Four weeks later
I'm feeling lonely.
It's not all I'm feeling. I also feel angry and betrayed and bottomless disappointed. But I mostly feel lonely.
Even when Ross is there, or when I'm at Monica's like right now, I am feeling like the loneliest person in the world. It feels like a wall of glass is separating me from everyone. Like I have to live with all those emotions I have and I can't share, I can't talk to anyone about them.
There is a big gap where my heart once was and I can't even reach the people who might be able to help me. I can't reach the one person who certainly could help me but refuses to. It makes me want to scream but sometimes I think no one would hear me or understand what I am saying.
I think I'm losing my mind.
Today I took a day off from work because Molly is sick and I decided to visit my now five months pregnant friend Monica, decided to ignore the fact that Joey might be there.
For the past four weeks, I wouldn't have done this. I went only over to Monica when I knew he was at work and I still know his schedule quite well.
Molly still brings Emma over to his place three times a week. As mad as I am at him, I can't ignore or deny the fact that he genuinely cares about her, that Emma likes him and that he asked me to let him spend time with her, even though this was back when everything still seemed to be good with us.
But I know I was deluding myself back then. I was pretending I could be friends with him again as if nothing has happened, as if all those feelings I have weren't there anymore.
I suppose I set myself up for getting hurt again. But this time, I blame him completely. Because even if I was the delusional one, he was the one to throw those words into my face. I thought he was sorry for saying this. Maybe he was sorry for saying it, but he obviously never thought he was wrong.
Nothing has changed.
It feels like I was going in a circle for the last year. I'm right back at square one. And this is what really makes me angry beyond belief.
This time, we're not even pretending anymore. We avoid each other. If we can't, we ignore each other. If someone asks me why, I tell them I'm mad at Joey for not wanting me to move in with him again. If someone asks Joey, he tells them he is mad at me because I was making such a fuss about him wanting to live alone. If they want us to talk about it, we tell them we will and that we won't be mad at each other for long and that it isn't even that bad, because I still let Joey spend some time with Emma, what I certainly wouldn't do if things would be really bad between us. So far, everyone bought that.
I don't know how long they will, but for now, I don't have to explain myself.
The really stupid, the maddening thing is, I think I'm still in love with him. Or whatever it is that I'm feeling. Maybe I have some sick addiction to being in emotional pain. That would explain my coming over here today. There is no denying the increasing frequency of my heartbeat when I only think I might see him. This is also why I avoided him to my best ability lately. Because I know I can't trust myself around him. I know if he would ask me, I would forgive him in a heartbeat – like I did the last time.
I definitely need professional help.
Monica is carrying Emma around and tells her that she soon isn't going to be the only child around here anymore.
The door opens and Joey comes in. He doesn't notice me, probably because he wouldn't expect me to be here and I'm glad. I don't think he should see me struggling to breathe normally. Emma sees him and squeals happily.
"Hey, look who's here. Come to uncle Joey, sweety", he coos and walks over to Monica to take my baby from her.
Emma is already extending her chubby arms in his direction expectantly.
I'm torn between melting at seeing him being so warm towards my child and exploding with still burning anger. I go for the latter.
"Oh come on, Joe. You don't need to act as if she means something to you."
I know this was below the belt, I shouldn't have said that. But as it always seems to be the case with me and Joey, I just can't stop myself.
He freezes for a second at hearing my voice and then turns to me slowly, eyes blazing with barely controlled rage. I wish he would say something, yell at me, anything. At least that would give me the opportunity to yell back to vent some of the emotions that are starting to drive me up the wall. But he just turns around and heads for the door. Emma is screaming pitifully and I'm not that far away from screaming myself.
"Yeah, of course Joey Tribbiani. Turn your back on her, too."
He stops for a second, shoulders shaking. Then he takes a deep breath and leaves the apartment.
I take the crying Emma from Monica and try to calm her down.
"It's okay sweety, shh, don't cry. See, you just learned a lesson. Don't waste your heart on a man, sooner or later, he's gonna break it."
"How convenient that there aren't any men here right now," Chandler quips.
After a while Emma stops crying.
"Come to aunt Monica, Emma. I'll show you where little baby Bing is gonna live in about four months."
It is typically Monica to have the nursery ready five months into her pregnancy. If Ross wasn't there, I would have bought all the baby stuff two weeks before Emma was born.
