Work Text:
As far as Friday nights at the beginning of May go, this one is pretty normal.
Or, well, it starts off that way.
Tessa is sitting on her couch, typing away on her laptop with headphones over her ears, listening to music while she answers emails that she didn’t get to during the day.
She’s just eaten dinner, which ended up being takeout from the place down the street after she had attempted to cook a nice dinner for herself after a long week.
And this week had been long. Not that every other week is particularly special since all weeks have the same number of hours in them, but this one felt longer than most.
It felt like there were seventy days squished into this one week instead of seven, something that she hasn’t felt since the months after she lost him, where she would look around the bedroom – she was still referring to it as theirs back then, old habits die hard – and wonder how this all went so wrong.
With a shake of her head, she turns up the music. She won’t think about it, at that period in her life post-breakup where everything had lost its color and meaning. Not literally, but suddenly the sky wasn’t as blue, the sun didn’t shine like it normally did. After work, she would return to her apartment, the one that once held so much life and so many warm memories but was now just cold and drab.
She doesn’t know why she thinks about him. Scott, the boy who was her everything until he let the door close behind him as he left for the last time, wrapping his hand around her heart and taking it with him.
It’s been two years, 45 days, 23 hours, 50 minutes, and 12 seconds, but she stopped counting a long time ago. Stopped hoping that he would come back.
He had made his choice the second he walked out that door and there was nothing she could do about it.
Friday’s are the best day.
Not only does that mean that there are two days of relaxation between Scott, Tessa, and the next work week, Friday’s are, in the Virtue-Moir household, date night.
Weekly date night had started back when they first got together; she was in her final year of law school and he was teaching first grade at the local elementary school.
Now, five years later, as she works as a copyright lawyer and he continues teaching, weekly date night had stuck. It was the time of the week besides the weekend that she looks forward to the most, where they go out for dinner and do something after, get out of the house.
Scott had asked her to move in two years into dating, on their second anniversary, and she had immediately said yes. There hadn’t, would never be, any other answer to that question for her. She couldn’t – can’t – imagine being with anyone else.
Who would’ve known that recommending a stranger a book while she browsed the fiction section at her favorite independent bookstore on a Thursday would lead her to finding the love of her life?
Tessa certainly did not, and, judging by the way her family members laughed in disbelief at their “meet-cute” (as Jordan, her sister, had put it), no one else had either.
She opens the door to their apartment to find it dark. Scott is usually home before her, and if he isn’t, he’ll text and tell her when he’s on his way home. She’s not going to worry about it, she got off of work a little early, so maybe he’s stuck in traffic but is still expecting to make it home before her.
It’s May seventh, 10 days before her birthday. Maybe he’s planning an early surprise. Or a scavenger hunt.
Tessa answers the last of her emails. It’s early still, and she feels relieved at being able to watch a movie or read a book, maybe she’ll take a bath and have a glass of wine.
The options, honestly, seem endless. The prospect of a weekend with nothing to do but sleep in and relax stretches out in front of her, welcome and inviting, like a warm embrace on a cold night.
She heads upstairs to the bathroom and fills the tub with water and a generous amount of her lavender-scented bubble bath. It’s only when the water gets cold that she decides to get out, and, on the way to her room, the doorbell rings loudly.
Fear makes her blood run cold for a second, before she remembers that if someone is trying to break in, they won’t ring the doorbell, and she starts to go answer it before noticing that she’s wearing nothing but a fuzzy purple bathrobe.
So, Tessa yells to whoever is on the other side of the door that she’ll be there in just one second and makes her way back to her room and hastily throws on a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt.
Stepping further into the dark apartment, the door closes behind her and she sets her purse on the ground, kicks off her shoes and leaves them in their usual spot on the mat by the door.
The side door opens right into the kitchen, which she’s standing in the middle of now, debating on whether or not she should text her boyfriend to find out if he’s going to be home soon.
Tessa unlocks her front door and pulls it open. Even though she’s lived in this house for a year and a half, the heavy front door is something she has yet to get used to.
She laughs a little once it’s open, and then pushes the screen door in front of it open.
Scott rounds the corner then, scaring her so much that she grabs a banana and throws it at him, watches as it hits him before landing on the ground beside him with a soft thud.
He stares at her for a moment before bending down to pick it up. “I didn’t think you’d be home yet.”
The laughter dies in her throat once she sees who it is that’s standing in front of her, and the greeting that forms on her lips is gone as well.
Scott is standing in front of her, his hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans. His mouth twitches upward as they make eye contact, but it doesn’t bloom into a full smile. “I didn’t think you’d be home yet.”
Something is off. The way he looks at her, there’s a hardness to it. His eyes aren’t bright, although that could just be because none of the lights are on.
She turns on the light above them and leans against the counter. “Yeah, I got off early.”
She can’t bring herself to answer. Can’t breathe, can’t think. All she sees is him, and images flicker through her mind in a time-lapse: her sitting on the floor of their bathroom, crying her eyes out with a mountain of tissues around her; throwing away the last of his clothes that had been sitting at the bottom of the laundry basket, ones that he forgot to take once he moved out.
“What are you doing here?” Tessa finds her voice eventually, and her hand is gripping the edge of the front door so hard that her knuckles are white, and her fingers are starting to cramp.
He runs his hand through his hair and twists his fingers around the short strands that are there.
They really should get haircuts soon, she thinks.
“I think we should talk, Tessa.”
He swallows thickly, his brown eyes burning into hers, and she remembers the last time she looked into them. “Can we talk?”
