Ryan must have returned late at night or early in the morning. I don’t know which. I didn’t wake up when he came home.
When I do wake up, he is on the other side of the bed, Thumper in between us. Ryan’s back is facing me. He is snoring. It scares me that we are able to sleep during this sort of turmoil. I think of the way it used to be, the way fights used to keep us up all night and into the morning. The way we couldn’t sleep on our anger, couldn’t put it on hold. Now we are on the verge of defeat and . . . he’s snoring.
I wait patiently for him to wake up. When he finally does, he doesn’t say anything to me. He stands up and walks to the bathroom. He goes to the kitchen and brews himself a cup of coffee and gets back into bed. He is next to me but not beside me. We are both in this bed, but we are not sharing it.
“We’re not in love anymore,” I say. Just the sound of it coming out of my mouth makes my skin crawl and my adrenaline run. I am shaking.
Ryan stares at me for a moment, no doubt shocked, and then he pulls his hands to his face, burying his fingers in his hair. He is a handsome man. I wonder when I stopped seeing that.
When we got married, he was almost prettier than I was on our wedding day. Our wedding pictures, where he is smiling like a young boy, his eyes crinkled and bright like stars, were beautiful, in part, because he was beautiful. But he no longer seems exceptional to me.
“I wish you hadn’t said that,” Ryan says, not looking up, not moving his head from his hands. He is frozen, staring at the blanket beneath him.
“Why?” I ask him, suddenly eager to hear what he thinks, desperate to know if maybe he remembers something I don’t, to know if he thinks I am wrong. Because maybe he can convince me. Maybe I am wrong. I want to be wrong. It will feel so good to be wrong. I will wallow in my wrongness; I will swim in it. I will breathe it in and let it overtake my lungs and my body, and I will cry it out, heavy tears so full of relief they will be baptismal.
“Because now I don’t know how we keep going,” he says. “I don’t know where we go from here.”
He finally looks up at me. His eyes are bloodshot. When he pulls his fingers out of his hair, they leave it in disarray, scattered every which way across his head. I start to say, What do you mean? but instead, I say, “How long have you known?”
Ryan’s face drops into an expression that isn’t so much miserable but, rather, lifeless. “Does it matter?” he asks me, and honestly, I’m not sure. But I press on.
“I just figured it out,” I say. “I’m just wondering how long you’ve known you weren’t in love with me.”
“I don’t know. A few weeks, I guess,” he says, staring back at the blanket. It is striped and multicolored, and for that, I am thankful. It will keep his attention. Maybe he won’t look at me.
“Like a month?” I ask.
“Yeah.” He shrugs. “Or like a few weeks, like I said.”
“When?” I say. I don’t know why I get out of bed, but I do. I have to stand up. My body has to be standing.
“I just told you when,” he says. He doesn’t move from the bed.
“No,” I say, my back now up against our bedroom wall. “Like, what happened that made you realize it?”
“What happened that made you realize it?” he asks me. The blanket’s stripes have failed to do their job; he looks at me. I flinch.
“I don’t know,” I say. “It just sort of flew into my head. One moment, I didn’t know what was going on, and then suddenly, I just . . . got it.”
“Same here,” he says. “Same thing for me.”
“But, like, what day? What were we doing?” I don’t know why I need to seek this information out. It just feels like something I don’t know—his side of this. “I’m just trying to get some context.”
“Just lay off it, OK?” Back to the stripes.
“Just be honest, would you? We’re clearing the air here. Just let it out. It’s all about to come out anyway, every last ugly piece of this. Just let it out. Just let it—”
“I’m not in love with another woman, if that’s what you’re asking,” he says.
That wasn’t what I was asking at all.
“But I just . . .” He continues. “I noticed that I am seeing them differently.”
“Women?”
“Yeah. I look at them now. I never used to look at them. I was looking at one of them, and I just . . . I realized that I don’t think of you the way I think of them.”
“Women?”
“Yeah.”
I let it sink in. Thumper gets off the bed and walks over to me. Can he sense what’s happening? He sits at the door by my feet and looks at Ryan. My heart starts to crack. This might all end in me losing Thumper.
“So what does this mean?” I ask quietly, gently. By saying the words out loud, I have changed our fate. I have set us in motion. I am ripping us out of this comfortable prison once and for all. I am going to solve this problem. I have a lot of other problems, and I know this is going to cause a whole new set of problems, but living with someone I don’t like isn’t going to be one of them. Not anymore.
Ryan steps toward me, and he holds me. I want it to feel better than it does. His voice is just as quiet and calm as mine. “This can’t be the end, Lauren. This is just a rough patch or something.”
“But,” I say, looking up at him, finally ready to say the last of what had been in my heart for so long, “I can’t stand you.”
It feels like such a sweet and visceral release, and yet the minute it comes out of my mouth, I wish I never said it. I wish I was the sort of person who doesn’t need her pain to be heard. I want to be the type of person who can keep it to herself and spare the feelings of others. But I’m not that person. My anger has to take flight. It has to be set free and allowed to bounce off the walls and into the ears of the person it could hurt the most.
Ryan and I sink to the floor. We rest our backs against the wall, our knees bent in front of us, our arms crossed, our posture perfectly matched. We have spent enough years together to know how to work in sync, even if we don’t want to. Thumper sits at my feet, his belly warming them. I want to love Ryan the way I love Thumper. I want to love him and protect him and believe in him and be ready to jump in front of a bus for him, the way I would for my dog. But they are two completely different types of love, aren’t they? They shouldn’t even have the same name. The kind that Ryan and I had, it runs out.
Eventually, Ryan speaks. “I have no idea what we are going to do,” he says, still sitting with me, his back now slouched, his posture truly defeated, his gaze directed firmly at the wayward nail in our hardwood floor.
“Me, neither,” I say, looking at him and remembering how much I used to melt when I smelled him. He is so close to me that I quietly sniff the air, seeing if I can inhale him, if I can feel that bliss again. I think maybe if I can breathe deeply enough, his scent will flow through my nose and flood my heart. Maybe it will infect me again. Maybe I can be happy again if I just smell hard enough. But it doesn’t work. I feel nothing.
Ryan starts laughing. He actually manages to laugh. “I don’t know why I’m laughing,” he says, as he gains his composure. “This is the saddest moment of my life.”
And then his voice breaks, and the tears fall from his eyes, and he truly looks at me for maybe the first time in a year. He repeats himself, slowly and deliberately. “This is the saddest moment of my life.”
I think, for a moment, that we might cry together. That this might be the beginning of our healing. But as I go to put my head on his shoulder, Ryan stands up.
“I’m going to call the landlord,” he says. “We need hot water.”