Monica makes a weird face towards Chandler who just nods confirming. Looks like somebody has just been ordered to talk to crazy Rachel.
When Monica disappears behind the door of my former bedroom, I turn to Chandler, trying to prevent the impending lecture about misbehaving in front of friends.
"Look, Chandler, I know..."
"No, you don't", he cuts me off in a very un-Chandler like fashion.
"I'm aware that you have a lot of problems of your own, but it is unfair to lash out at Joey like that. He has nothing to do with it, he was just trying to be nice."
God, I wish I could tell him this has everything to do with Joey.
"Look, you probably don't know that and I guess he's gonna kill me if he finds out I told you, but he is through quite an ordeal himself."
I have to roll my eyes at this. Yeah, I bet he is.
"There was this girl..."
Well, enough is enough. "Chandler I really don't want to know anything about Joey's girls."
"Would you just listen to me for a moment, Rachel!"
I throw my hands up in mocking surrender. "Okay, if it means that much to you."
"He was involved with some girl about a year ago. From what he said he had really deep feelings for her but she just wanted him as ... well ... as her fuck buddy."
There is a roaring in my ears that drowns out everything Chandler is saying after that. This is not happening. It can't be.
"… and it killed him, so when he told me about her, I gave him the advice to end it. I guess he did, but he has never been the same since then."
No, no, NO. This can't be real.
"Do you know who she is?" I ask as uninterested as possible.
"No, he never told me. He just talked about her this one time. I figured he didn't want to talk about her anymore after the break up. But I know it is still eating at him."
I can't believe that another one of these brilliant men I've met in my life was too damn stupid to let me know about his feelings before everything was too screwed up to save it.
"When did he break up with her?"
"I don't know," he shrugs. "Must have been around the time you moved in with Ross."
I just stand there, rooted to the spot, staring unseeing out the window and trying not to scream, or to throw something against the wall, or to bite Chandler's head off.
"Oh nooo..."
Sounds like he just solved the puzzle. I have to give him credit for doing it so quickly. He probably already suspected it.
"Please Rachel, don't tell me ..."
Monica uses this moment to emerge from the nursery and whispers, "Rachel, she fell asleep. Do you want to let her sleep here for a while?"
"Yes, she does," Chandler answers for me.
He is right, though. This is my golden opportunity to talk with the stupid man in the other apartment.
After knocking on the door with the number 19 I tap my foot impatiently against the floor. Joey takes his sweet time opening up, probably because he has seen me standing out there.
"What is it Rachel?" he barks.
"I don't want to discuss that out here. Can I come in?"
For a moment he looks as if he's about to say no but then for some reason decides against being totally rude. "If you have to."
"Thank you."
After he closes the door behind me he prompts me again, "What do you want?"
"You know, Chandler just told me the weirdest story."
That gets me a dark glare from him.
"Well, excuse me Rachel, but I'm not in the mood for one of Chandler's stories right now. I just got humiliated in front of my friends."
It occurs to me that we're talking with one another for the first time in four weeks. The thought almost takes the edge of my anger.
"Just listen, it might cheer you up."
He is still glaring. "I seriously doubt that."
"It is about that guy Chandler knows, who slept with this girl. He had feelings for her, but thought she just wanted to have sex with him. So he ended it."
Joey goes from shaking with suppressed anger to standing perfectly still in one instant. His eyes squeeze shut and his whole body seems to deflate. When he looks back at me he seems smaller. Vulnerable and somehow … frightened.
"I..."
I'm not about to let him off that easy.
"There is one thing in that story that doesn't make sense though: Why didn't the guy just tell the girl about his feelings?"
He looks at me curious and I'm sure he can see the challenge in my eyes.
"What good would that have done when she didn't return them?"
I'm glad he understands what game I want to play. He invented it after all.
"At least he would have known that she didn't return them. Besides, how did he figure out she wanted just sex, anyway?"
"She told him so. She said she was looking for someone who she was comfortable with, who knows what he's doing, just to have sex with her. She said she didn't need a relationship at that point."
Yeah, I know I said that but …
"That was weeks before they even started to sleep together! Maybe she changed her mind."
"No she didn't. Also, it was a lot more complicated than Chandler will ever know."
"What was so complicated?"
"Well, she was in love with this other guy and they had a lot of history."
Oh my God, not that again.
