For the first time, I felt my stomach clench when he said those words — and not because of the sentence itself but the text in which he said it. Calm. Dismissive. As though my feelings were something fragile, not to say stupid. “I’m not going to block my ex just because it’s been a problem for you. He said it calmly, and I didn’t flinch. Not on mine, though they bounced back and forth between hurt and incredulity.
“Fair,” I said, attempting to sound unperturbed. “Accepted.”
But inside, a tempest was stirring — a tempest that would eventually devour everything I thought we were trying to build.
When I met Ethan, I wasn’t interested in love. I had just left a long, intense relationship that left me empty. He blows into my life like rays of sunshine through the cracked blinds — light, unexpected but warm enough that I allow myself to open up again. He was lovely all along, attentive in pried-a-woman’s-all-defenses sort of ways. He’d text me once a day every morning and it just said: “Good morning beautiful.” How did you sleep? No detail was too small to hold onto — how I took my coffee, the book I never got through because it called up someone and something, which songs pained me so that I didn’t want any part of them.
I did harbor some fleeting hope that I had been offered peace in him.
