You simply must read Part I and Part II before you even THINK about reading this.

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Hijinks indeed. Followed by exhaustion. Cuddles. A few kisses. Cover-stealing. Normalcy.

7:15 pm: I stir. Now I know he’s going to ask me to take him home. We still haven’t confirmed anything, he’s still in need-to-think mode. I get up quietly, let the dog out, make her dinner and cat’s dinner, and let the dog back in. E is snoring and I sneak back into my room. I steal a blanket from him.

8:10 pm: He rolls over and starts to make mumbly wake-up noises.

“Roo shungr?”

“Huh?”

“Are you hungry?” he asks, almost incoherently.

This means he wants to leave the house and get food before I drop him off. The Last Supper. I want to lie and say no but in a half-asleep stupor I say yes. “What are you hungry for?”

“Talayna’s.”

HE WANTS FOOD DELIVERED! HE WANTS TO STAY EVEN AFTER THE HIJINKS! I play it cool. “I’ll call. What do you want?”

“Sausage,” he mumbles. “Is okay?” What a loaded question.

The good people of Talayna’s inform me that a Chicago-style sausage pizza and a six-pack of beer will be delivered in forty-five minutes. I do love me some beer delivery. I do love that his favorite pizza place is close enough to deliver and let this happiness last just a little longer. It’s going to fall apart when he leaves, I know it, so thank you, Talayna’s Pizza, for letting me enjoy it just a little longer.

Back in my room, he has commandeered my blanket once more, but he lifts his arm for me to crawl in. He’s flipping channels and we come to the beginning of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” which, like most movies, I have not seen. He fills me in on the 15 minutes I have missed, and I get excited when I guess that the “X” is on the floor of the library before Indiana Jones sees it.

Everything becomes normal in the dark cocoon of my room. He plays with my hair. We eat pizza and drink beer while the movie plays on and I talk to the characters when I know something they don’t or when something doesn’t go my way. Our heads end up at opposite ends of the bed and we give each other footrubs. When the movie is over, I crawl up towards him and put the channel changer in his hand. (This is what a good girlfriend I am. I always give him the remote.) It’s 11:00 pm. He flips to SNL and watches the bit with Ricky Gervais and “The Office” before I hear him snoring. I make it through Weekend Update, dig for the remote under the covers, and turn it off.

“Slarmsef? he mutters. “Ftooworksevn.”

“Yes.” This one I understand. “I set it for six-fifteen.”

“Ffmph.”

We sleep. In the morning it’s still normal. Normal cursing of the alarm, normal waiting for the bathroom, normal sleepy eyes and his lovely messy hair. The only thing wrong is that I don’t have any clean clothes for him because they’re all in the back of the Jeep, and we both know why. We drive and listen to our normal Sunday morning radio station because they play bluegrass. He wraps up in the blanket I keep in the backseat because he’s always cold in the morning.

I pull up to his house and suddenly normal is gone, and it’s The Moment of Truth. He leans into my shoulder and sighs.

“You still need time to think.” It’s a statement, not a question.

He nods.

“What happens now?” I ask. “Are we or aren’t we? Are you going to call me?”

“I’m going to call you,” he says into my sleeve.

I tip up his chin and make him look me in the eye. “Sooner or later?.”

“Sooner.”

“I love you.”

His only reply is a light kiss, and he gets out of the car. I watch him walk toward the house, and on the porch steps he turns around, waves at me like he does every morning, and smiles a little. I wave back.

I suppose I still have a boyfriend. I fought and won this battle; we’ll see about the war.

You simply must read Part I first.

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“I don’t think I love you enough,” he says.

I am turning right and hit a curb so hard that he almost smacks his head on the window. “You don’t THINK you love me enough,” I say blankly.

“Not to marry you.”

“Not to marry me right now, you mean.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t want to marry you right now. I don’t know if I love YOU enough to marry you right now.”

“So you see what I mean then?”

“I see that you’re full of shit, either right now or for the last eight months when you’ve been saying you love me, saying you could stay with me always, telling me that we’re a team, telling me the sky’s the limit for us, telling me opposites like us can be good for each other.”

“Look – ”

“I’m looking,” I say sarcastically.

“I mean don’t run over that guy.”

