Left My Heart Out

On day 5 of Operation: Quit Liam, I shut myself up in my flat with the intention of revising for my exams.  They’re not for a couple of weeks, but that doesn’t mean I can’t start early.  Just because I’ve never started early before doesn’t mean I can’t now.  My flatmate, Lucia, is rarely ever here, and when she is, she’s shut up in her cave of a bedroom or blowing in and out of the flat in all-black clothes, making me wonder if she’s a vampire.  Point is, she isn’t home now, which means I’ve got the place to myself.  I spread my books all across the kitchen table and get to work.

Around dinner time, Liam texts me, but I ignore it.  I know it’s him because my phone only buzzes once: Liam always only sends one message, whereas Harry and Lila are prone to sending six messages at once, like telegrams.  Hi STOP can STOP you get STOP me eggs STOP at sainsburys STOP ?????

So I ignore the message and keep on reading my textbook, which is telling me about all of these Italian artists named “Fra” and how they painted pictures of Jesus in a bunch of churches.  Nowadays, American tourists pay money now to go see their anatomically incorrect Cabbage Patch Doll Jesuses painted on the church walls, apparently.  I’m about halfway through the chapter and ready to gouge my eyes out when somebody knocks at the door.   

I want to ignore it, but then they knock again.  I only get up to open it because I start worrying that it might be Lucia, forgetting her key again, but it’s not.  It’s Harry, wearing a stupid green beanie over his stupid hair and biting his lip like he’s nervous he’s accidentally committed a crime and is about to get caught.

“Hello,” I say, raising an eyebrow.  Harry rarely comes over unannounced.  In fact, he rarely comes over.  I usually only see him at his place, where I beat him repeatedly at Mario Kart, or in the library, where I attempt to read while he blinds me with whatever new tattoo he’s decorated his arms and chest with.  

“Hi,” he says, pushing past me without another word.  I shrug and go back to the table, picking up my pen and intending to continue with my reading.  Harry and I study all the time, so maybe he’s just decided to study here with me, since he couldn’t find me at the library.

“I’ve got a secret,” Harry says, sitting down at the table across from me and then immediately getting up again and pacing across the kitchen.  

“Go ahead and tell me, then,” I say, clicking my pen a couple of times to remind him that I’m busy revising and don’t have all day.

“I’m not supposed to tell you,” he says, biting his lip, which tells me that this is major gossip.  Could even be life-changing.  Harry’s moral compass very rarely points due north, so this must be a secret about someone we know.

“Why not?” I ask.  “Who’s it about?”

“It’s not a good kind of secret,” he says.  I sigh, shutting my book, and raise my eyebrows.  This prompts him to take a seat across from me at the table.   

“Look, Q,” Harry says, looking somewhere over my head as he speaks. “I didn’t want to be the one to have to tell you this.”

“So then why are you telling me?” Anxiety bubbles in my stomach and makes the hairs on my arms stand on end. This can’t be good news, not if the look Harry’s got on his face, like he’s just swallowed something disgusting, means anything.

“Because as your friend, I feel like it’s my duty to let you know when you’re about to be royally fucked over.”

“I’m about to be what?”  I’m pretty sure I’m already fucked, and it’s my own fault.  Nothing he can say can make it worse.  But I wait for him to answer anyway, and suddenly all of it’s out there, shooting out of his mouth all at once.

“Liam’s in love with somebody. And it’s not you,” he says, ending the sentence with a relieved sigh, like he’s glad he’s not holding the words inside him anymore.

I’m not relieved, though.  I’m confused.  It was only a few nights ago that Liam was cuddling into my side in the middle of the night, glad that I didn’t leave at 3 AM.  But maybe it was a goodbye cuddle.  Liam’s in love with somebody, and it’s not me. I repeat the words over and over again in my head, waiting for my heart to pound and my eyes to fill with tears. But none of that happens. Instead, I feel strangely calm.  When I really think about it, this is good news.  This is great news.  This should make it even easier to break things off with Liam.

“Quentin? Are you okay?” Harry asks, putting an uncertain hand on my shoulder. He never touches me, so I know that this must really be serious.  He must really be worried about me.

“Sure,” I say, feeling a laugh bubbling up at the back of my throat.  I know I should be crying, but I can’t help it.  Suddenly the laugh bursts out of my mouth, and I find myself trying to talk through it. “I’m… fine…  I’m okay, Harry… really.”

Harry’s eyes widen as he watches me. “Are you in shock? Do you need to go to hospital?”

“I’m not in shock,” I say, trying to steady my breathing, but the laughter just keeps on coming. “I’m just… I’m okay… Really.”

