The Break-Up Clause by Niamh Hargan

Chapter Forty-Four

If it were a film, the day would go by in a montage – and, somehow, the whole thing does kind of feel like a film to Fia. They go to the little hardware store in town to choose the paint, taking a wander through some of the other shops while they’re there. It seems only sensible to pick up a few basics in the grocery store, to treat themselves to an ice cream cone each. Benjamin grabs her hand at some point and never lets it go, and part of Fia actually hates how good it feels. She hates that she feels somehow validated, in other people’s eyes, just by presenting as part of a pair.

They come back to the house and get to work, making rapid progress in the small space. Again, there’s something a bit aggravating, in principle, about that – about the fact that a task really does turn out to be so much easier when shared between two.

‘What do you think?’ she asks, once the first coat is done, and they stand together regarding their handiwork.

Benjamin has a cold drink in one hand, and his other comes to rest lightly at the juncture of her neck and shoulder.

‘I think … I hope we don’t die of fume inhalation tonight,’ he replies, and in this moment, his fingers pressing against her skin, Fia forgets all analysis of couple-privilege in modern society. She just doesn’t know how to feel anything but happy.

Post-dinner, they’re settled on the porch, a bottle of wine between them. Fia pads into the kitchen, taking care where she steps in her bare feet. Properly re-sanding the deck, Benjamin tells her, is another job on his to-do list. She re-emerges with two bowls of ice cream, having picked up a pint earlier, and she hands one to Benjamin wordlessly.

His eyes brighten at the sight, and it feels nice, being able to offer him this small surprise, being able to take care of him in this small way.

‘Twice in one day, I know,’ she says. ‘But it’s basically medicinal.’

Temperatures here are probably not one bit lower than they were in Manhattan. If anything, it might even be hotter. Hopping in the shower earlier, Fia was actually grateful, in the circumstances, for the periodic bursts of cold water.

‘Works for me,’ Benjamin says, and when he tugs at her forearm, somehow she knows instinctively what he wants. She leans down for a kiss that’s, respectively, thank you and you’re welcome.

The last of daylight has faded by now, but the heat hasn’t. Benjamin’s old plug-in fan is still whirring, its lead trailing out onto the deck from the living room. Fia can hear cicadas buzzing in the distance, too. For whatever reason, as she sits back down, she wonders briefly what it might be like here in winter.

Different, for sure. But she can imagine loving that, too. A fire in the grate in the living room and red wine instead of white, jazz in the background instead of nineties R&B. In the privacy of one’s own fantasies, it is perfectly possible to become a jazz lover.

‘So, here’s a question for you,’ she says, mouth half-full of Häagen-Dazs. ‘That summer at Camp Birchwood. Did you … I mean,’ she falters, feeling suddenly unsure about what she’d envisaged as merely a piss-take. Nonetheless, having started, she must find a way to finish. ‘You didn’t, like … have feelings for me back then or anything, did you?’

What, she wonders frantically, if he actually says yes? What if he has been pining for her, for almost a decade, everything he’s ever done a manifestation of a love she’s been too blind to see? But—

‘No,’ Benjamin replies frankly, with not so much as a blink of hesitation, and the relief of it is such that Fia laughs out loud.

‘I mean, obviously I thought you were unbelievably, like, borderline unfairly gorgeous,’ he continues, and for a brief second, Fia would swear she can see a bit of colour rising to his cheeks. Or might that be her own cheeks? In any event, he’s not done.

‘Irritating, though,’ he adds wickedly. ‘Very, very irritating.’

‘Well, back at you,’ she replies, and then she just can’t resist. ‘What about now?’

‘Same,’ he says, and she makes a face at him, spooning another generous helping of ice cream into her mouth.

‘It’s a good job we’ve got Susan Followill on the case then really, isn’t it?’ she says blithely.

‘Thank God for her,’ he agrees, extending his glass towards Fia.

She clinks hers against it in turn. Should it feel so easy to joke about this? She doesn’t know or, at the present moment, care.

