She shook her head, more tears welling in her eyes. “No, no, I can’t leave here without fixing things with you.”
“Julia, there’s nothing to fix! It’s been two months since we broke up. I didn’t fit in with your friends. I didn’t fit in with your lifestyle. And we both know I never will. I am always going to be an embarrassment to you, so just do yourself a favor and focus on something or someone else.”
She wiped tears from her eyes. “I know. I know I was shitty, and I didn’t stick up for you, and I acted like you weren’t good enough… but you were. You always were the best thing that ever happened to me, and I don’t know how I lost sight of that. Dating has reminded me of that. No girl comes even close to you. I don’t care about the money anymore or that you don’t have a serious job, that’s fine, it’s all fine with me.”
Ahh, so she was only coming to me after she’d failed in dating other people… romantic.
“You’ll find someone eventually,” I told her coldly.
“I don’t want someone, I want you.”
I was already so sick of this. I’d been filled with disappointment the second I’d realized it wasn’t Emily, and now I just wanted to be alone to deal with those feelings. How the hell was I going to get Julia off my porch?
“Look, it’s seriously inappropriate for you to be here. You abused the information I gave you. You knew I never intended for you to come here, and you didn’t even bother calling before you did? Why? Because you knew I wouldn’t let you come?”
“…I feared that you wouldn’t, yes,” she admitted.
“Julia, that’s so freaking creepy. It’s been two months, and we’ve hardly spoken! Good God, girl, get a grip! Move on with your life! This was just as much your decision as it was mine.”
She reached out for my hand. “One more chance, please. I know you can’t possibly be happy here. I know that you can’t possibly be happy without me. I haven’t had a second of happiness since we ended things. We could be together again.”
I jerked my hand away. “Well, I have had happiness! Like, a lot of fucking happiness without you in my life.”
Her jaw dropped. “You… you have?”
“Yes,” I said definitively.
She took a second to take this in. “You’re lying.”
“No.”
Her eyes were full of hurt as she suddenly realized what I meant. “You met someone.”
“Yeah, I met someone.”
“But… but we’ve only been apart for a couple months,” she said sadly.
“And that’s a long time,” I told her, not bothering to add that I’d met Emily mere days after our break-up.
I also wasn’t going to add that how I felt for Emily was so much different than how I had ever felt for Julia. That she did something for me that Julia never could, and I felt I’d finally found my soul mate. No, I was livid at Julia for showing up this way, but I didn’t feel the need to hurt her any more than I’d already had. I just wanted her to go. Right now, that was all I needed… for her to just leave.
“I’m sorry, Julia, but you’ve got to go,” I told her, a little less coldly but still very seriously.
“No!” she snapped. “No, I can’t! I can’t just leave you! We need to work this out, we absolutely have to work this out… if we can’t, then…”
“We can’t,” I told her. “I just told you, I’ve moved on. I’m in a different place in my life. You need to move on, too.”
“I won’t!” she bit back. “Whoever you think you’ve moved on to, they’re just a rebound from me! You can’t truly love them. They’re not going to make you feel the way I made you feel.”
She was so wrong. Again, though, she was just hurting. I wasn’t going to make it any worse by pointing out the flaws in her argument.
“If you don’t leave, Julia, I’m calling the cops. You can’t harass me at my house like this. I’m asking you to leave.”
She looked taken aback that I would even make that threat.
“You’re serious? You’d call the cops on me?”
“If you won’t leave, yes, absolutely,” I answered.