guess ill take this pain instead of your name
Part 2.5 // 02 [part 01] [part 02] Promptober Masterlist
He feels pretty blindsided to be honest. They’d talked about having kids before, laughed over who they’d look like then agreeing their poor children would end up with his curly hair, surely. He’d talked about moving and she’d agreed, being closer to his mum and their made more sense.
Looking back on all these moments though, he sees them in a different light. The way her eyes darted away from his when he talked about trying. How Brittany kept filling her schedule, show after show, interviews and talk show appearances. The noncommittal answer she’d given him when he’d asked about what names they should call their inevitable child.
He never anticipated her telling him that she decided, without him, that she didn’t want to have children.
Then the conversation evolved and he doesn’t know how it happened, but all of sudden they weren’t together anymore. It’s only when he’s alone in the spare room, in the bed that’s too big and cold without her does he realise that he’s completely unmoored. His future isn’t clear anymore.
He cries himself to sleep.
Dinner with their friends is brutal. Charli takes Brittany outside so that she doesn’t see him break down at the table, sobbing into his hands as George holds him tighter than he ever has before. He doesn’t know what to do. Doesn’t know how to change her mind and make her come back. He tries to convince himself that he doesn’t want children either, just to keep her a little bit longer.
It doesn’t work. He wants more of her, a miniature version running around with his accent and a laugh larger than life.
He doesn’t know what he was thinking when he offers to help her pack when she tells him that she’s going to move to the States. It’s the worst torture he’s ever put himself through, wrapping up all their memories and her into cardboard boxes. He cries every second that he has to do it, carefully separating her vinyls from his and bubble wrapping a plant pot that once housed a plant so close to death that he’s honestly jealous of it now.
He's not a nosy guy, he never felt the need to snoop through her things, but she’s not there right now and all of her belongings are, so sue him. He wants to find a sign. Something that tells him that she doesn’t mean it, that she’s coming back and this was only temporary.
He pulls open every drawer, rummages through every empty shoebox in the walk in wardrobe and reads through her journals of incoherent lyrics. There’s a tatty page that slips from one of the books as he pulls it off the shelf and his heart breaks in two all over again.
“Matty’s song” is scrawled at the top along with a date in August 2024.
She’s only ever played it for him once. It was never recorded and he’s had to resort to watching fan videos from the crowd to hear it. He loved that it was just for him, but in this moment, he hates her for it. For taking yet another thing from him that she said he could have.
He steals the page, slipping it between one of his leather bound journals instead. Then he calls a removalist company and gets them to pack up the rest. When he cries over a pair of white Converse sneakers being put into a box, he hides at George’s until they’re done.
“I don’t understand,” his mum commiserates with him. “I thought you had spoken about this?”
“We had. She changed her mind.”
“Oh, Matty.”
~~~
Brittany returns home.
No.
Not her home.
It’s his house now. She’s bought an apartment in New York.
That had been something they’d spoken about too. Buying something small for them to share so they didn’t always have to stay in hotels. A little home away from their home in London. They’d talked about maybe buying something with a private balcony so he could smoke and more here.
She spends her last weekend packing up the last bits and pieces around the house that he (the movers) missed and saying goodbye to her friends in the city. Mayhem follows her around like a bad smell and if she asks him for the dog, he doesn’t know if he’s strong enough to say no.
Then he gets mad when she doesn’t. She treated that dog better than him some nights, always coming home with toys or buying him his own treat at cafes when they’d go out for coffee. It’s the first time since their separation that he feels anything but despair and of course it strikes when it’s the last time he’ll see her again for the foreseeable future.
Her last day (morning, really. Her flight is just after lunch time) he makes her regular mug of tea without really thinking about it. It’s an unconscious habit after all these years and he hopes she can’t taste his tears within the brew when he puts it on the bedside table for her. Mayhem’s ears perk up from his spot on the end of the bed, by her feet.
Brittany is still asleep, her hair a mess, and her face squished into the pillows. He hasn’t really come into the main bedroom since they split, it already smells different with the lack of her belongings. He can’t stand it.
The house sounds different as he putters around. His footsteps echo more and it feels colder. Everywhere he looks there’s a reminder of what his life is about to become. Empty and void of Brittany Jackson.
He can’t watch her say goodbye to the dogs, instead sitting in the car and wishing time would stop. If he could just have a few extra moments with her, an extra few seconds, then maybe he could turn this around and she’d stay.
The door leading into the house opens and he’d expected her eyes to be red, but they remain dry. The same cannot be said for his own. She jumps into the passenger seat with a small smile and he starts the engine.