Harry looks skeptical, but he nods his head anyway. “Whatever you say, Q.”

It takes me another minute to catch my breath, and after a while Harry stops staring at me.  I pick up my pen again and look down at my textbook, and Harry taps his nails on the table for a few seconds before he stands up and wanders over to the fridge.  I listen to him digging through the veg drawer as I think about being okay.  I’m okay, aren’t I?  I still have all four of my limbs, and my heart’s still beating inside my chest, even if it does feel a bit like it’s been squashed by a lorry.  I put my hand to my chest so that I can feel it going thump, thump-thump like it hasn’t even realized that anything is wrong.

And then I remember something.  I remember Liam, straddling me and asking me if I remember the first time we met.  Maybe he was asking me that because he wanted to tell me how much it means to him, our friendship, and how much more our friendship means than whatever’s going on between us – was going on between us, I correct myself – now.  And maybe I should’ve made him tell me then, so I wouldn’t be dealing with this now.  

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Harry asks me a few minutes later, when he comes back to the table with an apple.  He takes a bite and chews loudly as he looks at me like he can’t figure me out.  “Do you want to go have a cry or something?  I can call Lila if you want.”

“I don’t want to have a cry,” I say, though I’m not sure it’s true.  Maybe I do want to cry.  Maybe I want to scream.  Maybe I want to wake up from this terrible nightmare.  Or maybe this is actually a dream.  Maybe this is exactly what I wanted: for Liam to dump me first, so I don’t have to deal with dumping him.

“Are you sure?  Because you look like you want to cry.”

I glare at him.  “What I want is for you to stop asking if I want to cry.”

He holds his hands up in defeat and goes back to crunching his apple, but I can tell that he still doesn’t believe me.  He keeps watching me like he’s waiting for me to crumble or shatter or explode into a thousand tiny pieces.  But I don’t want to do that.  I don’t want to fall apart.  I don’t want to be the girl that can’t keep it together when a boy doesn’t love her back.

But I never wanted to be the girl who fell for her best mate, either.  And look how well that worked out for me.

“Stop staring at me,” I tell Harry, trying to keep my voice from trembling.  

“Oh God, you’re going to cry, aren’t you?” Harry asks, wrinkling his nose like he smells something gross.  “Q, I know we’re good mates and all, but I don’t think I’m prepared to–”

“Stop.”  I hold up my hand to silence him and take a couple of deep breaths through my nose.  Be rational, Quentin, I tell myself.  “I really appreciate you telling me this, Harry, but can we talk about something else now, please?”

Harry stares at me for another second or two before he shrugs and throws his apple up in the air.  He tries to catch it on the way down, but it misses, landing with a splat! on the kitchen floor.  It breaks into pieces and when he picks it up, it leaves a bit of stickiness behind.  It looks exactly like my heart feels.  

As Harry cleans up the mess, he starts babbling about how his roommate’s gone and joined a band and now he keeps odd hours, stumbling in the middle of the night and banging about.  I try to pay attention to what he’s saying, nodding sympathetically and “mm-hmm”ing when appropriate, but I can’t focus.  All I can think about is Liam, and how much I love him, and how much it’s going to hurt to let him go.

It’s going to hurt, but I’m going to have to do it anyway.  

I pick up my pen and try to look like I’m working on my coursework, but I’m really making a plan.  I’m going to go over to Liam’s and dump him before he has a chance to dump me.  At least then I’ll have the upper hand.              

+++++

After Harry leaves my flat (read: after I push Harry out the door, insisting that he doesn’t need to stay and comfort me), I text Liam to tell him that I’m coming over, and I leave for his place without even waiting for an answer.  I know that I need to dump him now, before he has the chance to dump me.  It’s not even really that any dumping will be happening, since we’re not even dating, but it’s basically the equivalent of dumping.  There isn’t a word to describe what it’s called when you end a friends with benefits relationship, so dumping will have to do.  

On the way over, I think about what I’m going to say.  I could explain to him that I know he’s in love with someone else, and it isn’t fair to her that he keeps sticking it in me every chance he gets.  (It’s really me that it’s not fair to, but I don’t want to make him feel too guilty.)  Or maybe I’ll sit down on Liam’s bed and look him in the eyes and say, “Liam, I’m cutting off your access to my vagina.”  Nothing could be clearer than that.  

When I get to his flat, he’s waiting for me at the door.  I expect him to lead me to his bedroom, but instead we go into the kitchen.  I’ve never really invited myself over before (it’s always him issuing the invitation), so maybe that’s why he’s acting weird.  Or maybe he’s psychic, and he already knows what I’m planning to say to him.  He walks through the small flat with his hands in his pockets and avoids my eyes.