He’s trying to hold my hand. I push him away and make my mean face. “How long have you been feeling this way? Because you told me Tuesday that I was the best. That you were so happy. Are you a liar then, or has someone besides me been in your ear the last couple of days?” I pull into my driveway. “Was it Craig, telling you that if you love a girl you should get married, like he’s going to? Or your dad, telling you all women skip birth control pills so they can get knocked up and trick you into getting married?”

“I talked to both of them, yeah. But – ”

“And you didn’t talk to me. Neither one of them know ME. And you’re making decisions based on what they say about me. Not what YOU know about me, not what you know about us.”

We get out of the car and walk into the house. The living room is a mess so we go sit in the bedroom. I can tell this makes him uncomfortable and I don’t even care.

“We’re not everybody else,” I continue, pissed and still crying. “Why do you let anyone else’s assumptions get in your head like this, and then dwell on them for three days? If you want to know what I want from you, ask ME.”

“I just needed some time to THINK. I didn’t mean to not talk to you but I had to think about this on my own.” His face is getting red and his eyes are watering.

“I can respect that you needed to think. But I can’t respect the fact that you left me – ME as an individual – completely out of the equation during this all-important thinking. We’re a team. And I’m kicked off the team now, am I?” Still bawling.

“No, that’s not it at all, it’s just – ” He stops and runs his fingers through his hair, grabbing it as he flops down on the bed face-down. He looks so miserable. I am seized with the sudden urge to pet him. I want to scratch his head like I always do when he’s upset. So I do. He looks up at me. “I just don’t know.”

I stop crying and sniffle for a moment into my tissue. “Don’t you love the life we have?” I ask quietly.

He nods and turns his head a little, the way he does when he wants me to scratch a different spot. I oblige, tangling his curls in my fingers. He likes that too. I can feel myself breaking inside.

I told myself on the way over to his house that if he said we were done, I’d just go. I’d give him the bag of his stuff and I would leave and move on. And here I am, practically begging for him to reconsider. Am I just afraid of being alone then, that the prospect of life without somebody scares me so much? Or is it that life without HIM scares me so much that I will fight tooth and nail, pretty much begging him to look at this again? Am I doing what I think he’s doing, looking at people in general, or am I doing what I tell him to do, looking at US for who we are?

I lay down on the bed next to him. He turns and we look at each other through reddened eyes.

“I don’t want you to do this,” I whisper. I mean it.

“I just don’t know what to do.”

“Do you want me to take you home?” I hold my breath, please-say-no, please-stay-and-remember-how-good-this-is-and-don’t-leave-it, don’t-leave-me. He shakes his head, almost imperceptibly, and says nothing. I move my fingers, still scratching, behind his ears, down his neck a little, onto one shoulder. I can feel him relax a little. This is what we’ve always done, this is how it should be.

We talk more, laying on the bed and sitting on my porch, then back to laying on the bed. More conversation in the same vein. I tell him he deserves to be with a good person and be treated right. He’s insecure. I point out that I’m no angel. He’s quiet. I tell him that I talked to K, that she and P come from such different backgrounds but they’ve been together three years and made compromises because they love each other. And they’re so good together, we both know that. He ponders this.

“I need time.”

“What does that mean for me? Am I just waiting, or am I going on with my life and just seeing if you come back?” I’m terrible at loose ends and he knows it.

“We’ll talk, we will. We’ll be with each other, I just need to think about all of this.”

What else can I say? The dead horse has been beaten to a pulp and the vultures are circling. “All right.” (5:01 pm)

We stand up, and I have to say something else. “I want you to kiss me.” It just spills out of my mouth. He hugs me, as though that could be enough. I lean into him and he pulls me against his chest, my head on his shoulder. He pushes me back and I don’t let go, my eyes starting to brim with tears again. “Just kiss me once, if you really love me like you say you do, and then go do your thinking. Then go.”

He kisses me. And kisses me. And hijinks ensue.

You simply must read Part III now.

Wednesday night:

9:15 pm: We fight.

Thursday:

7:12 pm: A text message from him: “Need to think about some things call you later.” No call.

Friday:

4:21pm, a text message from him: “I have to work tonight but maybe when I get off we can talk.”

6:32 pm: I rummage through the house and pack up everything that belongs to him. I put it in the back of Jeep so that whenever he says what I know he’s going to say, I can give it to him and be gone.

8:30 pm: I go out with the girls.

