Purposefully Accidental

Chapter Fifty

"What was it, exactly, that went wrong between us?"

My question comes out in a hum against the muted sounds of the morning traffic outside my building. I glance at Jonah, seeing the openly thoughtful expression on his face as he ponders over it.

It's been a month since the Archer Gala, and Jonah is visiting me in the city to help me move into my new place in Brooklyn over the weekend. As Freddie and I are proceeding with the divorce, I decided that it would be best to move out to make things a little easier for everyone. That way, whenever Jonah flies in for a visit, he can just sleep over at my place instead of booking a hotel room or having to, understandably, turn down Freddie's offer to stay in one of the guest rooms in the townhouse. Besides, the apartment I'm renting is considerably so much closer to school now, so the shorter commute surely doesn't hurt.

It's been a really long few days of tidying up my new place, cleaning out the ceiling and scrubbing the bathroom spotless and putting on new sheets on the queen bed in the only bedroom in the apartment. I feel a little bad to have Jonah fly into New York for a visit only to help me rearrange the furniture and assemble the new bookcase and the TV set, but he didn't mind it, even if I'm too tired to even go out for a proper date.

After relying on the nearest takeouts for quick dinners for three days straight, last night Jonah whipped up an easy chicken and green bean stir fry with lemon garlic butter sauce, and we ended the night by burning away the calories with a little workout on my new bed. Then I woke up the next day, pleasantly surprised to find the notorious insomniac and early riser still snoozing away on the pillow next to me, so of course I had to ruin the relatively peaceful morning by opening my mouth and starting a discussion about our past breakup as soon as he opened his eyes.

To his credit, he's genuinely thinking over it, eyes clear and bright even though he's freshly awake, his finger absentmindedly twisting around a strand of my messy hair.

"I think... I think we were too careful with each other, in a way that ended up hurting our relationship more than it did any good," Jonah finally says. The dim light from the side table lamp casts a gentle glow over the outline of his handsome face.

I think about the late-night fights over the phone—of the fights that weren't quite fights, but more like arguments that we never finished, unspoken words that we kept burying until there was no space left to store them. Jonah, especially, had the tendency to diffuse an escalating situation by putting on a forced neutral tone in his voice and changing the topic, which made me feel like my frustrations were being dismissed. And I, to make it all worse, never spoke out to let him know that by doing that, he was making me feel like I wasn't being heard. It became yet another habit of mine to hide what I truly felt from him, in attempt to keep our relationship "okay"—when in truth, our relationship was beginning to deteriorate from the lack of proper communication.

I explain to him exactly that, and his lips twist in a rueful smile. "That's true. I thought I was doing that to protect us. I'd hate going to bed after a fight, knowing that we were so far away from each other, with no way for me to make it up to you. So I was careful not to start a fight, when I knew you had something you wanted to say that I knew I wasn't gonna like to hear. I always... deflected."

"I know. But all we did was avoid a ticking time bomb. That one last fight we had on the phone... that was the bomb going off." I said to him so many awful things—shit I wouldn't have said if I hadn't been stewing in that frustration and disappointment for weeks and weeks without an outlet. Instead of seeking a resolution, I blew up, thinking it would make me feel better. Spoiler alert: it didn't.

I feel his warm leg slipping between mine, keeping us comfortably tangled under the sheet. He says softly, "I kept running away from things that scared me. And what scared me the most was losing you. I'm sorry that I made you feel like I was dismissing your feelings, like you couldn't be honest with me. I'm guessing that was the reason why you were so afraid to tell me about your marriage—and I was trying to be patient by not pushing you to tell me the truth, but maybe I was repeating my old mistakes, too."