"Well, she was in love with that other guy. Years and years ago. She didn't love that guy anymore, it was over. He should have known that."
"How could he? She was carrying this guy's baby for Christ's sake!"
We're always returning to that. In Joey's eyes, Emma is like this irrevocable prove of my eternal love for Ross. Does it make me a bad mother if I say, that as much as I love her, as much as I always wanted to have her, the reason she exists is nothing more than a coincidence, albeit a very happy one?
"He could have asked."
"He didn't need to. She made very clear what she wanted from him."
"How so?"
"She always left him right after they had sex. To him this felt like she was fleeing a crime scene or something. There was no cuddling, no spending the night, no actual 'sleeping together', just sex."
I had never considered he even wanted that, because most men don't. Even Ross was secretly doing his 'hug'n roll' trick to have his space. Well, if I'm perfectly honest, Joey had asked me a few times to stay with him but I mostly considered this as some sort of post sex courtesy, something he felt compelled to offer and didn't really mean. I should've known better. It would have been unlike him to be this insincere. Still, I had my reasons for leaving his bed.
"Maybe she hadn't wanted to give him the opportunity to tell her how bad and wrong it was, like he always did. Maybe she couldn't deal with that right after making love, because maybe she had feelings for him, too. "
This was a Freudian slip, I hadn't meant to say 'making love' but it seems to give Joey a lot to think about and it makes him defensive.
"He didn't always say that. He actually stopped saying it after the third time."
"But he never stopped thinking it, right? He always let her feel how much this situation was killing him."
"That was because he felt rejected every time she turned her back on him."
Chicken, egg. I'm starting to think that we won't be able to place the blame for that particular problem any time soon.
"He always gave her the feeling that one day, it would be over. That one day, he would be able to resist."
"He would never have been able to resist her."
"Yes, maybe", I sneer, "I guess that's why he was throwing her out of his apartment."
Now he looks angry again. "He wasn't throwing her out! He was trying to do the right thing. He was trying to get her to live with the man she was supposed to be with. He wanted her child to grow up with its father."
Oh please, who does he think still believes this load of crap?
"No, he didn't! And how exactly was he the one to know who she was supposed to be with? He just wanted her to stop messing up his life."
It feels incredibly good to finally get that off my chest.
"Even if this would've been true. What would be so wrong about that? She didn't feel about him the way he felt about her, why shouldn't he have tried to move on?"
He obviously still fails to see the point.
"At least he could have given her a chance."
"A chance for what? She had plenty of chances, she had months worth of chances to tell him how she felt but she never did. He would have loved to keep living with her if she would've said one word that this was what she wanted. But she didn't."
I refuse to believe this. I could have stopped that madness by telling him that I wanted to stay? How could he not have known that?
"Wait, wait, wait. That was a test? He made this whole thing up to test how she felt about him?"
My voice is raised almost to the level of yelling. Or maybe it qualifies as yelling already. I have to vent a years worth of pent up emotions, yelling feels real good right now.
Joey looks about ready to rip something to pieces. Probably me.
"No, he didn't! He made that suggestion because he thought that if she were to live with someone, it should be the man she would be able to love. The father of her child. Her lack of protest just confirmed what he already knew."
That has got to be interesting.
"And that would be?"
"That he was only her god damn fuck buddy!"
Seriously, if I'm gonna hear him say that one more time, I'll rip his tongue out.
"Would you just stop saying that! Because he WASN'T!"
I'm definitely yelling now. Maybe that is the only way to get through this thick skull of his. Also this way, Monica and Chandler won't have such a hard time following our conversation.
"She had feelings for him and she was devastated that he wanted her to live with that other guy," I continue a lot quieter. How can I make him believe this, how can I prove that this is the truth?
"Do you really think she would have thrown herself at him time and time again just for some meaningless sex? It wasn't about sex, it was about him."
It seems so much easier to say that when it sounds as if I'm talking about someone else. The embarrassment I feel every time I even so much as think about my shameless behavior is a bit easier to deal with that way. Not that I wouldn't do it again if given the chance. I would, I wouldn't be able to help it, he does that to me. It is like a force of nature.
His reaction makes me realize very painfully how much sooner I should have informed him of that particular fact. He didn't know. He clearly didn't know any of this. How could he not know? On the other hand, how could he? I've never told him.
