Fiction: You Can Make Her Like You by Jay Slayton-Joslin

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  You can accidentally bump into each other in a coffee shop. You ordered a cappuccino, her a black coffee. The barista gives you both each others drinks and you look at each other after taking the first sip.      

            “I like to drown the flavour of my coffee.”         

            “And I like to taste it.”  

            Despite there being plenty of free seats, you two decide to sit with each other. You haven’t been too social since you broke up with your last partner, she made the executive decision to keep all the friends in the split up, or at least you pretend she did because otherwise it means your friends deserted you, but at least you don’t have to worry about going to pick up your vinyl because she moved out. You talk to this new girl about your job, your dreams and the kind of books and films you both like. You form a synergy that neither of you have felt in a long time. You ask her out for dinner, and she suggests something a bit less intimate. You never had issues with intimacy; you would say to your ex “Why can I go down on you but not use your toothbrush?”          

              “How about we go paintballing?” She says to you, resting her cup on the table.  

            “That sounds great,” you say, and then you give that smile like you did in your school photos.

            The first time you two get undressed in front of each other, it wasn’t quite as intimate as you were hoping. You take off your paint-stained overalls, and dump them onto the grass. She is still wearing her jeans and a vest, but you look at her as if she is naked the way that God intended.

            “I had fun,” you say to her.       

            “Me too.”        

            The first time you make love is also the first time you have sex. You watch the way that she bites her lip gently, as if she is holding back a secret. Afterwards, the two of you hold each other in bed, laying there silently and comfortably like you’re waiting for the end of days.  

            When you two decide to move in together you get a brand new place. Her flat was too far away from anything essential, and the weekends are not meant for losing a day just to go food shopping and your place reminded you of the one that came before her. You find a nice two-bedroom place that is near a park, you plan on using the second bedroom for when you have guests over, but you never do, so it becomes a study. Everything works out well in this place, your spaghetti bolognese is better than hers, but she can make pizza from scratch. On the weekends you go through a few bottles of wine, you read together, watch movies together, consider getting a dog. After six months of living together you truly wonder, can anything ever be better than this?        

            You get to the point of time when you start thinking about marriage. On your days off you think about wedding dresses, a dog being the ring bearer, how you’d never be able to afford it. But, you decide you’ll ask her. You plan to get an irresistible diamond ring that houses a jade stone at the heart. You hide it in your sock drawer. You don’t realise she’s having an affair. 

            She urges you to sit down at the kitchen table where you’ve sat opposite her most mornings. She bites her nails and looks around as if there is an easier way to say to tell you what happened.

               “I slept with someone else,”. You don’t say anything for a couple of minutes, though it feels longer. You let it process, wondering when, where, who, like you’re learning the basics of journalism. The normal questions you think, but you’re not sure about that. Or anything, really.

            “Do you still care about me?” You ask her.        

            You leave the room before she has a chance to answer, come back with that little black box, the one that you sunk plenty of your wages into, the one you were going to put in the foundation of the house that you would build together, so it was built on the love of you two.        

            “I do, but not in the same way I used to.”          

            “Are you leaving me for them?” 

            “No, I’m just leaving you.” She says. And you wonder if that is better or worse.  

            You start writing her letters, though you never send them. You even lick the envelopes sealed and put the stamps on. They rest on your desk through the summer and crinkle as the sun dries them out. The emotions of the letters stay fresh though, you never open them because you can still remember every fucking word you wrote to her. You start drinking less, because you’ve done the research and no amount of hangovers will bring her back. One day, over lunch while talking to a close friend about her he spells it out for you clearly: “You need to stop talking about this girl. Get the fuck over it, move on.” You stutter a protest and he says “Try and fuck five new girls, when you’ve done that you won’t even think about the girl way back when.” You sit in silence, and think about what he says.

            As a result, you can start going clubbing. You never really liked the closeness of a dancefloor, but met talkative girls when you were having an anxiety attack in the smoking area. You realised that it pays to be proactive, and you’re a fair few years in debt. You meet a girl at the bar and you tell her that you like literature but don’t have time to read anymore, so it goes.        

“Do you think I’ve never read Vonnegut?” All things withstanding you take her home, or more realistically she agrees to go home with you because you’re not that bad looking and seem harmless enough. In the morning you watch her leave and she says “This is a one-time thing,”. It hurts, but it hurts you less than that the absence of joy that you’ve been feeling recently.     

            The next few lays come a lot easier, and you are almost surprised. You think that sex works like the Fibonacci sequence, the odds of you getting laid are increasing and increasing. You go to dinner with an accountant, wine tasting with a chef, roller-skating with an artist who goes down on you in the toilet of a train and you read poetry with a waitress on a beach while a violinist busks on the street nearby.           

            Eventually, you get over your heartbreak. It’s never sudden, you just think about her less and less, until one day, like food taking too long in a restaurant, you have realised you haven’t thought about her for a week. I guess I’m done, you think.

          One day on the street, you’re walking back from a farmer’s market with a bag full of vegetables like the adult you promised yourself you would never become. You don’t have to check your phone all the time, validation isn’t spiced and sponsored by a pirate, you’re just on your way through life. You see the ex, not any of the recent ones but the original one, the how do I make it all stop hurting one, with her new partner. You think you see a wedding ring, but you can’t be sure, and you realise that is doesn’t matter. You’re the same person as you were back then by name and a few other things, but you’ve moved forward. You realise that it can be fickle in relationships, and that unless a million things out of your control align, it just might not happen. You can make her like you, but you can’t make her love you.

Jay Slayton-Joslin is the author of Sequelland: A Story of Dreams and Screams (Clash Books, 2020) and Kicking Prose (KUBOA, 2014) as well as many other pieces both online and in print. He lives in Guangzhou, China with his wife.

If you are interested in learning more about Jay, you can find him on Instagram here and Twitter/X here.