“I just don’t understand. Have you done it or haven’t you done it?” I said, trying my hardest to reign in the volume of my voice.

“The money’s there Becky, I just need to get some stuff sorted out with my online banking before they let me make the transfer.”

“So… you haven’t done it then.” At this point, a mere few days before I was due to move to my new condo and away from Kirsten forever, I was almost ready to just write off this deposit.

“Not technically, the deposit still has to be made, but listen, the money’s there,” she said, getting irritable with me.

I could do nothing but turn away from her so she couldn’t see the look on my face. Squabbling over my rental deposit was not how I envisioned beginning my brand new adult life working for our city’s most illustrious ad agency. Hadn’t I worked hard to be free of all this shit? It was like Kirsten was doing her best to cram as much of her bullshit in as possible before I left. I groaned and grabbed a glass, placed it in the center of a sheet of newspaper and tried to just focus on wrapping it carefully.

“You know, I’ve honored every single part of our rental agreement, to the letter,” I said under my breath, and put the glass in the box. If she thought offering to help me pack would get her off scot-free, she was wrong.

“Becky, I’m on it, okay?”

“The whole time, you’ve always been the one to break the rules we agreed to. You’re the one who makes noise after 11. You’re the one who brings guys around and…” I spun around as the sharp sound of glass shattering echoed through the kitchen. I saw Kirsten standing over the spinning shards of a water jug, a look of horror on her face. My mother had given me that jug.

“Becky, oh my god Becky I’m so sorry,” she said, her hands at her mouth. I rushed in to wordlessly scoop up the broken pieces, my face hot. She looked down at me fretting to clean up the shattered glass and kept blubbering about how sorry she was, but I was too angry to talk.

“Becky I didn’t mean it, it was just an accident,” she muttered.

I stood tall and glared at her.

“Why don’t you just go? I can pack by myself” I said, terse.

Her lower lip trembled, and then, all at once to my shock and hers, she burst into tears and began sobbing loudly.

“Kirsten, come on...” But she was inconsolable, quickly trying to smear away the torrent of tears falling down her face.

“Becky, you’re right you know. I’m such a fucking idiot…”

“I never said–”

“What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I get my life on track?” she wailed. I rubbed my temples.

“He never called me, of course. I texted him this morning, no response. Why am I surprised though, right? I can’t go on like this. I’m tired, Becky. What is it about me, huh? Is there just a big sign on my head inviting everyone to treat me like dirt?” she cried.

The last thing I needed right now was for my flaky roommate to have a breakdown on me when I still had 90% of my stuff to pack up… but I did feel really bad seeing her like this. I went over to her and gently hugged her shoulders.

“Hey, come on, don’t be like that,” I said and tried to give her a sympathetic smile. “He’s just an asshole, I’m sure. Forget about him.”

This had to be too much to ask, I was sure of it. My ex waltzed into my life and now I was here, trying to clean up the mess he made with his most recent one night stand? An asshole indeed. She sniffed and tried to catch her breath.

“Becky, you’re so awesome. You know, I never told you, and I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye but… well, I think you’re awesome. And now you’re heading off to some awesome new life and leaving me here,” she said and began crying again. I was rapidly getting pissed off, but I gave her another hug and a stern look.

“Kirsten, hey, just relax. We’re cool. You’re just tired probably. It wasn’t meant to be with that guy, that’s all. Okay? Come on, stop crying”.

She gave me a teary look but nodded.

“This guy was different though. I want it. I want love, Becky. Don’t I deserve it? I had something special with him,” she blubbered. I couldn’t help but snort.

“Special? I mean let’s be realistic Kirsten, you met him in a bar and…”

“No, this guy was different,” she insisted.

I gave her a cold look.

“He was so… passionate,” she said and got a dreamy look on her face. “I’ve never connected with someone like that before. And he felt it too, I know he did,” she said. I felt something angry and bitter rising in the back of my throat. I pulled away from the hug and cleared my throat.

“Kirsten, I know you’re upset but he was a one night stand.”

She nodded sadly at the ground.

“You need to just get a grip here. I don’t know why you keep doing this to yourself. Don’t have casual sex with people if what you really want is something else.” Man, I was being a fucking saint right now. If Kirsten had any idea of the restraint it took to keep my cool right now… But she got the dreamy look in her eyes again.

“You’re right, Becky. You’re always right. It’s so easy for you to say though, you have your shit together and you just… I wish I could explain to you what it was like with him.”

I bit my tongue. Understand what it was like with him? Oh, I understood better than anyone.

“He was… he wasn’t just some idiot guy looking for sex. He told me things. There was a spark, you know, a real spark. And in bed? Jesus, Becky, I don’t want to be crude but oh my god…”

“Yeah, okay, I don’t need the details.”

“I can’t even explain…”

“Oh, I can guess.”

“Can you though? He was just like a machine,” she whispered.

“Okay, can we get back to packing now?” I said, throwing up my hands to stop her.

“He had a dick like a baby’s arm, Becky, I swear he made me come so many times I thought I was going to die…”

I fixed my eyes on the half-packed box. Took a deep breath.

“Let me guess, he told you that you were beautiful?”

