"Keep hoping. I'll never love you." The words came out clean and crisp and polished, cutting through the steam from her frozen breath. It was five in the morning. The harsh lights of the airfield cut through the soaring concrete sarcophagus of the departure terminal and carved angular shadows into the upper reaches of the building. She shot me a nervous smile, flicked back her hair, fiddled with her wedding ring. I drank my coffee. She sipped fastidiously at hers. If she wanted to keep on talking, she would talk, and if she didn't then she would not. Dealing with her had always been easy, if only because everything rested on her terms and there was nothing anyone could do to change anything if and when she ever made up her mind.
"I'm sorry," she said, finally. There was a raspy undercurrent of cigarette smoke to the girlish timbre of her voice, and while once upon a time it had turned me on, I found that it wasn't improving her word choice any. She tried again. Eternal optimist. "I'm sorry. I really am. Really."
Really, I thought, but she never took sarcasm well. It had a tendency to fly over her head and she didn't like that either. She was tapping her foot now, nervous as anything, casting anxious glances at her watch and then at me and then at her coffee and back to me. Her lashes quivered up and down more times than I could count. I picked up her mug, stared at the watery dregs of her insomnia, put it back down. She flicked her hair forwards and tried another smile. It worked about as well as you would expect.
"Well," she said yet again, "I'm sorry."
She didn't sound sorry at all. She sounded tired and uneasy and caught in a corner. I felt sorry for her, I sympathized with her, but that didn't mean I had to let her walk all over me. Didn't mean I had to stand back and let her leave me one more time. If we had come together at any other place or at any other time then maybe it would have been different but this was an airport and this was five-thirty in the morning and you know what, I was tired and uneasy and backed up into a hole as well. To hell with smart responses and wanting her back. To hell with sorry and goodbye and half-formed dreams of persuading her to come back into my arms. To hell with her. She didn't even want me back.
So I looked at the table and said, "It's alright. Don't worry about it."
And then she was standing up and shrugging into her jacket with that same anxious smile, that same nervous fluttering of the lashes, ready to take me at my word and forget that this distressing interlude had ever happened. "I'm glad we agree," she said, but her eyes were already distant. In her mind, she was already on the flight back to her husband and her job and her four-room flat, to the tidy little life she had built for herself after walking out on me all those months ago. "I've got to get going. I'll talk to you later?" The light lilting at the end spelled a question, not a statement. "I'll talk to you later." I wished she had said that instead. I wished she had been more definite but she had gone and she hadn't even paid for that coffee. I had to dig out my wallet and do the gentlemanly thing. I'll bet she was sorry about that, too.
(WC 607)
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