Between Us

by Mhairi McFarlane

Each time he returned, he was a degree more distant than the last time.

There was a strained pause that Roisin felt obliged to fill.

Much as she loved Dev’s idealism, Roisin felt sure that these two portraits would be less of a sequence, and more like bookends.

She felt as if Joe kept trapping her inside riddles. He might be great at dialogue, but a hyper-empath, he was not.

it wasn’t the time. But once again, she suspected The Time would not obligingly create itself.

Could she fall back in love with him? Not without his help.

Joe’s distaste for Matt as a conceited attention seeker was to cover for the fact he actually hated that attention sought Matt.

She hadn’t realized how broken she was, until someone acknowledged it.

clandestine

emollient

feel naked around him anyway, so once he’d literally seen me naked, it was more than I could tolerate.

Once you knew someone could betray you over something that serious, and try to bluff their way out of it, how could you trust a word out of their mouth about anything else?

If she went behind Joe’s back to try to catch him out, enlisting friends as PIs, then trust was gone. Good faith was gone. A chunk of the moral high ground had gone.

Their breaking up, after so long—it was one of those things that happened all the time, but when it happened to you, it was unfeasibly gigantic.

He wrote Cool Things to Say for a living, so she’d wait until she felt a truth.

“The price of love is grief.”

How did you explain having fallen in love with someone who wasn’t nice? It wasn’t a very sympathetic error.

We have to make a joke of it to cope with it, right? I try, and I can’t. I end up feeling like I am the joke.”

“An imperfect attempt to help is better than a self-protective nothing.

She had beclowned herself.

Roisin would find herself reassuring her mother. She needed her heart to heal a little before she exposed herself to all that noise.

“I’m saying it would be too costly a fling.”

“I think he hates losing control of people. Control is what he calls ‘love,’”

you’ve been decent enough to tell me the truth. That took guts. That deserves forgiveness.”

Don’t worry. I didn’t come to you for answers. The next layer of lies have no value to me.

Roisin needed to stop punishing the people available to be punished, who might’ve made mistakes, but sincerely loved her back.

“I’m not going to pretend to be more resilient than I am. I need you.”