8:31 pm: I start to rant and rave along the lines of how-can-he-do-this-to-me and that-bastard-is-driving-me-crazy and I-know-it’s-over-I-just-know-it.

Saturday:

12:48 am: A text message from him: “Work was hell have to be back at 7am.”

1:15 am: A weepy voicemail from me, telling him that if he wants to break up he should just grow a pair and tell me.

1:48 am: A text message from him: “Love U”

11:15 am: A text message to him: “I really need to talk to you, please call me when you get off work.”

2:50 pm: He calls.

3:20 pm: I pull up to his house. He’s sitting on the porch, which is never a good sign because it means he doesn’t even want me to come inside. He’s wearing the shorts I bought him, which is a good sign because it means he hasn’t burned them. He gets in the car – apparently we are not going to have this conversation on the porch. We do not kiss hello. I just pull into the alley and drive up the hill, turn left and then right like we’re going to my house as usual.

“Before you say anything,” I say, “I’m sorry I yelled and said mean things on Wednesday. But you have to know that we were fighting when we were tipsy, about a hypothetical situation that we’re not even dealing with. We’re both always cranky if we fight when we’ve been drinking. And this thing we fought about isn’t even something we have to deal with.”

“I know. I just had to think about it. About a lot of things.” He won’t look at me.

“What are you thinking?”

“I don’t think I can marry you.”

Both eyebrows pretty much go up to my hairline. “Um, I didn’t ask you to.”

“But you want to get married.”

“Not NOW. Not even necessarily to YOU. I’d like to do that eventually but when I’m ready and whoever that is is ready, that’s when it will be. You know that. We’ve talked about that a hundred times.”

“I don’t think I can give you what you want. What you deserve.”

“And what is it that you think I want and deserve?”

“You deserve to have someone love you unconditionally, to give you everything, to be a husband. And a father.”

“I’ll tell you what I want. I want someone to love me unconditionally. Period. And you say you love me. So we could be going that direction. No one is off-course here.”

He’s gripping the roll bar tightly. “I do love you. I do. But we’re both so different – ”

“Oh God, THIS again.” Does it comes from the Boy’s Book of Excuses?

“We come from such different places and I think we want different things. Everyone has this idea of a perfect life,” he says. “I know you do.”

“I know we have different backgrounds. We knew that forever ago. But do you know even know what MY perfect life is, though? Do you think it’s beige siding and two and a half kids in the suburbs? Do you think I have to have what my parents have? You don’t know that my perfect life includes anything but that person to love. That’s it. That’s all I know I want FOR SURE right now.”

“I feel like I’m so selfish, that I can’t give you enough.”

This is where I start bawling. “You,” I gulp, “you have been the sweetest person to me. You have been so kind and thoughtful and you’re the only guy for years and years who has shown me what it means to love somebody. How can you say that you don’t give me enough?”

“But you do so much for me and I don’t feel like I deserve that.”

“I wouldn’t give you anything if you didn’t deserve it. And you deserve all of it.”

“I don’t feel like I do.”

“What have you done that’s so awful then?”

“I just don’t think I fit into the life you should have.”

“I’ll be the judge of that, thank you. Do you want someone to love you?”

“Yes.”

“And you love me?”

“Yes.”

“And you know I love you?”

“Yes.”

“Then you fit into this life. And what’s the problem?” My contacts have gotten all blotchy from crying and I pretty much can’t see at this point. “I don’t WANT to get married right now, so why is this even an issue? Is it because you can’t give me the things you THINK I want and deserve or because you just don’t love me enough?”

Silence. I almost drive off the road in frustration. He stares out the window.

You simply must read Part II now.

A fight with someone you love can cause your heart to swell up so much that it chokes you.

A fight with someone you love can make you feel high and mighty, like it’s not your fault.

Then when he doesn’t call although he said he would, you feel lower than low, like it’s all your fault.

You leave one voicemail asking him to call back.

He doesn’t.

Do I really need to go through this again? I’ve put the phone down and sworn that the one voicemail will be the only call I make today. He can take it from there. I am calm. Collected. Medicated. Whatever works.

And on top of this, why, WHY is my basement still leaking?

Text message received on E’s cell phone, sent by one of his employees who is at work and supposed to be training a new line cook:

“Lady Owner forgot to tell BossMan that the new guy just got out of jail for bank robbery, and he made him leave.”

Priceless.