‘Although …’ Fia lets her eyes span the modest surroundings, with a little gesture of flourish. ‘To think: of all this, I might have been mistress.’

‘That’s a Pride and Prejudice reference,’ she tells him, when he just smiles vaguely in response.

He brushes it off, all bluster. ‘I know.’

She lets out a peal of laughter, prodding whatever part of his leg she can reach with her foot. ‘Bullshit – you didn’t know!’

‘Okay, I didn’t know,’ he relents straight away, not trying to hide it in earnest. ‘Honestly, I still don’t really know. I’ll google it.’

‘Do that, Benjamin,’ she says indulgently. ‘You have to be willing to put in the work, you know? Educate yourself.’

For a minute, there’s quiet between them, the playlist in the background tailing off as they each eat their ice cream, sip from their wine – it’s a pretty unusual combination. But neither of them is complaining.

‘I bought this place ’cause of my dad, really,’ Benjamin says then, into the silence. ‘In a manner of speaking. He died four years ago.’

The suddenness of this information, the simplicity in Benjamin’s delivery of it, somewhat takes Fia’s breath away. She has just about managed to open her mouth in reply when the expression on his face, the slight flinch in his upper body, stops her.

In that second, she can see that he doesn’t want sympathy – or, at least, not the outward expression of it, not platitudes he’ll only have to find a polite response to. He’s probably heard plenty of those already.

‘He had a brain tumour, and it was slow, and just … yeah, hard to watch. We did get to go on some good trips, have some good conversations. We sure read a lot of books together, towards the end.’

Fia manages a bit of a smile, her mind conjuring the stack in the living room just inside.

‘People say all that should be a comfort. And I guess it is, sort of. But, still, I don’t think I’m ever going to get over it,’ he says quietly. ‘Not totally. My parents spent every dime they had looking for a cure – clinical trials, experimental treatments, the whole thing.’

The next logical statement – that none of it worked in the end – goes unsaid. Fia feels the weight, the finality, of it, nonetheless.

‘I did end up getting a big life insurance payout, though, when Dad finally passed. Hence law school. Hence this house. And it’s so hard to process, knowing that certain things – like, good things – probably wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t died.’

Fia wishes she had something helpful to say in response to any of this, some sort of wisdom to offer. She doesn’t, though, so she just nods, reaching out to lace her fingers through his.

‘He was a lawyer, too,’ Benjamin continues, and if Fia didn’t already know, instinctively, that it is difficult for him to really open up about his life, then the somewhat stilted tone of his voice would tell her. ‘My dad. He was a public defender.’

‘Wow, how’d that go down with your mam?’ Fia asks, chuckling lightly. It almost sounds like the beginning of a joke. A public prosecutor and public defender walk into a bar …

‘Well, it was a huge practical nightmare, obviously – they were both constantly having to turn down cases the other one was already involved in. But, in terms of how they handled it, like, between the two of them … I don’t know. I think, ultimately, they felt like they cared about the same thing, and they were just coming at it in different directions.’

‘Must’ve made for some lively dinner table chat,’ Fia says.

He smiles. ‘Oh yeah. Neither of ’em were exactly the type to back down from a debate, that’s for sure.’

‘Now I know where you get it from.’

‘Mmm, but what’s your excuse?’ Benjamin tosses out, and they share a brief smile before he gets back on topic. ‘You know, one thing I’d say about with my mom is that any time she was campaigning … I don’t think even she would disagree that the whole circus made her a little crazy. It would probably make anybody a little crazy. But she never asked my dad to quit, even when it would have been a lot better for her if he had.’

‘That is pretty cool,’ Fia murmurs in reply. She’d like to meet this woman, she thinks. She’d like to have met Benjamin’s dad, too. Her own parents’ relationship has always – at least as far as she’s witnessed it – been harmonious, even-keeled. The idea that there could be conflict between a couple, a bit more fieriness but no less love … that’s intriguing to her.