In the kitchen, he reaches into one of the cupboards and takes down a couple of bowls.  

“Want some ice cream?” he asks, already getting it out of the freezer.

“Sure,” I say, an unnecessary response because I can see him already scooping it out.  I try not to sound suspicious, even though I can’t remember the last time Liam served me food at his flat.  “What flavor is it?”

“Chocolate.  Your favorite.”

My favorite’s actually vanilla, but back when we first met, I told Liam it was chocolate because I thought it would make me seem more exciting.  Truth is, I’m boring as shit, but at least Liam remembers my lies.  That says something about our friendship, I suppose.  

“Here.”  Liam puts my bowl down on the table and sits down with one of his own.  I plop down across from him and start eating it, because I have no idea what else to do.  I try to pretend I wasn’t near tears just an hour ago.  I try to pretend I’m not about to dump him, just so that he can’t dump me first.   

I decide to wait until Liam’s almost done with his ice cream before I break the bad news to him, but he doesn’t seem to be eating it.  Instead, he’s mushing it around the bowl, digging caverns out of the scoops and forcing it to melt.  

“Are you okay?” I ask after watching him do this for several minutes.  I try to eat my own ice cream, but it tastes like heartbreak.  Also, it has nuts, and I hate those.   

“Sure,” he says, avoiding my eyes as he makes puddles out of his ice cream.  But then he says something that is not okay.  “Wait, Q.  I think we ought to stop seeing each other.”

Oh.  Ouch.  I knew that Liam felt this way, but it still hurts to hear him say it out loud.  And he’s borrowed his words straight from an American telly program, one of those ones with beachy teenagers who never actually go to school but still manage to get into fancy universities.  We ought to stop seeing each other.  I repeat the words over and over in my head, and then I deflect.

“We’re not seeing each other, Liam,” I say after I manage to pick up my jaw off the floor.  My heart’s beating in my chest like it’s attempting to run away.  I’m trying to remain completely emotionless, because I knew this was coming, didn’t I?  I prepared myself for this.  At least, I tried to.  I mean, I thought I would be the one saying those words, but at least I knew someone would be saying them.  "We’re fuck buddies.“

Liam cringes and drops his spoon, which clangs violently against his bowl before settling into place. “Jeez, Q. You don’t have to be so crude about it. It’s not as if I don’t care about you.”

“You care about me?” I ask carefully, unsure what he means by that.  Liam certainly doesn’t love me; I know that very well.  And in all the months we’ve spent as friends with benefits, I think we’ve lost track of the “friends” bit.  Or at least I have.  So it’s pretty shocking that he’d say that he cares about me, especially since he tends to avoid all admissions of feelings.

“Of course I do,” Liam says, sounding a bit offended that I even had to ask.  “We’re best mates.”

“We’ve been using each other for months,” I remind him.  

Liam picks up his spoon again and bangs it around his bowl.  "So you’re saying you don’t care about me?“

"God,” I scoff, grabbing his ice cream bowl away from him and sliding it across the table towards me so he’ll be less tempted to destroy it any further.  And then I lie through my teeth.  "That’s not what I’m saying. Of course I care about you, but not like–“

"Not more than like–”

“As a friend. Yeah,” I say.  There’s a pause where we both take that in, the admission that we both only like each other as friends.  I mean, I like Liam as more than a friend, but I’m trying really hard not to.  And he doesn’t need to know that.

“So we should just go back to being friends,” he says, as if it’s as simple as that. A wave of a magic wand, and all that happened between us is undone. Presto, I’ve never seen his dick. Abracadabra, he never ripped a pair of my knickers in his haste to get them off of me. Alacazam, I never once fancied myself in love with him.

“Sure,” I say, mustering up the best smile I can, but I know that the truth of it is that it’s going to take me much longer to get over this than it takes to eat a bowl of ice cream. Because even if I know now that all the feelings I thought I had for Liam were just some fantasy-induced hallucination heightened by the after-effects of orgasm, they still felt real. And right now, as I look at Liam smiling at me across the table, I still feel a small flutter in my stomach.  “Friends.”  

I know we’re not going to be friends, though.  I know we can’t be, and it’s not because we’ve seen each other naked.  It’s because I left my heart out for Liam to take, and instead he stomped on it.  It was my fault, really, for expecting more than I knew he could give, but now I’m the wounded one, picking myself up and limping away from the scene with my head hanging and my ego bruised.  There’s no quick journey from there back to “friends.”  

Liam wants there to be, though.  I can tell from the way he’s looking at me with a mixture of pity and confusion, like he can’t figure out why I’m not crushed over no longer being his fuck buddy but, at the same time, he’s happy that I’m not.  After a few minutes, I can’t take him looking at me like that anymore, so I stand up from the table and tell him I’ll see him soon.

