Trying to Throw my Arms Around the World

A little crush

A little crush

“It’s not you, Lee. I promise,” Lou said. I had found her waiting for me in Eleanor’s living room when I came home from work. With the morning sunshine peering under my curtains I had found a new hope, the kind that the night, with its gloomy darkness, is always eager to take away. And when I had seen her sitting in the couch, her complexion grey and her eyes tired after the adrenalin of weeks of non-stop work had worn off, my heart had jumped with a stupid kind of joy, a primitive, instinctive happiness simply because of seeing her. We had gone up to my bedroom and I was all but ready to ignore the sadness in her eyes. They’re just remnants of yesterday, I told myself. Shadows of darker days. I just wanted to take her to bed and forget. She seemed eager enough, until I kissed her. Then the doubts returned, like sudden storm clouds on an endless summer day. When she kissed me it was as if she retreated, as if something was holding her back, stopping her from surrendering.

“If it’s not me, then it must be you, right?” I asked.

“I’m so sorry. I’ve just been going through some emotional stuff lately.”

“Can you give me a bit more, please? Emotional stuff is fairly vague.”

She sighed and I braced myself for the worst. We sat in silence for long seconds, then I couldn’t stop myself anymore. “Are you breaking up with me?”

“No, God no, Lee. I don’t want to break up with you.”

“Then what do you want? You obviously don’t want to be with me either?” I wondered if I should be more gentle, more discreetly probing, but my patience had been tried to its limit and I was going through some emotional stuff of my own by then.

“I do. I really do. It’s just… I don’t really know how to say this.” She stared at the wall, at a picture of Alex and me taken in Hyde Park, back in the days before my first real heartbreak. “I guess I’ve… developed feelings for someone else.” Bam, my heart dropped, the anxiety that had been building popped all over my veins, exploded in my blood. Fuck. I had been right. “Just this silly impossible crush. I’m so sorry. I thought I could deal with it alone and put it behind me, but it’s been eating at me.”

“Who?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter who.”

“It matters to me.” 

She shook her head. “It’s no one who would ever want me.”

“And that makes it OK, then?”

“No, of course not. I just, I don’t know, wanted to tell you the truth.”

“Tell me who it is, Lou. It’s not as if it can get much worse at this point.”

She buried her head in her hands. “I have tried to fight this, believe me, Lee, I have. Every day I have told myself I’m a big loser for allowing myself to have these feelings.”

“Just fucking tell me already.” She didn’t have to anymore. I knew who it was. I just wanted to hear her say the name.

“It’s Claire.”

“Of course it bloody is.” Bam, my heart sank a bit lower, the lowest it could go really. “Does she know?”

“I told her this afternoon.”

“What did she say?”

“That I should get over it. That nothing would ever happen. And that I shouldn’t tell you.”

“I see you took that advice to heart.”

“Would you rather I lied?”

“At least I have your honesty. How heart-warming.” I knew it was over there and then. I also knew what I needed to do. “Go, please. I wouldn’t want to keep you away from your precious job. The job, by the way, I begged you not to take.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I realise this is a lot to take for you. Maybe we can talk about it more tomorrow?” She lingered by the door and I could see that she was hurting, I just had no idea if the pain was for me or for Claire.

To be continued…