She looked confused.

“He told you that you were unlike any girl he’d ever met before and the way he felt about you, he’d never felt for anyone else?”

Her face colored.

“Like I said, he used you, end of story,” I said, with perhaps a harder tone than necessary.

We packed in silence for a few moments and I tried my best to blink back tears of anger as I folded glass after glass into crumpled sheets of newspaper. Fuck Hugo for putting me in this position. Fuck him for making me deal, yet again, with his immature bullshit. If I wasn’t trying my best to prove to myself what a bigger person I was, I might be tempted to cause some trouble for him right now… but I couldn’t think clearly at the moment.

The thing was, Hugo was a machine. A powerful, intense crazy-machine, running at twice the speed of everyone else. I was a pretty high-energy person, but Hugo was one of the few who could keep up with me. Hearing Kirsten talk opened up a long-locked door in my mind, and I was having a hard time shutting it again… Hugo had been my first and I had been his. Together we learnt all about love long before life taught us what we could and couldn’t do.

There was always something so …wild about Hugo. He really didn’t give a shit. When we kissed there was always the thrilling sense that it could lead literally anywhere. He had an energy and an abandon in the way he moved, the way he touched me… it was something I had never quite recovered from. Hugo made up everything on the spot, every passing moment. Nothing was ever the same with him. He always said how he only ever listened to his instincts, and it made everything he did feel dangerous and impulsive.

Fucking Hugo was like having sex during an apocalypse. Like animal sex. He was a wild card at the best of times, but in bed? Even the last shreds of good behavior were stripped away and he was raw, completely bare with me. He wasn’t scared of much, but he was scared of social convention the least of all. The boys around me had made fun of my weight all through school. I had been the girl who wore two bras to squash down her too-big breasts and I had been on some kind of diet since I was 10 years old. My nickname all through High School was Miss Piggy.

But Hugo… he didn’t give a damn about any of that. He took great big full handfuls of my flesh and devoured me, the whole of me, every inch of it. He buried his face in my hair and moaned, and he clasped my wide hips like he could never get deep enough… Hugo was the man who taught me that sex didn’t have to be clean and small and polite. In fact, when we got together, sex was sloppy and loud and obnoxious. And I loved it. There was nothing I could do that he didn’t relish, no part of me that he didn’t want to kiss, often and hard…

What I had with Hugo, I had never had with anyone else. I smirked quietly to myself. Listen to me. Wasn’t I just like Kirsten, convinced that I and I alone was the real deal for Hugo, and that every other girl was just a warm up to me? Wasn’t I just as pathetic, just as deluded as she was? Except maybe I was worse. After all, I hadn’t limited my delusion to one night. I had thrown years away on that man. They were glorious, wonderful years, sure. Juicy, sticky, achy, delicious years, absolutely. But so what? They were over now and Hugo was messing around again like nothing had happened at all. Typical.

“I’m sorry about being a little mean back there,” I said quietly as Kirsten and I topped up the box. She shrugged and gave me a small smile.

“No need to apologize. You’re right.” She sighed deeply. “But we have to learn from shit like this, I guess. I should be like you, just focus on my work, focus on my life. Get stuff done.”

“Oh, I’ve had my fair share of boy drama, don’t worry,” I said.

“You? I don’t believe it.”

“Nah, it’s true. My ex was… well, he strung me along too. I guess I was so hell bent on seeing something that wasn’t there that when reality hit me in the face I felt really betrayed, you know? But it was just me. Just me lying to myself.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah. We thought we were invincible. That no two people had ever been in love before us.”

“What happened to him?”

It was my turn to sigh.

“Well, he moved on. We were together about two years, and then he had to move away for his… job. I lived in denial for a while, thinking we could make it work. So, I told him we needed to get married or I was out.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking, honestly. Of course it just scared him right off. And suddenly it seemed like we weren’t so clever, and our relationship wasn’t so great. We just seemed like everyone else – fighting over commitment, over money. It was depressing.”

I watched Kirsten as she opened and taped up a new box and began to line it with plates and bowls.

“Where is he now?” she said.

I didn’t know what to say for a moment.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t wonder about him?”

“Well …I do. But I have my own life now, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“In a way, having him break my heart was the best thing that could have happened to me.”

“It was?”

“It taught me that I could survive on my own.”

Kirsten gave me a long, hard look.

“Oh my god, you really loved him, didn’t you?” she said with a sweet smile. I nodded slowly.

“That’s it right there, that’s what I want,” she said and shook her head. “The way you talk about him? That look in your eye? That’s special. I bet he misses you too.”

“Maybe.”

But I was finished talking about him, and so we packed up the rest of the boxes chatting idly about this and that. Maybe I had loved him. But that was a long time ago. Crazy, uninhibited sex might have been fine when I was young and stupid, but I was a grown up now and knew better. I didn’t need a man with a …dick like a baby’s arm. I needed one who’d stick around. I needed a man who didn’t balk at the suggestion of something serious. A man who wasn’t an immature commitment-phobe. Hugo had been a fun adventure, but at some point I needed more than an adventure. I had made the right decision, all those years ago.

Then why did it feel like such a mistake?