The Reunion

Jen was fine with that, or at least she said she was. She wanted a curry, but Conor fancied a pizza. It was as simple and trivial a matter as the choice of menu. They bickered about it a bit, until Jen said, fine, OK, pizza, and went downstairs to order it.
    It should have been over then, it wasn’t a big deal. Only when the pizza arrived, she sat there, plate on her lap, then took one bite and set it aside, her face hard as granite, jaw clenched. She was fuming. It was ridiculous. He said so.
    ‘For God’s sake, Jen, do you want me to call out for a biryani for you? Is that what you want? I’ll do it! Christ, it would be preferable to sitting here looking at you with that face on.’
    ‘Just forget about it, OK?’ she said, getting to her feet and taking her plate into the kitchen. She stood there at the counter, her back to him, as though she couldn’t bear to look at him.
    ‘How can I forget about it, with you standing there, I can almost see the steam coming out of your ears!’ He laughed. ‘You’re being ridiculous, Jen, it’s just a bloody pizza.’
    She turned to look at him, pure hell in her eyes, and he wished he hadn’t laughed.
    ‘It is not. About. The bloody pizza!’ she yelled and he ducked as a slice of the offending foodstuff came hurtling right at him. It landed tomato sauce-side down on the sofa. He could feel his mouth fall open; he was astonished, he’d never seen her behave like this, so petulant, so childish.
    ‘Jesus, Jen, what the hell is wrong with you?’
    And then she burst into tears, which really got his back up – he couldn’t stand it when girls did that, behaved badly and then cried to make you feel bad. That was Lilah behaviour, it just wasn’t like Jen. He strode past her into the kitchen, not reaching out for her or trying to comfort her, grabbed a cloth from the counter and returned to clean up the mess.
    ‘It’s not about the pizza,’ she was sobbing, ‘it’s not about that.’
    ‘Well, tell me what it is about then, for God’s sake,’ he muttered, scrubbing furiously at the sauce stain on the sofa, grinding the mess into the fabric. ‘I’m not a bloody mind reader.’
    And then she went off on this unbelievable rant; it came out of nowhere, he could scarely believe what he was hearing.
    ‘It’s about you,’ she cried, ‘always getting your way. No matter what the issue, from deciding what we’re having for dinner to deciding where we’re going to spend Christmas, when and where we’re going travelling, when we’re going to get married, how many bloody children we’re going to have, it’s all about you.
Everything
is about you. I feel like I don’t have control over anything any more. I feel like your bloody wife!’ She spat the last word at him, stormed out of the room and up the stairs, slamming the bedroom door as hard as she could.
    He sat there, stunned. It wasn’t just the unfairness of it, it was the vitriol. His bloody wife? She felt like his
bloody wife
? As though that were something abhorrent. He picked up his plate with its half-finished pizza slice and carried it with shaking hands to the kitchen, dumped it in the rubbish bin. He couldn’t eat another thing, could barely swallow. He stood there for a moment, hands gripping the kitchen counter, and felt his shock turn to anger.
    He stormed up the stairs and flung the door open, the handle smashing into the bedroom wall. She was sitting on the bed, looking out of the window. She didn’t look round, didn’t even flinch.
    ‘I thought you wanted to be my bloody wife,’ he said, trying his best to keep his voice low and even. ‘I thought you wanted to have my bloody children. I thought you wanted me, to be with me, to marry me. Now you make it sound like a prison sentence.’ She didn’t say anything, still didn’t turn around. Silence stretched out. But as he stood there in the doorway with his hand against the frame, steadying himself, anger falling away, he felt desperately sad. He felt afraid.
    ‘Do you not love me any more, Jen?’ he asked her, but he couldn’t bear to hear the answer, so he turned quickly away, closing the door behind him. He grabbed his coat in the hallway and left the flat.
    She was in bed when he came home, after the pubs had shut. Her eyes were closed, but he was pretty sure she wasn’t sleeping. He slipped into bed and lay beside her, his eyes fixed on the tiny mole between her pale shoulder blades, that place he loved to kiss. He willed her