At the front door, he gives me a hug, and it almost feels like goodbye.

I try not to look back at the closed door as I walk down the corridor, but it’s hard not to.  The door is brown and ridgey, a typical door, I suppose, but it’s a door I’ve walked through a thousand times to get to Liam.  Once, he pressed me up against it, too patient to unlock it so that we could go inside, and sucked a bruise into my neck.  Another time, he lost his keys and spent several minutes trying to jimmy the lock open with one of my bobby pins.  We were both drunk, so it took us awhile to realize that Niall was home and all we had to do to gain entry was knock.

It’s because I’m thinking about all of that that I don’t realize that Niall is coming toward me.  I crash right into him, and I stumble for a second before I catch myself and make a face at him just like I always do.

He doesn’t make a face back.  Instead, he just looks at me.  So I stare back.  He’s just come in the building, a too-long scarf wrapped around his neck and his nose red from the cold.  When I get tired of looking at him, I brush past him and continue toward the lift.  I expect Niall to go the other direction, toward Liam’s door (his door too, I suppose), but instead he turns around and follows me.

“Are you following me?” I ask, the normal thing to say when you think someone is following you.

“Yeah,” he says.  We reach the lift and he stands next to me, looking at me with a strange expression on his face.  “I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

“Why wouldn’t I be okay?” I say.  I’m perfectly okay.  I knew this was coming, I expected it, I’m fine.  And, besides, Niall doesn’t know about any of that.  There’s no reason for him to think that I’m not fine.  I look fine, don’t I?  “I’m fine.”  

“Are you sure you’re fine?” he asks.  “I only ask because Liam dumped you, and you’re in love with him.”

I don’t answer for a second, thinking that maybe the lift will arrive and save me from this conversation.  God, where is it?  I tap my toe impatiently and stare at the little light above the door, indicating the lift’s arrival, but it doesn’t light up no matter how much I will it to.  Finally, I say, “I’m not in love with him.”

Niall raises an eyebrow.  “You sure about that?”

“Well, I’m trying not to be,” I snap, feeling suddenly impatient.  “Not that it’s any of your business.”   

“Ah.”  Niall’s voice is detached and emotionless, a bit like a scientist examining a specimen.  That’s exactly how I feel under his gaze: like he’s looking at me through a microscope, trying to find my pulse and locate all my flaws.

“And he didn’t dump me,” I say, my mouth moving without my brain’s permission.  There’s absolutely no reason that I need to explain myself to Niall, but I can’t help it.  “We weren’t even dating.”

Finally, the light goes on above the doors and a little ding announces the lift’s arrival.  I wait for the doors to open, avoiding Niall’s eyes.

“Well, then,” Niall says.  I wait for him to say something else, but before he can, the doors slide open with a woosh.

I step into the lift, thanking my lucky stars (I don’t have many left these days) that it’s empty, but Niall seems to have no intention of letting me leave, because he puts his hand out and and holds the door, keeping it from closing.  

“That doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck,” he says, saying each word slowly and clearly.  He’s clearly waiting for me to respond, but when I don’t, he goes on.  “Listen, Quentin.  I wanted to apologize.  For the way I’ve treated you.”  

I raise an eyebrow.  “You mean that time you called me a whore?”

Niall flinches.  “Yeah, that time.  And all the other times I was rude to you.  It was… uncalled for, and mean.  I was just jealous or something.  And stupid.”

Stupid, I believe.  But jealous, I’m not so sure about.  But I don’t really want to spend any more time thinking about it right now.  All I want to do is go home, bury myself under my duvet, and drown in my self-pity.  

“Thanks,” I say, making sure I don’t sound thankful at all so he knows that he’s absolutely wasting my time.  I don’t blink as I look at him.  “Apology accepted.”  

Niall stares at me, an unreadable look on his face.  He looks like he has something more to say, but then he takes his hand away from the doors, clearly deciding not to say it.  And, finally, he drops his gaze from mine.

“Well, if you ever need to talk,” he mutters, eyes downcast, “you know where I am.”

Just before the doors slide shut, I give him the best wtf look I can muster on the spot.  Why would I ever want to talk to Niall about anything, much less Liam?  Niall’s an arse.  He’s always been an arse.  Just days ago, he called me a whore.  Maybe he apologized for it, but I don’t believe that for a second.  Niall Horan is an arse, always has been and always will be.

Not that it matters anyway, I think as I ride down to the ground floor and duck outside into the rain.  I’m done with boys.  At least in a romantic sense.  Harry can stick around, but only if he promises never to tell me any secrets again.