A Friendly Meal

Had he heard her right?

"Sorry," he asked slowly, "did I hear you right? Did you just ask whether I'd mind you sleeping with other people?"

She cocked her head slightly to the side and continued to stare at him. It was quite unnerving really, her eyes flickered slightly as if she were trying to map every tiny shift in his expression.

"Yes," she confirmed with a matter-of-fact air. She paused for a second and asked again, casually, "Would you?"

Her face gave nothing away aside from a mild curiosity belied by an underlying intensity. Was she...joking?

"Are you...joking?" he asked, quite genuinely. Her eyebrow flicked upwards for just a moment and with an almost imperceptible sigh she leaned forward to sip her drink through a straw.

"Well, either way," he continued hesitantly, "no, no that would not be cool with me." Again she looked at him and cocked her head to the side. Her eyes narrowed slightly.

"Really?" She asked with a note of mild surprise. "Why not?"

There was a pause as they looked at each other with what seemed to be mutual bafflement. Brow furrowed, he thought again that this had to be some kind of elaborate joke.


"What do you mean 'why not?' Do I really have to justify it? You asked, I'm telling you, I would mind. It's that simple." He looked at her for a second, "Why? Do you want to sleep with other people?" She shrugged and sipped again from her drink.

"Not necessarily. It's just that, well, it's not like we're boyfriend and girlfriend or anything, are we?"

The thing that surprised him the most was that she kept looking straight at him as she said these things.

"Well, yes," he stammered slowly, "yes, as far as I understand it, we kinda are..." The wincing look she gave him indicated her near certainty that he was incorrect.

"Really? I assumed we were a lot more casual than all that."

"Is that not something you might have thought to check with me?" he asked with growing anger, "I mean call me crazy but I would have thought the natural assumption would be..." He couldn’t seem to get a bead on his argument, "I mean, an open relationship seems like a bit of a leap..." noticing her wince again he trailed off.

"What?" he asked, irritably.

"Nothing, nothing..." Sensing the subject would not drop she took a deep breath and continued, "it's just...'relationship'?" She crooked her fingers into quotes on the final word.

He just about suppressed the sudden impulse to shriek the words 'Make Sense' at her and took a deep breath.

"Ok," he started slowly, "has one of us had a stroke? All I'm saying is that I assumed that we..." there was a long-suffering sigh from across the table.

"Yeah, I get it," she started shortly, "I just don't get why your assumption is so much more valid than mine."

That was veering dangerously close to sense in his opinion. When had things stopped being ok? Why hadn't he been informed? There was a moment of silence.

"So?" she pressed.

"What, sleeping with other people? You realise I already answered that question right?"

"Did you? Oh. Oh, right."

To her credit she tried to hide her disappointment. He knew at that moment what he had to do and sighed as he accepted the end of this quasi-relationship. Oddly, it didn't hurt nearly as badly as he would have thought. He began to wonder if all of this might have been a cunning ploy on her part. Either way...

He pulled the napkin from his lap and folded it beside his plate. Thankfully they had just finished their main meals by this point. He had been thinking about dessert but it seemed like that would be a needless and torturous extension of this car-crash meal. Taking a few notes from his wallet, he dropped them on the table before rising from his chair.

"Luckily for you it no longer matters what I think. Have at it."

It was much more blunt than he had intended it to be and the incontrovertible righteousness that the sentence had exuded in the privacy of his head shrivelled down to something petty and vindictive in the light of the real world. He immediately regretted saying it but it was done now. She held his gaze for a moment.

He could see no outright reproach in her eyes but she remained silent. He stared at her for a moment as he stood perched on the point of leaving. He thought about the times when she had seemed an angel in his eyes: beautiful, impossible and distant. How he had yearned for her. Maybe the chase had been all there was to it?

"I'll see you later." He lied. She stared at him for a moment more and then nodded before reaching down for her bag. He walked past her towards the door, sternly resisting urge to look back. Their waiter, busy serving another table, noticed his departure with a panicked change of posture and relaxed only when he spotted the money beside the plate.

The door jangled shut behind him with a cathartic and panic-inducing air of finality. Maybe he should have stayed and talked it out, maybe this was essentially an act of cowardice, or an overreaction, but a wry smile crept across his face and he began to feel a sense of freedom he hadn't even realised he had been missing.

It wasn't freedom from her. No, he had never felt constrained by her, in fact their trobule had been quite the opposite. He had never felt that she needed him, nor that he could allow himself to need her.

This was something deeper, something much more personal.

He stepped out into the early evening rain.