The Ex Talk

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

  “Steve,” I call out, running after him, trying to soothe him, but he’s possessed: jumping on and off the couch, zooming so fast he starts panting. He even ignores a handful of his favorite treats I present to him. I’ve never seen him like this, and I hate that he’s so scared. That I can’t fix it. “Steve, it’s okay. You’re okay.”

  Dominic heads for his suitcase, unzipping it and retrieving a white undershirt. At first I think he’s going to change into it, but instead he kneels on the floor, stretching out his hand to a wildly barking Steve. Steve sniffs the air tentatively, and then, as though lured simply by the scent of Dominic, trots over to him.

  “Good boy,” Dominic says, petting his head. I can tell he’s still trembling. “Can I try something?” he asks me.

  “Go ahead.”

  Gently, he scoops Steve into the T-shirt, then wraps it around his body once, twice. “It’s okay, little guy,” he says. “Do you have anything to secure this?”

  I lift my eyebrows at him, completely lost. But I grab a few hair bands from my bag, trying to forget the way Dominic snapped one against my skin. Trying to ignore the way my skin burns when he takes them from me.

  He uses the hair bands to hold the T-shirt in place, not too tight, and . . . it works? Dominic lets go of Steve, who looks concerned but no longer batshit. He sits down, staring at us and wagging his tail.

  “My sister had a small dog that got scared of fireworks, and he had this special shirt that calmed him down,” he explains, scratching behind Steve’s ears. “This is just a makeshift one. The pressure helps with the anxiety.”

  Watching him with Steve tugs at my heart in a way I’ve never quite felt before. It catches me off guard, turns my legs liquid.

  “Thank you,” I say, still dazed. I wobble my way into the kitchen. We’re in the relative middle of nowhere, so we brought enough nonperishables to cook dinner. I open a cabinet, checking for cookware. “Well, I’m getting hungry. Should we just make some pasta or something?”

  “Yeah, sure. Don’t overcook it, though. I like it when the noodles are al dente. The way they’re supposed to be.”

  I pause with one hand around a pot. It’s a relief he’s back to being obstinate. It makes disliking him much easier. “I’m not going to make it for you. If you want dinner, you can come help.”

  I hear a groan from the living room, and then he appears in the kitchen, settling into a lean against the doorframe. Did he have to bring that lean all the way out here?

  “Noodles are in the blue bag,” I tell him.

  * * *

  —

  I’ve never viewed making pasta as a particularly volatile experience, but with Dominic, it turns into one. The first batch of noodles, we overcook, and Dominic refuses to eat, saying they’re too slimy, so we dump them in the compost bin and start over. He’s acting like a child about it. Then he fails to mention he’s allergic to mushrooms, and it’s a good thing the pantry was stocked with another jar of sauce. It feels like I’m back in college, or in my first apartment with Ameena, where we set off the smoke alarm every time we tried to cook something besides macaroni.

  It’s nine thirty by the time we carry our bowls to the couch, along with two bottles of hard pear cider. Rain batters the windows, but Steve seems content to wear Dominic’s undershirt and chew his hippo toy. Dominic flicks on the TV to salt-and-pepper static and lets out a long-suffering sigh.

  “Are you trying to get me to break up with you again?” I ask, twirling some noodles with my fork. At least he left some room on the couch this time.

  “Sorry,” he admits. “I guess I’m a little on edge.”

  I try a softer approach, because he really is, and I’m no longer sure it’s from being forced on this trip with me. “Are you . . . okay?”

  He places his bowl on the coffee table and takes a swig of cider. He picks up the bowl before putting it back down again, as though debating whether he wants to tell the truth or put up another shield. Steve waits on the floor for a noodle he knows I’ll probably give him at some point.

  “My ex is dating someone new,” Dominic finally says. “It’s all over social media, the two of them together, and it’s been hard to see. And I’ve been a dick all day, haven’t I?”

