Page 5 of We'll Meet Again
“What’s so bad about that?”
“It started a fight,” Billie said, picking needlessly at her nails. “Because I told him I wasn’t ready to say it back.” Tessa placed a cup of coffee in front of Billie. “That’s what I get for being honest, I suppose.”
“You must have said more than that,” Tessa said, and took her seat on the other side of the table, starting in on her eggs.
“Well, yeah,” Billie admitted. “He said he thought eight months was sufficient time to fall in love, and I told him that I disagree. For at least the first six months, everyone is on their best behavior. How can I know that I love him if I’ve known him less than a year, right?”
Tessa swallowed the bite of toast in her mouth. “Billie, that’s fucking mad.”
“It is not!” Billie insisted. “People rush into things much too quickly these days. The word love has basically lost all its meaning.”
“Billie -”
“I’m not being defensive!” she cut across, having heard this sort of response countless times.You’re too guarded, oryou must take a chance, orthere’s no love without risking hurt.She’d heard it all before. From her parents and her sister, even on occasion from Tessa. “People are entirely too reckless with their own hearts.”
“How would you know if you’ve never really had your heart broken?” Tessa pointed out.
Billie dropped her gaze to her coffee at that. True, she had never been in a relationship long enough to call any separations “heartbreaking,” but she had seen her friends and family go through it. And - though she never admitted this, not even to Tessa - she had dreams about it. Since she was a girl, she was haunted by terrifyingly real dreams where she received a letter that caused an earth-shattering ache inside her chest and she collapsed to the ground. Over whom was always a mystery, but the feeling was so heavy, she always woke with a lump the size of a goose egg in her throat.
A fraction of that kind of pain was behind Greg’s eyes last night, right before it shifted into rage…which was probably why he said what he said.
“He told me…” she paused and swallowed a sip of coffee to push down the lingering hurt in her voice. “He told me that love is wasted on me.”
Tessa’s coffee cup froze before it reached her mouth. She set it back down. “Can you blame him?”
Billie’s mouth fell open. “Tessa! That’s the cruelest thing anyone’s ever said to me, and you’re agreeing with him?”
“Not entirely!” Tessa insisted. “I mean,mylove isn’t wasted on you, neither is your family’s, but every time a fella tries with you, he ends up sorry he ever did! Greg had the best go of it, and you’re more upset about what he said to you than you are about losing him.”
“Tessa!”
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Billie, love, but you’re the emotionally unavailable fuck boy of your own life,” Tessa said firmly.
Billie folded her arms across her chest. “That is just not true.”
Tessa raised a challenging eyebrow. “Did you cry?”
“What?”
“When Greg left, did you cry?”
“God, no,” Billie scoffed.
“Case and point,” Tessa said. “Perhaps I should be the lawyer instead of you.”
“Legal assistant,” Billie reminded her bitterly. “I am not, myself, an attorney.”
Tessa sighed. “I am sorry he said that to you. But maybe…it was what you needed to hear.”
“Or maybe,” Billie said. “Men are just idiots who don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Tessa shook her head and returned to her breakfast. Billie tapped her fingers on the side of her coffee cup, fuming. She ran through a mental list of every guy she’d been on more than one date with and recalled how it ended. Always, when things started to get serious. When they asked her for exclusivity or expressed some deeper affection. But Billie didn’t feel that way in return. Your heart was the one thing that was truly yours, and it could be catastrophic when broken. So how could people just give them away so freely? Like emotional swingers? She didn’t understand it.
“Speaking of idiot men,” Billie said, checking her watch. “I’ve got to get ready for work. Thanks for the coffee and sympathy, Tess - limited as it was.”
Tessa offered a mock salute. “At your service.”
Rolling her eyes, Billie left the kitchen and started back toward her bedroom, trying not to envy Tessa’s remote job too deeply. Writing for an online magazine would never be in Billie’s wheelhouse. Tessa was a creative, and her real passions lay in poetry and vintage collecting, but those things didn’t pay the bills, so journalism was a financial choice. Billie, on the other hand, didn’t have a creative bone in her body, so pushing paper for the legal department of a football club made the most sense.