right?” She sat back in the booth and sighed. “Can we move onto something else now?”
I took a bite of my patty melt and moaned. “You can never go wrong ordering a greasy ass patty melt from here.”
She eyed my plate.
“You wanna try it?”
Her eyes darted to mine. “I mean, if you don’t mind. My burger is good, but yours looks a hell of a lot better.”
I cut it in half and lifted it to her mouth. A pull of stringy cheese hung from the plate to the sandwich. “Oh, cheese,” she whispered. “You know my inner Wisconsin girl comes out when the cheese comes out.”
She leaned forward and took a huge bite. Cheese dripped down her chin and she swiped it away with her finger.
“You still got a cheese drawer?” I laughed. I set the patty melt down and licked the grease off my fingers. Deedra had an obsession with cheese. She blamed it on her youth growing up in Wisconsin.
She moaned and closed her eyes. “Oh, my God, that is good.” She licked her lips and smiled. “And I now have two cheese drawers.” She opened her eyes. “I had to get a new one in the last move, and you can bet your ass I made sure there was plenty of room for cheese.”
“There were a couple things I knew to never keep from you. Cheese was one of them.”
She laughed. “You are right about that.” She took a sip of her tea. “What are the other things?”
I held up one finger. “Cheese is a food group. If you were having a bad day, a good hunk of cheese would go a long way in making it better.” I added one more finger. “My sweatshirt.” I lowered my voice. “The one I know you still have.”
Her cheeks turned pink. “Uh, which one? I mean, I might have something like that.”
I shook my head. I knew damn well she had it. When I realized she had taken it when she had left, it gave me a little sliver of hope that she really did still love me. “Pretty sure a close inspection of your drawers would find it.”
She waved her hand. “Continue with what you think you know about me.”
I held up three fingers. “Your job. Nothing can or will stand between it and you.”
She shrugged. “I mean, that’s right, but it sounds way more harsh when you say it like. And it’s not like I love my job most. It’s just that I kind of need to have a job so why not be the best at what I do, right?”
“At the sake of everything else in your life?” I asked.
Her eyes dropped to her half-eaten burger. “I think it’s time for another subject change.”
I shook my head. “No. This subject is pretty much going to lead us into what we’re here to talk about.”
She sighed and looked up at me. “Can I at least have one more bite of your sandwich before you ruin my dinner?” She reached across the table and grabbed my patty melt. She took another bite then looked down at her burger. She grabbed it, set it on my plate, and kept the half of patty melt to herself. “If you’re gonna make me possibly cry, then I get your food.”
“Fair enough,” I chuckled.
She took another bite and waved her hand toward me. “Commence with whatever you want to talk about.”
I waited ‘til she finished chewing and dropped the sandwich to her plate.
“Why did you leave me, Dee?”
Her face paled, and she dropped her chin to her chest.
I wasn’t going to beat around the bush. She had given me the bullshit excuse of not loving me anymore, but that was just that…bullshit.
“I told you when I left,” she whispered.
“Bullshit,” I seethed. “No way in hell you stopped loving me at the drop of a hat. We were good, and then, you were fucking gone. What changed in the matter of seconds for you to not want to be with me? Was I not good enough for you? Did I not treat you right? What the hell did I do?”
Everything I should have said the day she left me bubbled out. I wasn’t leaving this restaurant without getting answers.
“It wasn’t any of that, Point.” She listlessly stirred her spoon around in her soup.
“Then what in the hell was it, Dee? What made you leave?”
She closed her eyes and dropped her spoon. “I didn’t know how to love you, Point. I didn’t know how