  “A little more than usual, yeah,” I say, and he whacks my arm with the couch pillow. I clutch my arm, feigning injury. “With the exception of making Steve less neurotic. I’m sorry, though. It’s shitty, and I want to tell you as the Token Old that it gets easier, but it really does suck every time. Just in a slightly different way.”

  “That’s the thing.” At this, he waits again, spinning his fork through the spaghetti, taunting Steve. “She was my first girlfriend. My . . . only girlfriend.”

  “Your only serious girlfriend?” I ask, assuming he’s not counting high school relationships or casual flings.

  He shakes his head. “No. My only girlfriend, period. I didn’t date in high school. We met at freshman orientation. We dated all through college, and then we broke up right before I moved out here.”

  Oh.

  That is an interesting revelation.

  And he’s not even being obnoxious about making it a point to clarify they met during undergrad, not grad school, so I know he’s serious.

  The house creaks, and Steve whines.

  “Steve, no,” I say, and he lies down, wagging his tail. “Dominic. I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

  “I should have told you when we were figuring out our relationship, but it still felt kind of raw.” He lets out a sigh, and I get the feeling there’s more to this story. He places his hands on his knees and inspects his knuckles, as though trying to distract himself from the reality of letting me into his private, personal history. “I’m not still in love with her. It’s been about eight months at this point. It’s more that we were together for so long, and we went through so much, that it’s been a strange adjustment.”

  “And it was the distance? That ended it, I mean?” I ask, thinking back to the reason he gave me that night we fake broke up.

  “Not exactly.” He reaches down to scratch Steve behind the ears. Steve seems to have taken to him immediately, much to my dismay. “We were inseparable, and when you’re together nearly five years, everyone assumes you’ll get married. We were That Couple, the one everyone made fun of because we were always together and so wrapped up in each other, and we pretended to hate it, but we loved it. We loved being that couple.”

  My heart twinges. I recall always wanting to be part of a couple like that. The pictures I saw on Facebook—they really did look like that couple.

  “So,” he continues as Steve leaps onto the couch to lick Parmesan cheese off his fingers, “when I applied to grad schools during senior year, my goal was to be able to stay at Northwestern. Mia was from Chicago originally. She was premed, and she was taking a year off before applying to med school to gather experience. So it kind of worked out perfectly when I got into Northwestern, both of us sticking around. Except . . .” Here he takes a deep breath. “A couple months after I started grad school, Mia went skiing with some of her friends from high school and—and she was in an accident.”

  “Oh my god.”

  He’s quick to hold up a hand. “She’s okay now,” he says, and I feel myself relax. “It was bad, but she was really fucking lucky. That whole year, every moment I wasn’t in class or studying, I was with her. Helping her eat, taking her to physical therapy, making sure she was taking her meds. I practically moved into her family’s house. But then a month after I graduated, when I was in the middle of interviewing for jobs all across the country, she said she’d been feeling for a while like she wanted to move on. That she didn’t think she was in love with me anymore.

  “It wasn’t that I thought she owed it to me to stay with me after that. I was just completely blindsided. I really thought I was going to marry her. And all that t
ime, she was trying to figure out how to break up with me.”

  “You were planning to propose?”

  “No, no, but I’d thought about it,” he says, more to the top of Steve’s head than to me. “I guess I didn’t know her as well as I thought I did.”

  “I really am sorry. That couldn’t have been easy, doing interviews while that was going on. And then moving back here.” I want to reach out and touch him, the way he did so effortlessly after our meeting with Kent, but I’m not sure how to make it look natural, so I keep my hands in my lap.

  “As you can probably guess, she called me Dom, and it just feels hers. It’s hard to let anyone else call me that now,” he says, and I get it. “So you can understand why I wasn’t particularly forthcoming with you before. Especially with someone who, no offense, seemed to really dislike me.”

  I hold a hand to my heart. “I don’t dislike you. I find you annoying. It’s different.”

