“So,” I say in both reply and question. “What does that matter?”
“I read on a tenth-grade level. I’m not…I’m not a lot of things. She’s right.”
“Lucas, you don’t really think that.”
He speeds up. My parents are only a forty-minute drive from my house, but it feels like a small and silent eternity when we finally pull up in front of my cottage. Lucas sits idle while I study his face. “Come in,” I say, opening my door, but I know it’s in vain. Inside my chest, just around the lodged bullet delivered by my own mother, tiny pieces of me are starting to fracture in a web-like pattern around it. He’s got his hand on the top of the wheel, his eyes bleary when he speaks.
“You know, I spent the night after our first date looking up what your degree meant. I had no fucking clue.”
“Most people don’t.”
“But some do.” He glances at me. “Isn’t that the type for you?”
“Come on, Lucas, she spoke out of her ass. She’s a horrible woman, and I’ll never talk to her again after this.”
He shakes his head. “Not true, you two talk often.”
“I love you,” I insist. “Right now, I don’t love her.” But he’s not hearing me.
A sad smile lifts the corner of his mouth. “I stayed up until four in the morning watching The Graduate, so I would know about it the next time you brought it up, but you never did.”
My heart sinks as he turns to me with a resignation that starts to tear me apart. Another crack, and then another, the web expanding across the whole of me threatening to shatter like glass.
More confession spills from his lips as I sit stunned. “That night at the pyramids, when I got upset, it wasn’t because I was tired.” He swallows audibly. “It was because I’d been trying to impress you and instead, you fucking schooled me.”
“It’s just stuff I learned in geography and other stuff I picked up.”
“Your mother is right, you’d be marrying down. And I do know it, I’ve always known it.”
“Jesus, Lucas, who said anything about marriage?”
“I just did,” he snaps without missing a beat, before scrutinizing my reaction. “Was that never a thought for you? Fuck, am I completely wrong about this, about us?”
“No, Lucas, God, no, I just, I didn’t think…”
“Think what?” he asks testily. “That I’m capable of marriage?”
“Stop. I’m not her, stop putting words in my mouth.”
“You look at me the way she does sometimes, like I’m an idiot.”
“Yeah, well, I hope you’re getting that look from me right now because you’re acting like one!”
He goes on as if he’s stuck in his own headspace instead of our conversation. “Maybe I fooled myself. Maybe we both did.”
“Stop,” I say. “Stop it. Stop right now. This is ridiculous. We’re happy.”
“But for how long? What will we talk about in twenty years?”
My head shakes repeatedly as I speak. “What is wrong with you? She’s the ignorant one, she has no idea who we are.”
“I’m not good enough! I’m not! I’m not on your level. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about sometimes and it kills me! I don’t know half the definitions of the words in your vocabulary!”
He’s never yelled at me and instant tears spring to my eyes. “I had no idea,” I confess, chin wobbling.
“Of course you didn’t, I’m a fucking actor, Mila! I can lie my way through walls. Why would your own boyfriend tell you he’s an illiterate fuck? He wouldn’t, he would just wait for your mother to figure it out for you.” He glances down at the console between us. “Maybe, it’s not so farfetched, maybe I’m really not the man for you.”
Another crack, this one so deep I have to fight for breath.
“Lucas, look at me, this is insane!”
His voice is shaking as he grips the steering wheel. “I just think you truly deserve better.”
“Please, don’t hurt me. Please, Lucas. Don’t break my heart, don’t break your own. We love each other, I don’t give a shit about your lack of education.”
“But I do.”
“This is really happening? You’re letting me go because you’re afraid you aren’t intelligent enough for me?”
He bites his lip, his voice low when he manages to speak. “I think about it constantly.”
“So what? I have to live with the scrutiny of the public, forever, just to be with you, you think that’s not something I think about? But I do it because I love you!” When he gives me silence