Page 62 of The Perfect Rom-Com

I’m too stunned, really.

No, not stunned, I suppose.

A curious feeling is coming over me. Adrenaline peeking through as I feel myself settling into a new reality. We’re breaking up, aren’t we?

We’re breaking up.

The rope that we had been clinging to as we stepped farther and farther apart is so long now it’s weak, the center so far from where I now stand that I didn’t even feel it breaking in two and dropping to the ground.

This is what’s happening, isn’t it?

And sure enough, my phone rings. Parker’s name and face—a big smiling face pressed cheek to cheek to mine over a bowl of tonkotsu ramen on one of our earliest dates—comes on-screen.

I look to Jack. “I . . . have to take this.”

Jack’s face is equally surprised by the round of things going on as well. His brows are screwed up. He’s put his hands on his hips. His eyes are soft. Concerned for me in this moment.

Only concern there.

Just . . . concern.

I wheel toward the back of the bus with my phone but spy only a closed door to Amelia’s bedroom, a closed door to the bathroom that is currently occupied, and a bunk bed. No place that will give me privacy. I wheel around, facing the front of the bus. I’m going to have to go outside. To stand in the parking lot in my pajamas on the side of the interstate next to an outdoor shopping mall. Where cars slow down every few seconds to stop beside the bus and take selfies.

“Here . . . I need”—Jack scoops up his laptop—“to stretch my legs. You stay here.” He pauses at the door of the bus. Turns back awkwardly. “Want me to pick you up anything? They have a nice”—he scans the rows of strip mall signs—“Dick’s Sporting Goods.”

Yes, that’s exactly what I need right now.

A volleyball.

“I’m . . . good.” The breath is starting to expel from my chest. My head is starting to feel . . . fizzy.

The doors shut on Jack and I spin around to check the bathroom once more and answer with a tentative and semi-inquisitive, “Hello?” The kind of hello one gives when they step inside an abandoned house and wonder if somebody is living in the attic and might reply.

“Hey, Bryony,” he says, and I hear it right then in his voice.

The sound of an era coming to an end.

* * *

The conversation went entirely as I’d feared.

No, fear isn’t the right word, is it?

More like . . . well, I suppose I can’t explain it. A jumble of emotions were mixed in there, as with most big things in life. There was some sadness as we spoke, a hole as I heard him speak to me just as he had for hundreds of days. A moment of silence to honor the good times we had, both of us knowing the sincerity of it. How we shared and will forever share in those memories. My first glimpse of him when he was hired to teach the level below mine. Our first conversations. Our first hopes. Our first flirtations. Our first date, followed swiftly by more dates. They were good, those times. Cherry on top of a cherry cupcake good. And to think of those moments and those moments alone would be enough to break me.

But for the anger.

The confession that he wasn’t quite so honest about his delays in coming home to visit. About Katia. About the woman he’d been seeing, oh, roughly the last six months behind my back.

And I could remain civil through that, almost entirely, except for the moment he used Jack as an excuse for his behavior. The moment he tried to announce his innocence by saying, “And it wasn’t like I’m entirely alone in this, Bryony. You have Jack.”

“Jack is my friend! And Jack has never, not once, done anything below board!” I cried out, a flare of anger that he dared compare a person who I happened to kiss once, in a dream, as anything remotely the same as one you are actually kissing behind your girlfriend’s back.

And really, what is a dream? I’ve had entire dreams devoted to me panicking because I discovered I had a third leg and there were no stores that had the right pants for three legs. Does it mean anything? No, it just means I ate something weird before falling asleep.

And then, when the call was done and I pressed the red button, there was shock.

A gaping hole in my heart.