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Rain beats against the vaulted window, the reflection of the glowing hearth coloring the droplets shades of orange and red, as if the end of world has come and the hellfire is finally pouring down. The downpour undulates, the pelting sounding less like the roar Mer had found herself caught in earlier, and more like a pulse, a heart beating at high speed. Or maybe that’s her own.
“Do you want a refill?”
Mer looks away from the window to the woman standing alongside the weathered leather ottoman beside her. She’s wearing a pair of olive jeans, a navy V-neck tee, and half-apron tied securely at her waist. In her hand, adorned with sets of jeweled rings in aquamarine emerald, and opal, hangs a half-filled coffee pot.
“Oh.” Mer’s eyes flick down to the coffee cup in grasp, and the tendrils of her drying mahogany hair slip into her face. In the past hour, she’s drained about three-fourths of the black liquid, but she couldn’t say when she last took a sip. Her fingers are as white, stiff, and cold as the ceramic they’re grasping. “Maybe just a little.”
She is desperate for heat, and, more importantly, for an excuse to stay here for just a bit longer.
Birch & Bean is not where Mer would’ve chosen to have an emotional breakdown, but here she was—sopping wet, shivering cold, and heartbroken. She thought he loved her, but Murray—her roommate, her best friend, her so called “one and only”—had played her. He held all the cards in a game she didn’t know they were playing.
The waiter, who’s nametag Mer can now see reads Katarina, tips the pot over the lip of the cup, filling it to just below the brim. Almost immediately, warmth suffuses into Mer’s hands, and Mer offers Katarina a quiet “thank you,” just as she had earlier when the barista gave her a towel to dry her soaking hair, a chair ten feet away from the fireplace for her drenched clothes, and a stack of napkins for her running makeup. Whether the barista could tell that the streaks down Mer’s face were a product of tears versus rain, she did not know, but she appreciated it and the lack of questions, all the same.
“Do I need to wear a jacket?” Mer’s ears perk at the sarcastic question from a neighboring table of students, packing up their laptops and books. The response is laughter, but for Mer, the question is raw and cutting..
She had asked Murray a similar question less than two hours ago, when he told her wanted to take her somewhere and offered no details as to the location, or whether it would be indoors or outdoors. He had said she didn’t need a jacket, even when she reminded him rain was in the forecast.
“No, you’ll be fine. It won’t take too long,” he had said and she believed him, because he had never given her a reason not to, or to think that this little outing would be anything but positive. So, she left their apartment with a smile and without her raincoat, revving herself up for a surprise.
How stupid. How naïve. She was goddamn Pollyanna.
A tear slips out of Mer’s eye, and she drags her still-damp sweater sleeve across her cheek, not drying it exactly, just sweeping into the ever-present swath of wetness on her skin. She will not cry here. She will not sob. She will not allow even a sniffle. The axis of her world may have tipped out of her control, but when it comes to her own emotions, she should be able to hold steady.
Should. Like her mind should be loyal to her, rather than, in what can only be an act of mutiny, replaying what she will come to describe as the worst conversation of her life.
Murray had taken Mer to a trail a few blocks from their place, although based on the fields on wildflowers surrounding it, it felt as if it was miles apart from anything brick or concrete. Her warning lights should’ve automatically flashed when he said, “I need to talk to you about something,” but with the air smelling of honeysuckle and lilac, she was primed for relaxation mode and just rolled with it.
“Okay. What’s up?” she asked.
Their feet kicked at the gravel as they walked, crunching it beneath their shoe’s soles. “I think we need to break up.”
“What?”
The warning lights flashed behind her eyes.
In her ears, the alarms blared, picking up pieces of his explanation: his heart wasn’t in it anymore. He wasn’t sure he loved her. She could keep the apartment. He already found somewhere else to go.
Her responses were repetitive, a mixture of “what?” and “what you do mean?” and “how did this happen?” His brown eyes that had always exuded warmth now seemed cold and detached. When she reached for his hand, it fell limp in hers. He had checked out without her ever realizing there’d be a time when he’d want to leave.
That was her surprise. After two years of a relationship. No exceeding expectations, just upending them in the worst ways.
Murray offered her a ride, but to accept that seemed unconscionable, like accepting transportation from the person who had just shot you in cold blood. Mer took off on foot, and as if Mother Nature was in mourning with her, the clouds unleashed a deluge. Part of Mer viewed it as bottle of salt poured into the bleeding wound. Another saw it as a gift, weeping clouds to mask her own.
She walked until she felt the dampness in her bones more than the pain in her heart, until her legs that had held steady as the rug was pulled from beneath them were no longer stable to stand. Birch & Bean, the coffee shop she and Murray had said joked tried too hard to be Instagram-worthy, was the first place she saw. Her refuge is not without irony.
Mer brings the coffee cup to her lips, sipping the liquid and feeling the path of warmth it paves through her. Even still, the goosebumps rise on her body, and she wishes for something to wrap herself up in. She hates that her mind first goes to Murray, and then hates him all the more when it goes to the jacket she left hanging on the silver wall hook beside their front door.
Although she’s too close to the breakup to say her hindsight is 20/20, Mer is far enough away to see another layer of irony in this cluster. The employees of the place she had besmeared had shown her more care than the man that she had loved. The man who knew full well what his plan was, but told her to leave home without a jacket as he wore one himself. The man who knew he was going to cut her in every way he could, but didn’t give her the slightest hint that she would need to protect herself. The man who chose to let her be vulnerable, while arming himself in every way he could.
Was that love? Was it ever really?
Another tear slips from Mer’s eye as she muffles her sniffle with a slurp of her coffee.
She thinks not.
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