Junk of the Heart

chapter one - the letter

“... Wow.” C.S. looked up from the page, not halfway through the break-up letter Rene had tossed his best friend and already secondhand-scathed by the inflammatory prose. Seated across from him, Brodie let out a rueful chortle. “There are a lot of ‘less’ words in here. Jobless, thoughtless, pointless…”

“I found it to be a little repetitive.” Brodie stretched his legs out and rested them on the coffee table. There was a smile on his face as though he found the whole act amusing, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “She also said I have no dick. But not without first insulting my lack of financial stability… Women have their priorities.”

C.S. delicately pushed the letter back across the tabletop, worried that the ferocious words would escape the confines of the page. “What brought this on?”

Brodie let out a long, dramatic exhale and squinted towards the ceiling, like he was recalling a distant memory. “Well it all started… this morning.”

“She drafted you a letter,” snorted C.S. “I doubt it started today.”

Brodie carried on unfazed. “She came over last night, we did the deed, as we consenting adults tend to, we went to Captain Roma’s for breakfast today, and then she started crying and yelling and kicked me to the curb.”

“You took her to a pizza place for breakfast?”

“Hey, Captain Roma’s is an institution,” pressed Brodie, more animated about his favorite eatery than he had been about the break-up. “... But she may have filed a similar complaint.”

C.S. snorted again, and leaned back in his chair.

“So it goes like this…” Pulling his feet off the table, Brodie sat up and rested against his knees. “We roll up to the parking lot. She’s got this huge scowl on her face because we’re the only people there that early or something…” He rolled his eyes. “Then she starts going after me about how we always go to Captain Roma’s. And I said ‘you’re damn right we always go to Captain Roma’s - it’s a fucking institution!’ And then I look over and she’s crying.”

“Your aptitude for wooing women amazes me,” drawled C.S. sarcastically.

“I offered to take her somewhere else and she said that wasn’t the point. She said she just feels trapped in this giant maelstrom of shit, where she does three things over and over and over: go down on me, go to Captain Roma’s the next day, and go home to cry.” Brodie drooped back against the couch with a shrug and a wily smile. “I said it sounds like one hell of a life.”

C.S. draped a hand over his eyes, shielding himself from the inevitable disappointment that always followed Brodie’s storytelling.

“Oh lighten up, it was a joke.” Brodie paused a moment, retracing his steps. “Admittedly ill-timed and inappropriate, but it really didn’t make much of a difference. Anyway. So Rene is crying and I’m really hungry and I’m trying to drag her into the damn restaurant to sit down and chill out, but she’s fighting me every step of the way and saying that there are people writing books and exploring the oceans and saving jungle animals and that all she’s doing is wasting her time in my basement.”

Through splayed fingers, C.S. peeked out at his friend, hoping to catch a glimpse of real, selfless emotion. There was none.

“Then she spiked this letter into the ground and ran away.” Brodie tossed his hands up, throwing aside any concern. “Hell hath no fury like a woman amidst an existential crisis… What’s a man to do?”

“So what now?”

Brodie chuckled, kicking his feet back up. “I guess I’m single and ready to mingle.”

Furrowing his brow incredulously, C.S. crossed his arms and looked at the mess before him. Lounging, as he always did, on a couch in his mothers’ basement-turned-mancave, Brodie Bryce was clad in a bathrobe at three in the afternoon. An unkempt mop of dark hair wilted across his forehead and stubble sprouted along his jawline. He was single, but he was not ready to mingle.

“And I know it’ll be hard to see me with a slew of new babes,” Brodie stretched across the table, batting his eyes and laying an affectionate hand on C.S.’s knee. “But damnit, Calvin Spencer, don’t you forget that I’ll always love you the most.” He pulled away, and C.S. smoothed the feeling of a likely unwashed palm off his jeans.

Brodie swiped up the letter as he reclined again, skimming it over with a wry smile. “I should frame this,” decided Brodie, extending the paper before him and aligning it with the opposite wall. “As much as it pains me to say it, she’s not wrong about most of this stuff… a portrait of a complex individual.”

“That’s a little cynical, isn’t it?” supplied C.S.

Brodie dropped a sharp bark of a laugh, overzealously pulling himself to his feet. “I’ll show you cynical...” With a showman’s flair, he whirled around and stalked to the adjoining room to fetch a cardboard box - which was promptly dropped with a muffled thud on the table.

Hesitantly, C.S. peeled back the box flaps to examine the contents.

“This, mon frare, is all the junk Rene left here over these past two years. You know, belongings of a personal nature and sentimental trinkets.”

Raising a curious brow, C.S. shifted a book and a stuffed animal to unearth a bright pink bra before Brodie swatted his hand away. “Look with your eyes, you dirty dog. This stuff isn’t here for you to grope with your sticky fingers.”

Bashfully, C.S. retreated. “So what is it for?”

Brodie grinned, standing tall and triumphantly resting his hands on his hips. Already, C.S. dreaded the answer. “I’m gonna sell it.”