He stares at me disbelieving for a while then shakes his head and runs his hand through his hair. After a few moments of contemplating he asks,
"Then why didn't she say something? Anything would have put him out of his misery. It would have made him the happiest man on earth."
My heart hurts as if it's squeezed by an iron fist. I had wished to hear that from him, fantasized about a moment where he would say something like this to me for almost a year now. To realize it is partly my doing that it never happened makes me want to kill myself.
"She was scared," I admit barely audible. He steps a bit closer to me and looks at me intently.
"He ... ", he shakes his head and starts again, "I was scared too, Rachel. I never felt that way about any woman before. I was ... I was terrified."
I remember the moment I heard him say that in that exact tone of voice, one year ago. I remember that so vividly, because this was the moment when I knew that I felt so much more for him than just friendship.
I can't believe we discovered those feelings at almost the same time and kept them locked up for so long. No wonder we were going nuts.
He takes my hand and I have to close my eyes when I feel his skin on mine. It still happens. This thing where I feel like a heap of churning emotions just from being touched by him. I can already feel tears threatening to fill my eyes.
"It probably doesn't make any difference anymore but for what it's worth, I am still in love with you Rachel."
He loves me? We were talking about 'feelings' and now he says he's in love with me? He still is after everything that happened? And why does that make me so deliriously happy? One would think after all the things he said to me, after being mad at him for weeks, after vowing to myself to never get weak like that again, it shouldn't affect me at all. But it does.
Big time.
"I guess I always will be. I mean, I've tried to move on. I dated other women, but I could hardly bring myself to kiss them let alone ..."
Let alone what? Sleep with them? If he thinks I'll buy that he hadn't slept with one single woman for ten months, he can start to think again.
"You didn't sleep with any of those women?" I ask incredulously. We better clear that one up right now. We have used up all the possibilities for misunderstandings for a lifetime.
"I couldn't. I know it sounds pathetic and silly, but just kissing them felt wrong somehow."
The big question is, why would he lie about this?
"Besides, after having had the best sex of my life with you, why would I even bother with anyone else?"
Wow, that really is the truth. Joey is a terrible liar he wouldn't be able to go through with a lie this big without giving it away somehow. That means…
"You really love me."
This is more a statement than a question. It is disconcerting how much it means to me that he didn't sleep with other women after me. If anything, the two of us were really 'on a break', there wasn't even a relationship to begin with and still he was faithful. The one thing no one would've expected of Joey Tribbiani. Maybe this was one of the fears I always had about being in love with him. That he would sooner or later hurt me the way Ross did. Because he was Joey, the womanizer, and you supposedly can't change a man like him. I remember Ross' words when he tried to justify what he did. 'I don't cheat. That's not me. I'm not Joey.'
Well, looks like both of them proved that one wrong.
Funny thing is, all my fears of getting hurt again had obviously led directly to me getting hurt again. Now I can't stop the tears anymore.
"Yes, I do. I do love you. Hey what ... Rach, what's with the tears? I think you are over this whole 'crying all the time because of the pregnancy' thing?"
I sniffle a bit more and smile through my tears up at him to show him that I'm happy. He loves me. Me. He was never in love with any of all those other women, but he loves me. I am the One for him.
All the feelings I ever had for him and that I thought dead and buried come rushing to the surface again, demanding to be acknowledged right now. I'm going to tell him something I should have told him a long time ago.
"It was never the pregnancy, Joe."
"What?"
"It was all you. When I cried all the time, when I couldn't keep my hands off you. That wasn't because of the pregnancy. That was because of you. Because I was so in love with you. And I was so afraid to admit it, even to myself, but I'm not anymore. I am in love with you."
He stares at me wide eyed, as if he doesn't get what I just told him.
"I love you, Joey."
When I see how his eyes fill with tears, how he smiles and looks just so unbelievably happy I want to kick myself for not telling him sooner, for not telling him the first time I felt it, all those months ago.
"I love you." It feels so good to finally say that to him and I'm going to say that the whole night if that's what it takes to make up for all the times I should have said it and didn't.
"I love you."
He cries openly now and it occurs to me that I've never seen him cry like that before. His knees give way under him and he sinks to the floor sobbing uncontrollably. I want to kiss him, make it better somehow, but I think this was one of our problems before. I always cut him off with kisses when he tried to say something. I'm not gonna make that mistake again.
xxxxxxxxx
tbc
