Work Text:
Track 1: We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together - Taylor Swift
It ends 4.52 PM on the 11th of March. They've been on the phone three fucking hours and that's all it takes, all it is to her - after all, it's only been a month. Maybe all she's looking for is a tag-team with someone as cold and "metallic" as herself, no strings attached. During this conversation she's run into no less than two people she really admires and she thinks it might be providence. A god-ordained sign to get a move on.
5.01 PM, he calls back. It's the same thing, only they're both frustrated: he swears; she says "fuck" about five times and shuts down. If he's going to call her a brick - well, that's what she'll be, then. He wants another chance, because he's done nothing wrong and he wants her to spare his feelings. She calls it blackmail. He's citing all the logical reasons it could work: we've both got compatible plans; who could accept you better than I am? With your mental health issues and asexuality and shit, stuff he claims aren't "baggage" at all - but if you didn't think they were, your so-called acceptance wouldn't be a bargaining chip now, would it?
("Liking someone isn't a selling point," Aidan says later, when she's hung up and blocked him from instant messaging and headed downstairs with laundry and a tub of ice-cream. "I could really like Shakira, but Shakira's not going to suddenly want to get in a relationship with me."
He also says: "Are you sure you don't have a penis?" Because while it's a stereotype, not always true, that the man is always less attached - well. It's a stereotype.)
She repeats this during the one hour, fifteen-minute phone call that takes place 6.44 AM the following morning.
("Look, I would never make you do anything you don't want to do," he says.
"You need to stop bringing that up as a selling point. It's not. That's sort of the bare minimum of basic decency anyone should expect, regardless of sexuality. If I thought consent was an issue, I wouldn't be speaking to you."
"But some boys are really bad about that. You know that, right? Like, I really like that girl, I think she's attractive, I wanna fuck her."
She doesn't point out the obvious, that she's lived with boys two out of three years of her university life and she knows exactly what he means, but the ones she knows have come equipped with a sense of morality and are cuddly teddy bears beneath all the bluster.
Instead she says: "But I wouldn't really be looking to get involved with someone like that, would I?")
They use up all their phone credit between them. She doesn't unblock him.
He calls again at 3.09 PM on 13 March, from his parents' landline. He wants a post-mortem, supposedly "quick" but it lasts exactly one hour and twenty-seven minutes. She's surprised when he brings up their chat history - she's deleted all of it. It would appear he's been drawing diagrams about what went wrong, and talking to his friend came up with the conclusion that she broke up with him because she was afraid that it would end.
"Not the event of it ending," she says, "that would've happened anyway (because after this extended, seven-hour conversation, I've realised I could see it coming and I am never fucking going back) but of how it would end."
"Yes, and I know you don't like having this conversation. But the only reason it's happening is because you tried to end it."
"Is that a good reason not to end something, though? Because you're afraid of the fallout?" (And I have ended it. You're looking it in the face.)
He says something about how it isn't any worse than ending something because you're afraid of the fallout, and she realises she hasn't been clear: the end would always have happened, she's merely bringing it forward to avoid a long drawn-out, messy process (yes, longer and messier than this, so hold on tight because we're doing this).
They manage to agree to be "friends".
Track 2: All Too Well - Taylor Swift
("You know, I think I said to him that we could be friends, not that we were BFFs," she complains later. "I don't want to know what he had for dinner last night. I don't want photos.")
It goes on. And on. She tells him he needs a Twitter; keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. And drop it does. Thud. Thunk.
"I can't do this," she texts him, "I need a break from all this contact." ("I need to forget about you long enough to forget why I needed to", she doesn't say.)
Track 3: I Knew You Were Trouble - Taylor Swift
Texts, fifteen-minute voice messages, phone calls that she hangs up on while on the bus talking to someone else. One text message saying that it's affected her a lot less than it's affected him and that's all it takes. She snaps. Takes it outside. Spends an hour and a half arguing loudly on the street, and maybe some parts of the conversation are good but that's no excuse.
Insecurity is not attractive. Neither is arrogance. Don't fucking ever pull this on anyone ever again. When you say something beforehand, it's an explanation, when you say it after it's an excuse.
But the hardest part is that you did it over the phone, and it's like it's a foregone conclusion and you're using everything I do or say to push me further away. Do you know how much it hurts to have someone who liked you now hate you instead? And I know I dug my own grave. Maybe that's why I can't accept it. And are you seriously blaming me for admitting that I lied?