  He cracks a smile, but it vanishes in an instant. I want to lean over and keep it affixed to his face. His heartbreak has been etched into him since he started at Pacific Public Radio—I can see that now.

  “It’s hard out here sometimes, and seeing Mia and those photos made it worse. All my friends from high school, we lost touch. I tried to get dinner with one guy, but he had to take a work call halfway through and we never rescheduled. And then one girl and I tried to meet up, but then her boyfriend got territorial and thought I was moving in on her. It’s even weirder because it’s not like it’s a completely new city for me. You’d think it would be easier. But I don’t have friends here, not really, and my siblings are all busy with their own families. I’ve tried at work, but almost everyone has a partner or kids and I just feel . . . lonely, sometimes.”

  It brings me back to Monday night. Not the kiss, but his drunken confession. I turn so my body is facing his, and then I graze his denim knee with a few fingertips. Touching him suddenly becomes easy, or I’ve become braver.

  “Hey. You’re not alone. You have your fake ex-girlfriend slash current cohost slash fellow inept pasta chef with you.” I chew the inside of my cheek, debating how personal I want to get. He laid it all out there—I might as well, too. “I’ve never left Seattle, so it’s even more pathetic that I feel this way, too. I’ve really just had my mom and my friend Ameena for the past ten years, and a few boyfriends that never turned serious. So maybe we can be alone together.”

  This time when he smiles, it lasts a little longer. “Thank you. It actually feels good to tell someone, after all this time. I guess I’ll have to get used to it if I ever want to date again.”

  “Oh please, you’re twenty-four. You’re not a cat lady quite yet.” I scrunch up my nose. “It’s ridiculous that there’s no cat lady equivalent for guys. Fucking misogyny.”

  “Cat man?”

  “Sounds like a very gentle superhero.”

  He puts on a dramatic newscaster voice. “He flies! He catches bad guys! He saves cats from really tall trees!” A pause. “So. What’s your hang-up, then? Why are you doing a show about our fake relationship instead of being out there having a real one?”

  “It’s not exactly an easy thing to admit, but . . . I tend to get attached. Extremely fast.” I reach out a hand in hopes Steve will let me pet him while I tell this story, but apparently Dominic gives better scratches. “I was the first one to say ‘I love you’ to all my exes, and it was always too soon. They freaked out and bolted.”

  “And you meant it, every single time?”

  That makes me hesitate. “Yes? I’ve never stopped to really analyze it.”

  I don’t tell him my biggest fear: that I wasn’t deeply in love with any of them. That I so badly wanted something beyond the small family my mother and I have that I was eager to jump into anything—even if it wasn’t the right time or the right fit. I craved those three little words so much that maybe I forced them from my own lips, hoping to hear them in return.

  “It’s why I haven’t gone on a date in a while. It can be exhausting, giving that much when the other person is barely giving anything.”

  “None of this sounds like a bad thing,” he says. “Difficult, yes, but not some fatal personality flaw.”

  “Maybe not with the right person.”

  “Then I guess you haven’t found him yet.”

  We sit in silence for a couple minutes, a not entirely uncomfortable one. So of course, I decide to make thing awkward.

  “There’s something else I want to ask, but I don’t want to sound too forward.”

  “I doubt it can get more forward than what we’ve already talked about, so please, go ahead.” He gestures with the cider bottle.

  “You’ve only dated Mia.” I bite down hard on my lower lip, wondering if I’m going to regret this. “Is she . . . the only person you’ve slept with?”

  He nods, a blush creeping onto his cheeks. Suddenly he looks very, very twenty-four.

  “What about you?” he asks, taking a pull from his cider. “What’s your . . . number? That’s how they say it, right? Your number?”

  “I don’t know who ‘they’ are, but sure, I guess.” I run through a mental list. “Seven.”

  “Ah,” he says, his brows flat, his expression impossible to interpret.

