The Weight of an Empty Room
It started out gradually, so subtle that he had been blind sided when the final blow fell. When she blew into their lives, she had brought with her awkward silences and angry glances. Even so, as he stood in the now half-empty living room, he wondered what the hell had happened and if he could have fixed it. Sandie had told him over and over again that he couldn’t have, but she never liked Jamie, and he wasn’t quite sure he believed her.
He noticed the circles the legs of Jamie’s couch had made in the carpet and had to fight the childish urge to rub them away with his shoe, as if out of sight out of mind would work for this kind of situation.
He thought back to Amaia and her treacherously beautiful features; she was what he really wished he could forget. She was the one who had ambushed everything he had worked to build and destroyed it with a single-minded passion. He hadn’t fought, because he didn’t realize what had happened; he hadn’t even tried to make sure that she knew who had been there first, who had been at Jamie’s side for as far back as he could recall.
He and Jamie had been through a lot together, and he thought they were bonded for life through their trials, but maybe really, it had been too much for them to handle, and they had done all they could for each other, and now it was time to move on. “It’s for the best,” was the phrase that had been most often heard in the house the past week. The week after Jamie had made his choice, and that choice was not him. Her, it was all her now.
He sighed and curled up in one of the two chairs left and absently noticed he’d have to find some new furniture. The thought hurt, and his mind rebelled, insisting that he could just rearrange the living room, and things wouldn’t feel quite so unbalanced. It was a stupid though, he knew, he needed a couch, and there were no two ways around it. He laughed when he realized he could have the large green one that Jamie hadn’t let him get, calling it hideous. He wondered if it would be as comfortable as it had been when he and Jamie had sat on it in the store.
When Jamie knocked on the door, he was almost startled when he answered it, and he began to realize that he had to get used to the idea of the house being only his now. They stared at each other’s shoes intensely for a few moments before he said, “Do you want to come in?”
Jamie seemed startled that their awkward silence had been broken and looked into his face before he quickly glanced away, and he imagined that he saw an almost guilty expression on the other man’s face. “Um, no, actually. I’ve got to meet up with Amaia.” This time the look on Jamie’s face was decidedly guilty. “I just wanted to say-”
He cut him off. “No. Not unless you mean it.” He wasn’t surprised when Jamie fell silent, so he couldn’t figure out why it hurt so badly.