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“Do you have any idea why this never works out well for me?”
“Your terrible taste in men, maybe?”
Britta quickly swats Jeff on the arm without even turning to look at him, moving with such force that her barstool swivels with her. “You know that’s insulting yourself, right?”
“Of course I do,” he says smugly. He then picks up the glass of whiskey she’d poured him and downs all of it in one go, knowing he might need it in order to have this conversation.
She sighs and buries her head in her hands, digging her nails into her scalp. “Like seriously, there has to be something wrong with me. David was absolutely perfect. Drove up to visit me spontaneously, showed up with flowers and champagne every Friday night, kissed my forehead and said I was cute whenever I did fucking anything…fucking ignored me when I tried to tell him what a mess I am…”
“That’s exactly why it didn’t work,” Jeff says without missing a beat. Britta lifts her head and squints at him, to which he laughs. “You don’t like nice guys.”
“So not true, I like nice guys!”
“Not in the traditional sense.”
“What does that even mean?!” Britta asks, exasperated.
“He was great and did all those things for you, yeah, but I think you knew deep down inside that you didn’t want everything he wanted to give you.”
Britta’s brow furrows even further. “Elaborate.”
“I mean…he wanted to be your boyfriend immediately after you hooked up for the first time, right?”
“Right.”
“And you didn’t like that.”
“Of course not! What kind of maniac wants to enter an official relationship based on a single hookup?”
Jeff tries to stifle a laugh. “Someone who’s head over heels for the person they hooked up with.”
Britta rolls her eyes. “Okay, what’s your point?”
“He’s the kind of person who wants to go all in right away. Nothing wrong with that on its own, but you weren’t all in for him in the same way. You took some time to warm up to him,” Jeff explains.
“And you’re saying it didn’t work out just because I took time to get to know him before rushing into a relationship?” Britta asks sarcastically.
“Not just because of that. You were incompatible on a fundamental level. He was into you more than you were into him from the start, so you couldn’t catch up. He’s someone who was only gonna fall more and more in love with you every day. But you’re someone who likes to be the person who loves the most.”
Britta pauses, then slowly nods. “I guess…you’re not necessarily wrong.”
Jeff smirks. “I like to think I know you pretty well after being friends with you for this long.”
“Okay, so he was all in right away, I wasn’t…what else?”
“You told me a few weeks ago that you felt guilty whenever he did something nice for you because you didn’t get the same impulses to do nice things for him.”
“Yeah.”
“That guilt was only gonna grow as he kept doing more and more nice things for you.”
Britta sighs. “So I’m just a shitty person.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“You said that my guilt could only grow! What if I’d started to do more nice things for him than he did for me?”
“You wouldn’t have.”
“Then how am I not a shitty person?”
“Britts, you just didn’t like him as much as he liked you. Some people are okay with being on that side of a relationship. You’re not, and it’s okay. You never would’ve caught up to his amount of ‘nice things’ just because he would do more for every nice thing you did.”
She pauses to consider Jeff’s statement, staring straight ahead at the jumbled liquor shelves behind the bar of The Vatican. “I mean…you’re right. And he wanted marriage and kids and big family holidays and-”
“That’s not what you want.”
“It’s what I want to want.”
“I know,” Jeff says, his voice uncharacteristically soft, “I want to want it too. But we can’t change what we want and what feels right for us.”
“See, I’m just- I don’t know if I’m this way just because of…everything. Like if this needs to be fixed.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then why can’t I accept love from someone who was perfect in every way? I don't want to be the person who always loves more, I just…I only get those feelings once in a blue moon. And they never make any sense but I want to feel them for the rest of my life whenever I do have them. But I also want someone who doesn’t want to tie me down or hold me back from doing everything I want to do,” Britta says. She pauses again, but swivels her barstool around so that she’s fully facing Jeff. “Does that even make any fucking sense?”
He laughs. “To most normal people? No. To me? Yes.”
“You’re the only person who ever makes sense of me,” she grumbles, sounding almost annoyed as she swivels back to face the bar. “Every person who wants to be with me wants to hold me back or limit me. Every person I want to be with doesn’t want to be with me. Something’s broken.”
“Not necessarily. You just…you want to love and be loved. But you also want your freedom. It’s hard to find someone who will love you and let you be free at the same time. Hard, but not impossible.”
Britta picks up her whiskey and takes a long, slow sip. Jeff watches her, observes the thousand emotions flickering across her face as she seems to consider the concept.
“You’re right. It didn’t work with David because his ultimate goal was to tie me down.”
“Yeah.”
“He seemed perfect on the surface, but…he’s perfect for someone else. And there’s nothing wrong with that not being perfect for me.”
“Correct.”
Britta lets out an exasperated sigh. “How come you’re better at my job than I am?!”
Jeff laughs. “Trust me, it’s only when it comes to my friends. And usually, just when it comes to you.”
“I just…is it impossible to find a guy that won’t view getting in a relationship with me to be the same as owning me?”
“Maybe. Maybe you just have bad luck and tend to attract those types.”
“Pretty sure it’s because of my amazing tits and my dazzling personality. Men kiss me once and wanna be obsessed with me for the rest of their lives.”
Jeff laughs again, harder this time. Britta cracks a smile for the first time since they started talking.
“As something of an expert on the topics of both your tits and your personality, I think you might be onto something with the first one. Not so much the second.”
Britta rolls her eyes and jabs Jeff in the side with as much force as she can, him laughing all the while.
“You’re a bitch,” she grumbles.
“Well,” Jeff says, then takes a deep breath to recenter himself before continuing, “I’m glad that you got to experience that kind of nice relationship, even if that’s not what you ended up wanting.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel bad for calling you a bitch?”
“No. It’s just how I really feel. I don’t think you’d had many good experiences with relationships before David, which sucks. You deserve so much better. And at least you learned something more about what you don’t want so that you’re closer to figuring out what you do.”
Britta’s face lights up with a genuine smile. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. And…thanks.”
She leans over to hug Jeff, her arms relaxing around his shoulders as he pulls her in by her waist.
“Hey, what are friends for if not comforting each other through break ups and doing light psychoanalysis?”
She laughs. “Not much else, I guess.”