‘The amount of people who sent letters after he died – clients he’d helped over the years, their family members … I still have them all. They’re here actually, in the closet upstairs. Anyhow, that’s why I’m in law school, I guess,’ Benjamin says. ‘I want to do medical law, if I can.’

Fia’s expression shifts in surprise. ‘What does that involve?’

‘Depends if I start off at a firm or go straight to some kind of public body. I’d lean towards the latter, but working for more equitable access to medicines and healthcare … that’s basically the goal. Those are the kind of cases we take at the clinic at Columbia. I know, it’s all very like “Daddy issues”, “psychiatry 101” or whatever, but … yeah.’

And, of course, there was a time when Fia would have been all too ready to pounce on any hint of worthiness in him, any hint of naivety. In the circumstances, though, she finds she’s not one bit inclined to make fun.

‘I think you’ll be great at that,’ she says, and what’s more, she means it. ‘I’m sure the partners at ZOLA will be very sad not to have wooed you to the dark side, though.’

He chuckles. ‘ZOLA’s not the dark side. I don’t know why I was such an asshole about that, at the beginning. I guess I was just insecure and—’

‘I get it,’ Fia interjects. She doesn’t want to rehash all that now. It feels like they are so, so far past it. ‘Didn’t you say it was your mam who really wanted you to try corporate law?’

He nods. ‘I think she actually is worried about Daddy issues. And I think she just sees it as an easier option somehow – better earning potential, obviously, but also just, like, less emotionally taxing than a lot of other practice areas. Everything’s hard in its own way, though, isn’t it? People at ZOLA are working at an insane pace, on crazy-complicated stuff. And most people there are pretty nice.’

Fia would probably agree with him. American corporate culture is terrible, but the majority of people involved in servicing the culture know this all too well. In other words, they themselves are fine.

‘You don’t think it was a total waste of time then? This summer?’ she asks.

Where their hands are joined, he scratches a fingernail down the length of her palm playfully. The sensation makes her squirm, even as she grins along with him.

‘Not a total waste of time, no,’ he says.

‘I meant in terms of the actual job!’

‘No. If nothing else, I’ll need the reference. Quickest way to get hired is always for it to seem like somebody else wants to hire you. And if the “somebody else” is a firm like ZOLA, then … all the better.’

After that, Benjamin talks and talks. And how long has it been, since Fia’s heard a man talk and talk and only wanted more of it? In fact, this might have never happened before. As she gobbles up every detail he offers her about his family, his future plans, some part of her brain thinks back to that night in A&E, when she was the one feeling chatty. Perhaps she needed to be there, in Dublin, in order to tell him everything that she did that night – the things that make her feel most vulnerable. Perhaps he needs to be here. That thought – the fact that he brought her to this place at all – makes her feel kind of … honoured? Would that be too cringeworthy a word? It does feel fairly cringeworthy. She will have to figure out some other way to put it, when she tells Annie and Kavita.

But then, really, she knows she’ll never tell Annie and Kavita any of this. This conversation – maybe this whole weekend – feels sacred. Just for them. Fia’s roommates, right this moment, think she is visiting a friend in New Jersey.

By the time she and Benjamin retire to that one bedroom, that one bed, it’s been an incredibly long day. Nonetheless, they both know what’s about to happen. Fia feels, in fact, that she cannot wait a single second longer for it to happen, and it occurs to her that this is how a person in such a situation should always feel. As she and Benjamin gravitate towards each other in the semi-darkness, mouths finding one another, it is the most perfectly obvious thing.

They kiss more languidly – more deeply, deliberately – than they ever have before, taking their time, making this last. When he runs his hand along her sundress, from the curve of her breast down to her hip, she shivers despite the heat.

‘Does this thing have a zip?’ he murmurs. ‘Or buttons or …?’

‘No, you just pull it off,’ she says, and she watches him swallow.

‘Oh.’

She looks up at him, and even a week ago, she couldn’t possibly have imagined it would be this way between them. She could have imagined frenzy, passion, fun, but she couldn’t have imagined there’d be tenderness, too.

A smile tugs at her lips. ‘So, pull it off.’