is: is there somebody else? Or, do you wish there was? Because I don’t feel like enough for you.’
He didn’t feel like he was enough for her? But wasn’t he saying she was the one lacking? Before she spoke, her tummy did a little leap as she thought: Train Guy. Those notes back and forth that there had been, the anticipation she’d had – it had been exciting. But it was nothing – Eddie was an actual real person, whom she’d talked to directly and slept with and made plans with. She wanted more time to decide, was all. Needed more time to fall for him. She could, if she tried. She was sure she could.
‘There’s nobody else, of course there isn’t!’ Nadia said. ‘Eddie, I’m having a really great time with you.’
Eddie nodded. ‘Okay then,’ he said. ‘Well, I’ve told you how I feel.’
‘So what now?’
‘So, let’s go home, and eat, and keep enjoying this.’
‘Even though you think you’d be happier with somebody else?’
Eddie looked at her. ‘I guess I just wanted some reassurance, is all,’ he said. ‘I’m falling for you, Nadia.’
Nadia took a breath. He was falling for her. She was enough. That felt good to hear. She needed him to fall for her. She needed to know for sure that she was enough. And she’d feel the same soon. Time. She just needed time.
‘So … we’re going to keep doing … this?’ she said.
‘If you want to,’ Eddie replied, and Nadia did. She really, truly, desperately wanted to feel as deeply as Eddie did. She wanted to fall for this good, good man. She wanted to make him happy. She wanted to be happy herself.
‘Let’s pay and go,’ she said, reaching for her bag. ‘I just need to find my card.’ She rooted around for her wallet, lost in the depths of her navy leather bag. She felt the edges of a plastic rectangle. ‘Got it,’ she said, triumphantly. She half wondered why her card wasn’t in her wallet and when she fished it out she saw why. It wasn’t her card. It was the card from that night – the one that said D E WEISSMAN. She’d forgotten she had that – his card from that night. She dropped it back into her bag like it was on fire, and Eddie said. ‘I can get it, babe. Ça va sans dire.’
‘Savva what?’ Nadia said.
‘Ça va sans dire. It’s French. It means, “it goes without saying”.’
‘I have literally never heard that used in conversation in my life.’
‘A lot of people haven’t. But don’t you think it sounds classy? Ça va sans dire …’
Nadia cocked her head at him. She thought it sounded pretentious, and suddenly, in that moment, everything about him bothered her. His stupid phrase and his stupid jacket and his stupid kindness and honesty.
‘But like,’ she said, pushing the issue, ‘if a lot of people don’t know what it means, why say it?’
‘Because I like it,’ he countered. The barman held out the card machine and Eddie tapped his card against it.
‘But, wouldn’t you rather be clear in your communication? It’s like you’re using it to be deliberately confusing. So that people ask you what it means and you get to tell them.’
Eddie laughed, nonplussed by her tone. ‘What’s wrong with that? I get to teach them something.’
‘But it’s showing off.’
‘It’s not.’ That’s all he said. It’s not. And typically, that’s why Nadia had respected him: Eddie knew who he was and what his values were, and wasn’t swayed by what other people thought. And just like that Nadia went from desperate to hope and to try with this man beside her, to angry. Irrationally angry. She knew, frustratingly, that she was better than this. She knew, in the blood pumping through her pissed-off veins, that she had let herself down because she should have been honest with him. Should have told him that she did think of somebody else, was holding a part of herself back. She had continued to see this man because she had been lonely, and on some level thought this was all she was worth – an almost. She was so mad at herself! She knew, she fucking knew, that it was better to be alone than with the wrong guy. And she had tried with Eddie. Even if she hadn’t explicitly known he was the wrong guy, in her gut she knew he wasn’t the right one. Two months was enough to know. It was inconvenient to acknowledge