I really don't care, I'm standing in somebody's front porch and oh look there's their car, you're the most opaque person I've ever met, I think I want to throw up. And how dare you say that this isn't screwing with my brain, and how dare you suggest that I should forgive you for lying because you confessed? It isn't like it wasn't a completely transparent lie anyway. Do you know what I thought when I saw that text? If he's seeing a girl while so clearly still cut up over this, well he's sort of an arse, and if he's not - well, lying is a pretty arseholish move isn't it? And it's not even like it was a little white lie. It was a lie deliberately calculated to get you what you wanted. It was a complete abuse of trust. And that's just it, I don't trust you, I don't see how I could trust you, I don't see how we're supposed to be friends.
How many friends do you have? Do you know how many friends I have, that I would do anything for? Less than five. I was keeping in touch with you to build that relationship.
Oh and do all your friends get to know what you had for dinner?
[Rewind. Repeat.]
Look at this point I just don't really care.
I know you're a very intelligent girl and I know that once you've made up your mind no-one can make you change it, but can you really blame me for trying?
YES. I'm not a string of code you can rewrite over and over again and which won't hold anything against you at the end of that process.
[Rewind. Repeat. Eventually...]
Look, I can't do anything here. You can text me. You can show up at my bloody house. My hands are tied. I can't do anything to make you stop doing this. If you're determined to make me miserable, you really, really can. There's nothing I can do except appeal to you to be a decent human being.
So you're saying I can text you.
Technically. I would prefer if you didn't.
But I can.
Technically. And this is what I get for being polite.
Go on, don't be polite. Tell me exactly what you think.
*gets in the door* Really? Well, honestly, fuck off. I never want to see or hear from you again.
*sob*
There's nothing I can do. You can keep doing this, which is frustrating and embarrassing for both of us, or you can stop.
*sob* I'm sorry, you know I meant well. I never did any of this with the aim to make you upset.
I believe that. And now that you know it's been upsetting me, prove that you aren't an arse. Because if you've been told and you keep on doing it, what does that say about you?
Yes, she makes him cry. She takes all the illusions she thinks he has and crushes them into dust in her hands. No, it doesn't bother her in the least. Except to be polite, she's never said anything she didn't mean.
Track 4: The Last Time - Taylor Swift
He sends her a text with an email address. Keep it in a safe place, he says, I hope you'll forgive me one day. I'm going to delete your number.
For the sake of her own sanity, she believes it. She thinks, I might forgive you but I'll never forget that you're a man with the worst case of tunnel vision I've ever seen, who thinks of everything as a means to an end.
Track 5: Hello - Adele
She realises the folly of it six months later.
8 PM: I'm not trying to upset you by sending this message I just want to talk
She's surprised when she doesn't even need the signoff to know it's him; she can tell from the long string of messages from the same number. Apparently, she'd never really believed he would stop, either.
Lying again? This is becoming a pattern, Mr C, she writes in a draft she doesn't send. Except you're not James Bond, and in real life you don't get away with everything.
You're not trying, she thinks to herself, you don't mean it, and I actually believe that. But it says something about a person when they know what effect their actions are going to have on other people, go ahead anyway, and argue later that harm hadn't been their primary intent.
You did fucking mean it. It's like punching someone in the face and arguing that you hadn't meant to leave a mark. You knew it was a possibility. It just wasn't the most important thing to you at the time. And I can deal with the transparent bastards who admit that to me and to themselves; there's a kind of honesty in that, if not honour - but I don't know what to do with an arse who has their head stuck so far up their own hole that they can't even see what they're doing. People who need to be in denial about treating others badly? They're the dangerous ones.
8:59 PM: If you don't want to talk believe it or not I actually understand at this stage. I just wanted to know if you ever got the message I sent you a couple of months back...
Huh. She actually remembers that. She'd put it out of her mind, pre-emptively blocked him on Facebook, and isn't it funny how that account doesn't seem to exist any more?
10:17 PM: New voicemail
She promises her friends she isn't going to listen to it.
She does. It's nothing new, apology after apology that he doesn't mean. I liked his voice, she remembers, and remembers how she's been straining her ears the past few months, ducking her head whenever she hears a similar accent. She remembers averting her eyes from anyone who looks like they could be him, from a distance. She remembers shuffling past the computer science building every morning with her hands shoved defensively in her pockets, eyes fixed on the concrete.
Don't take the bait, she reminds herself. Remember the last time? It's not fucking worth it.
She spends the night listening to 'Hello'. It's such a spectacularly terrible idea, she thinks. Sorry doesn't change anything. If I'm never home, it's because I still haven't put myself back together. It's because I won't feel like my home's a safe place until I move someplace where you don't know the address. If I don't pick up the phone any more it's because I'm always afraid it's going to be you. There's no need to dig up the corpses now, no need to try. I don't know what monstrous game you think you're still playing, and the fallout isn't over by any means - but I'm done with you and good riddance.