  “But all the bravado,” I say. “That stuff you said at the station about your ‘raw sexual energy.’” No, of course the exact wording wasn’t imprinted on my brain.

  He waves it off. “It’s easy enough to lie about it when the world expects men to be a certain way about sex.”

  “The world is gross. I wouldn’t have judged you. I swear. Your taste in music, yes, but your number . . . definitely not.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  I shake my head, still wrapping my mind around everything. “I honestly assumed for a while that you were a bit of a player.”

  “Sleeping with someone feels like a big deal to me,” he says, settling back into the couch, as though he’s grown more comfortable with the subject matter than he was fifteen minutes ago. “I don’t think I could do it casually. Maybe it’s because I’ve only been with one person, but I don’t know if I could ever have sex without it feeling personal and intimate.”

  The temperature in the room climbs a bit. His eyes don’t leave mine, and his words land heavy between us. Personal. Thud. Intimate. Thud. In my head, personal and intimate translates to languid kisses and the kind of pleasure that gets stretched to its limit before it breaks. Slow and torturous and satisfying. I can smell the sweetness of cider on his breath. I barely know how his lips feel, and that only increases my desire to kiss him again. How would they feel on my collarbone, my throat, right behind my ear?

  No.

  I set my bowl down on the coffee table and cross my legs tight. When I speak, my throat is dry. “That . . . must be nice.”

  “It’s never been like that for you?”

  It hasn’t. Not with Trent, my most recent ex, or with Armand, the guy I dated before him, and certainly not with David, my first. Sex has always felt . . . not transactional, necessarily, but far from the intense emotional experience he’s talking about.

  It’s too warm in here. I’ll have to see about turning down the thermostat.

  “I think we’ve been honest enough for one night,” I say.

  A corner of his mouth pulls up into a smile. There’s that dimple. “Aren’t we supposed to be getting to know each other?”

  Not like this. Not in a way that makes me imagine Dominic having personal, intimate sex with someone. Probably by candlelight, in a remote cabin on a snowy evening.

  “Yes,” I say, getting up from the couch and heading toward the kitchen. “I’m really interested in how you do the dishes.”

  20

  Dominic stares me down in the mirror as we brush our teeth. The upstairs bathroom is too small, and when we bend down to s
pit into the sink, we bang elbows.

  “I’ll report back to Kent what your toothpaste spit looks like,” I say.

  “Fantastic.” He places his toothbrush back in its travel case. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without your glasses,” he says to my reflection, and I feel immediately self-conscious.

  With a hand holding back my hair, I spit one last time before rinsing my toothbrush. “I’m so used to them that I always worry my face looks asymmetrical without them.”

  “I like the glasses.” He splashes some water on his face, then swipes a towel to pat it dry. Bedtime Dominic, in his sweatpants and a worn Northwestern T-shirt, might be my favorite version of him yet. The softest, most dangerous version of him, all his armor stripped away. “But you look fine both ways.”

  Fine. See, this is what happens: I spend hours on the couch next to him watching old episodes of Buffy, wondering if our legs are touching on purpose or if he thinks I’m just part of the couch, and then he says something like this. Something that convinces me I’m the only one who feels gravity shift between us. Our earlier conversation swims through my head. Something has changed, I’m sure of it.

  Or maybe we really are just getting to know each other.

  The bedroom poses an interesting dilemma.

  “I can sleep on the couch,” Dominic says, eyeing the bed. His breath is wonderfully minty fresh.

  “We’re adults. We can sleep in the same bed without it being weird.” I hope he doesn’t hear the tremor in my voice.

  “I’m not sure I can sleep next to someone wearing such a ridiculous T-shirt.”

  I glance down at it. I packed quickly, and of course I happened to pick this shirt. i’m into fitness—fitness taco in my mouth, it says, with an illustration of a smiling taco.

  “It was five dollars at Target.”

  “They paid you five dollars to take it off their hands?”