Cracks form in the pieces of his broken heart with every change of the station on the radio. He’d offer to plug his phone in, but he doesn’t want to have a record of the last song that ever played with Brittany Jackson in his car. (Not that it matters, he’ll have committed it to memory anyway.)
When they pull up into the 2 minute drop off bay, he doesn’t know who leans in first, but their lips press against one another and this is his last hail Mary. His last chance at convincing her to be his. He doesn’t have the words so he hopes that his mouth and his tongue can do all the talking for him. Her hands brush through his hair and he holds onto her jaw like she’ll fade away from him.
(She is.)
A car horn breaks through their moment and they climb out of the car, moving to the boot for her suitcase. Her hand brushes his as she grabs for the handle. She thanks him for driving her, treating him like a glorified Uber driver before she turns and goes inside the terminal.
She doesn’t even turn back around.
And that’s it.
Brittany Jackson is gone.
He doesn’t really remember the drive home or parking the car in the garage. He doesn’t remember being so distraught that he vomits in the hallway, doesn’t remember calling George or sobbing violently down the phone. All he can think about is Brittany walking away from him and how its pattern he never got her to break.
~ ~ ~
He can’t sleep. He tossed and turned in the spare bedroom before moving silently back to the master. The sheets are still rumpled on her side.
His side too now, he realises.
Curling onto the righthand side of the bed, the one further from the door because she was afraid of the imaginary monsters in the darkened hallway, he pulls her pillow close. It still smells like her and he wonders how much longer the scent will remain imbedded in the sheets. He closes his eyes when Mayhem hops up onto the end of the mattress, circling around a few times before settling where Brittany’s feet would normally lay.
His phone buzzes just after 4am with her name on the screen. Scrambling to answer it, he clears his throat and hopes that it wasn’t a pocket dial. Hopes that she landed in New York and realised what a horrible mistake she’d made and that she was coming home, back to him.
“Hi,” Brittany whispers.
He can’t help but close his eyes. Her voice, one of the things he’d fallen in love with first, was comforting. The way the syllables rolled off her tongue, her Australian accent fainter as the years went by.
“Hey,” he whispered back.
“I have a lot of stuff, huh?”
The comment catches him off guard and his lips curl in a smile.
“You do.”
The line goes quiet, but he can hear the telltale signs of New York City in the background, sirens and car horns.
“How’s your apartment?” He asks.
“It’s… big.” She responds diplomatically. “Everything just feels really big and scary right now.”
He looks around his bedroom and knows exactly what she means. There’s so much adjustment to be made and the longer the call goes on, the more he realises that she’s never coming home.
“Mayhem’s been looking for you.”
It’s true. The dog had sat by the front door all day, tail wagging and jumping up excitedly when a key had turned in the front door, only to be disappointed when George walked through instead. The dog had whined, crying in his bed and trying to sneak upstairs when nobody was looking to get into the master bed.
“I don’t think he’d like it here very much. I don’t have a garden and there’s this little black cat sitting on my fire escape that keeps watching me.”
“Looks like you’ve got your very own stalker.”
“Looks like it.”
The conversation keeps ending naturally and he doesn’t know what to say to keep her on the line. To keep her with him.
“We’re going to be friends, right? It’s not something we said just because we broke up?”
She keeps breaking his heart and he kind of wishes it would stop. (Her or his heart. Whichever comes first.)
“We are friends,” he promises, but it sounds empty even to him.
“Ok,” she breathes out. “G’night, Matty.”
“Night, Britt.”
She continues to call him, always after midnight and his sleep schedule becomes totally thrown out of whack. He’s been sleeping in until well after lunch time every day and staying up almost all night waiting for her call.
Every minute that he’s awake without her feels like hell. The seconds feel like hours and she consumes his every waking thought. He’s begun checking the weather in New York just to have something to talk to her about.
(“You unpacked your coats, right? It’s meant be below freezing this week.”)
George begs him to stop answering, begs him to start letting her go, “just a little bit”. He can’t.
He won’t.
Their time in the studio is frenzied, a million ideas pouring out of him some days and then others he can barely string a sentence together. They’re meant to be deep into the progress of their new album and he’s just not in the mindset for it.
Then the calls stop coming. The first night she didn’t ring he stayed awake until she texted him the next day. He couldn’t close his eyes in fear over what could’ve happened to her. She tells him that she’d just had a long day at the studio and went to sleep as soon as she got home. Tells him that she forgot to call him.
When she doesn’t ring again another night, he’s brave enough to call her instead. She doesn’t pick up and the next morning he sees the paparazzi photos of her out to dinner with Jack and Taylor. It feels like 2024 again when he was trawling around the internet for scrapes of her and he hates it.
