“Oh, Ryan, you’re so… practical,” she’d say, when I didn’t want to spend five hundred dollars on a bottle of wine nobody could pronounce.
“Ryan’s cute,” she’d tell people, like I was a dog someone had rescued. “He tries so hard.”
Once, at a holiday dinner, she’d introduced me to someone as Jenna’s “little project,” and when I stared at her, she’d blinked innocently and said, “What? I mean it in a good way.”
The truth was, Melissa didn’t dislike me because of anything I’d done to her. She disliked me because I represented something she couldn’t control.
Melissa had been married once. For years, she’d worn that marriage like a badge, like proof she’d made the right choices. Then her husband left. Three years ago, he packed his things and walked out, and Melissa never quite forgave the world for letting it happen. She didn’t talk about him unless it was to paint him as a villain, but you could feel the bitterness in everything she did. A kind of rage that had nowhere clean to go, so it splashed onto everyone around her.
Especially me.
She’d decided men were a problem. Not in the empowering, “I don’t need anyone” sense. More like, “Every man is trash and I’m going to make sure they know I’m above them.”
And since I was the man Eleanor liked, the man Jenna loved, the man who kept showing up and refusing to be chased off… I was the perfect target.
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