“About what?” she answers, confused as to why he’s standing on her doorstep in the first place.
She blinks. “About what?”
“I . . . I’m really sorry, Tessa. I didn’t know what I was losing when I left you.”
Hearing her name fall from his lips for the first time in two years brings tears to her eyes, but she blinks them furiously away.
“I’m really sorry, but I think we should break up.”
The words break up rattle around in her mind as she tries to make sense of them, and it’s only once she realizes that she can’t that she asks, “What?”
She closes the door and walks outside so that they’re standing face to face on the porch. “What made you come to that realization?”
“I just . . . I don’t know if I see forever with you anymore,” Scott tells her, focusing his gaze on the banana that he turns over and over in his hands instead of looking at her. “I don’t know what it is that I want.”
“Well,” she starts harshly, unable to keep the bite out of her voice, “when you figure that out, let me know.”
His eyes fill with tears, and when he blinks, one of them forges a path down his cheek. She fights the urge to brush it away.
“Do you remember what I said to you that day, about how I wasn’t sure if I could see forever with you anymore?”
It sounds ridiculous when he says it, seeing forever, but that had been their thing. They would talk about the future, about where they would get married and what names they might use for their kids. They could see forever with each other, as simple as that.
She remembers how closely she was to having forever with him. Two weeks before they broke up, she found an engagement ring in his sock drawer, shoved in the back corner as she was putting away his laundry. When she had tried it on, it had fit her just right and sparkled when she moved her hand.
“Yes,” she answers quietly, and when another tear falls, she reaches her hand up, cups it around his face, and catches it with her thumb.
“Tessa, wait.” He reaches for her hand as she passes him, but she curls it in toward her chest, out of his reach.
She spins around to face him, crosses her arms over her chest, and opens her mouth to speak.
“And you said – you said . . .” he trails off and looks away from her.
Her hand falls to his shoulder, and the tear that has been on the tip of her thumb soaks into the fabric of his shirt.
“Why should I wait for you if you’re going to break my heart?”
She repeats those words now, just quietly enough that only they can hear them even if no one else is around, and nods for him to go on.
“Those words stayed with me for a long time,” he confesses, looking back at her. “I thought about them in the quiet of the night when I couldn’t fall asleep, when I would type out a text message to you about how sorry I was and see the cursor blinking back at me. I wanted to text you so many times, Tessa, call you and hear your voice, but I knew it wasn’t fair to you. It wasn’t fair that I decided that I was going to leave and didn’t give you a choice.”
She’s sitting on their bathroom floor an hour later, not having bothered to turn on the light. The sound of suitcase wheels thundering down the stairs is loud in her ears.
A piece of torn-up toilet paper is in her hands. She’d shredded it to pieces because it felt like how her heart was feeling: shattered and ripped to shreds.
He didn’t even give me a choice, she thinks as tears roll down her cheeks.
“You didn’t,” she agrees, her other hand coming up to his shoulder.
“That’s something that I will never forgive myself for. We should’ve talked about it, I shouldn’t have just up and left like that, I mean, who does that–?”
“Scott.” Her voice is quiet, and his name catches in her throat but both of them pretend not to notice. “Even though, yes, I was really, really hurt by what happened and it took me so long to get to a place where I wasn’t hurting anymore, you shouldn’t beat yourself up over it anymore. If you came here to get closure, to tell me that so I could tell you it’s okay to move on, there it is. You need to move on, okay? You can’t live your life stuck in the past.”
She follows the sound of his suitcase down the stairs, and when she reaches the bottom, Scott turns around to face her.
The look on his face when his eyes meet hers makes her burst into tears again. He looks like he’s seconds away from crying himself, and if that’s the case, then why is he leaving?
He walks around the suitcase and holds out his arms.
She walks right into them, despite the fact that he’s the one that’s caused this pain.
She didn’t know that loving someone could hurt this badly.
“I thought you were going to be my forever,” she whispers, her voice cracking as she cries into his shoulder.
Scott doesn’t respond. She doesn’t know how she would answer if she were him, either.
When she pulls away, it might as well be hours or days later. Tessa has always thought that time stops whenever she hugs Scott, and now she knows that’s true.
He leans in at the same time that she does.
Scott is already shaking his head. “I don't want to move on; I’m still in love with you, Tessa. I haven’t stopped loving you.”
Her arms loop around his neck at the same time that she stands on her tiptoes, looking him directly in the eye.
“I haven’t stopped, either,” she admits, her fingers tangling in the hair at the base of his neck.
Their last kiss is hasty, and if she’s honest, in the months after it happens, that kiss isn’t the one that replays over and over in her mind.
(If anyone asks, it would be the one that he’d given her the night before, as they settled in to go to bed, a whispered goodnight against her lips as presses his own to hers before turning out the light. But that’s not relevant right now.)
There are two things she remembers from that kiss: how dark his eyes are once she had pulled away, and the fact that he leans toward her again but then stops himself, like he wants to kiss her again but knows that he shouldn’t.
It wasn’t the kiss that had hurt the most.
It was, actually, the memory of him going to kiss her before thinking better of it, a sign that he had already made up his mind.
Their second first kiss is slow and languid. There’s a spark to it that is familiar as soon as their lips touch, one that she had missed so much.
Scott’s hands wrap around her waist and pull her closer to him. He kisses her as if it’s the first time, shy and like he wants it to last forever.
Tessa slides her hands through his hair, memorizing the way that the strands are soft against her fingers and the way that his mouth moves in time with hers.
She knows that this is it, now.
This is forever.