Another Door Opens

2 - Domestic boredoms.

- EDEN -

Trey hasn't owned a car since I met him. He's always lived and worked in the city, where most of his friends similarly reside as well. There was just never a need to have one. He can get around just fine without it, whether that be by walking, public transport or ride services like Uber. 

Which is why I had no warning when I got home that he would be here, and also why I'm frozen in the very same position I was standing in when I first registered that he was here, and that he's cooked dinner, and set the table. With flowers and candles.

I can count the number of times he's cooked dinner in our six years living together on one hand, maybe two if I include breakfasts. I generally finish work before he does most days so I'm home to get started on dinner before him. That's just the routine we fell into. The one day per week I work the late shift, we generally order take out to the apartment, and on weekends we usually head out to dinner somewhere with Trey's friends.

Apart from that, it's been all me, and I'd be lying if I said it hadn't resulted in some poorly repressed resentment leading, in part, to the decision to end our relationship. If I'm sharing a life with someone, I want it to be fair and equal. And on the matter of domestic boredoms—-of which, let's face it, there are many-—there was no equity. I carried that responsibility almost completely alone for years.

So a last ditch effort to presumably save our relationship using this strategy of a complete 180° turnaround on matters he knows by now have long irritated me, really just takes the piss. I would laugh if I didn't think it was rude.

Then again, I barely ever raised his doing next to nothing with him as an issue, so maybe I should also be laying some of that blame at my own feet. Maybe I should have said or done something more to bring up that sometimes I felt more like a mother than a partner, and that what it seems like he actually wants is a parent or a housekeeper to care for him, rather than a girlfriend or fiancé who just wanted him to lift his own weight.

His first home outside of his parents' place was the one we're awkwardly standing in now; whereas I've been living out of home since the very second I could afford to be, sacrificing any potential, dedicated house fund deposit to renting just to get away from my mother's shitty boyfriends and my mother's even shittier passivity to their shitness. I'm just not sure Trey's learned those crucial living skills yet. Maybe it makes me lazy, or dismissive, or selfish, I don't know; but I really don't want to be that kind of teacher to anyone, let alone my future husband.

"Hey," Trey said, walking towards me. Internally, I took a step backwards away from him, but my actual feet remained firmly in place as he closed the space between us.

I had no idea what to say. I exhausted all my explanation points last night when I told him I couldn't do this anymore. So all I really had left was a simple, "Hi."

"I made dinner," offered Trey, no doubt expecting me to be impressed. I don't think I am. In fact I'm kind of annoyed. Had he done this at all over the past six years we’ve lived together, I might have been, as would I have been incredibly grateful and flustered by the effort. But now, it's seeming to have the opposite effect of what he intended.

"I can see that, Trey," I replied, taking a deep breath to steady myself. "Though I'm not entirely sure why."

"I just thought we could sit, have dinner and talk?"

His hand is raking through his blonde hair, and his blue eyes are watching me both carefully and hopefully. I remember when he pulled this move in the club back in Byron Bay when we met. He had such natural swagger and self-confidence, and simple moves like this would floor me while we talked and drank and danced. Mid-twenties were a much more simple time though, or maybe it was me that was more simple back then. Naïve at the very least to think that having a man look at me like this meant that we were going to be together forever.