frank, Fawn," Dax snarled, giving up all pretense of wanting to be close to me and letting go of my hand. He started stalking around my living room like some wild beast doing his damnedest to find his way out of captivity and failing. "You can't blame me for the shit he did to you. And I'm not some random asshole you just met on the street a couple of months ago. We've known each other for our whole lives. That's sure as shit long enough for you to give me more credit than you're doing right now. Or at least it oughta be."
“I know you’re not! That’s not what I’m trying to say! But you’ve got to understand that it messed with me. It made it so, so hard for me to trust a guy and when I hear you tell my dad no to a question like the one he asked you? It makes me wonder.”
"Well, it fucking shouldn't! How many times do I have to tell you I'm not going to bail for you to get it through your thick skull?!"
"So then why did you say no?!" Now we were both shouting. I had told myself before I'd started this conversation that I wouldn't let that happen but now it just seemed inevitable. Dax and I had always been close, but we were also a lot like trying to mix oil and water into the same bottle and have it stick. On my feet now and facing off against the father of the baby growing inside of me, I could feel my face growing hot and the fear and anger rising inside of me. There was no end to that fear. It would just keep growing until it took over everything and everyone around me. "Why did you say no when he asked if we were going to get married?"
“Because we’re not! Marriage isn’t happening!”
“But we’ve never even talked about it, Dax! I don’t understand how you could just take it off the table completely without us even having a conversation about it first?”
"Because no conversation needed. What did you want, a shotgun wedding?"
“No, but -”
“But nothing! I told you I would be there for you. That should be enough. Marriage shouldn’t have to come into play. Everything was fucking fine before we told your dad. You should have known he was going to say stuff like that. You should never have let him get into your head that way. With all of the bullshit marriage stuff.”
“Who said it was because of him?” I whispered, this whole thing starting to feel like an out of body experience, “Maybe I didn’t need him to bring marriage up. Maybe it was something I had already thought about. Not for right now, but at some point. It’s not an abnormal thing for two people to do, especially when those two people are going to have a baby together.”
That brought us to an impasse, one full of the most dreadful kind of silence there was. All I could do was stare at Dax. I knew my expression must have been pleading, pathetic even, but there was nothing I could do about it. I had laid it all out there, poured out my heart, but I couldn’t force Dax to say the things I wanted to hear.
“I’ve got to go.”
"Wait, what? What are you talking about?" For some reason, it hadn't even occurred to me that his answer to everything would be to just up and leave. I would have done just about anything to make him stay, to make him talk to me, but I felt cemented in place. There I was, unable to move, and he was going to walk away.
"I've got things I have to do, Fawn. I didn't account for this kind of shit, and I don't have time to deal with it right now. Believe it or not, you aren't my only responsibility in this world."
As closing lines went, his was a scathing one. By the time I found it within myself to do anything he was already out the door, locking it behind him with what felt like heartbreaking finality. I kept waiting for him to come back, for him to say that he was sorry, but he never did. He just left me there to regret ever opening my mouth in the first place.