Girl and City

“Do you talk to your exes?” I asked him nonchalantly.
“Well… you,” MFL answered with a chuckle.
“Besides me.”
“No, god no. My last ex was terrible. A terrible mistake.”
I swallowed the xiao long bao in one gulp and my ears perked up. He had never talked about his relationships before. At some point in the last three years, we had formed an unspoken rule not to talk about our love lives.
“Oh? Why?” I asked, as offhandedly as I could.
“She was just horrible. Really unreasonable. I have no idea why I went out with her.”
I took a bite of a steaming shao mai and thought before I spoke again. “I don’t really know her but she has always been cold to me.”
He paused. “To tell you the truth… she hates you.”
“What? Why?”
“Because you’re my ex.”
“Just because of that?”
“Yes, just because of that. Which I find absurd. It actually really bothered me. She just hates you. And she creeped you on Facebook.”
“She did?”
“And she interrogated me about you, about all my relationships.”
“Interrogated?”
“Yes, actually interrogated. Like ‘Do you miss her?’ and whatnot.”
“She sounds like a –”
“Bitch. Yes, she was a huge bitch.”
“– bitch.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t see it,” MFL looked down at the table, “it was so obvious that she was a bitch. But we were just together constantly, I couldn’t see it, I was blinded. But when I went away for the summer, I realized immediately. So I broke it off.”
For a moment, neither of us spoke. We sipped the xue cai and tofu soup in silence. My head was swirling with a million thoughts but one came clearest: my intuition was bang on. When I met BE in first year, I immediately thought she was a bitch, namely because she completely ignored me when I tried to talk to her. I wasn’t sure at the time if she knew I was MFL‘s ex, but I should have guessed. And the few times that I talked to MFL that year, I could tell their relationship did nothing for him. Maybe that was why I had gotten the boyfriend-vibe from him, because he did miss me. Because as inadequate as I might be at playing The Girlfriend, I was still light years better than BE.

(more…)

I miss having a boyfriend. Not so he can take me out on fancy dinners or go on road trips with me. Not even so I have a date to bring to “couple events.” I miss having a boyfriend for the most basic comforts. Like spending a night in sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace, me on my laptop and him reading the newspaper or watching TV. And I would tuck my feet behind the back of his knee because they’re cold. And I would look up occasionally from my work and see my loving boyfriend and smile in silence. And then when I returned to my work, he would look over at me and smile and ask if I need anything. And it might sound like the most boring night in the world, but to me, it would be perfect, because I am with him.
Last night, I had the perfect night in. I was on one end of the couch working on my laptop, with my legs propped up and my feet tucked under his thigh. He was on the other end, watching me work¹. And even though I had been working for nine straight hours and my butt was numb from sitting for so long, I would not have traded it for anything else in the world.

The only problem was that I was on someone else’s couch, in front of someone else’s fireplace, and the boy warming my feet was someone else’s boyfriend.
Small details, of course. When I should have been jolted awake by the realization that this entire fantasy belonged to someone else, I was instead swooning in his presence.

The last two days have been spent preparing for a presentation that we had to make this morning on a business idea. DEB was in my group, and we flirted mercilessly. My version of flirting was bickering with him – on everything. So much so that the rest of our group started to call us an old married couple. Honestly, he really drives me crazy, but in a good way. I find him so frustrating and exasperating and… heart-wrenchingly adorable! The only way I could focus on the task at hand was by making snide remarks and snappy comments to make him think I was annoyed with him. Every time he said something, he would grin at me, and I would look up from my work and lose myself in his eyes. And then I’d snap back to reality with a quick “you are so annoying” or “I hate you” and proceed to ignore his wounded act. As we were closing in on 30 hours of working together, he started to really believe it.
DEB: Do you really hate me?
Me: Of course.
DEB: I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not.
Me: I’m a good actress.
DEB: See, right there, were you being serious? I can’t tell.
My friend, who was also in our group, walked by and said, “She is probably secretly in love with you.” I guess she saw right through me. I blushed and returned to work.
This morning, after we presented, I made a paper crane and gave it to him, and he wrote me a note:
so you don’t hate me?
I replied: of course not =)
I was tempted to draw a little heart but I didn’t want to make it too obvious. He smiled and tucked the paper crane into his shirt pocket.

All in all, it was a fantastic way to end first term, even if I could only borrow DEB for a short time to play the boyfriend role in my fantasy. Now I am going to end up spending my holidays going over every little detail in a futile attempt to figure out if he was flirting with me and whether that is because he likes me or not and… you know. Typical googly-eyed girl stuff.

1. He divided his time between watching me work and trying to do work himself, but he was pretty much useless so it was much more the former than the latter. [↩]