Donna found him by chance a week later, sitting on the Vista Cruiser and spinning a basketball between his hands. She had been moving boxes of her stuff back to her childhood home from the apartment she shared with Randy and happened to glance out of the window to see him there.
He cut a solitary figure, pensive and unreadable, and for a long moment she simply stood and stared, a primal feeling low in her belly and a wrench in her heart. Like a moth to a flame, her feet somehow took her downstairs, across the driveway and to him.
Eric felt her standing there, and for a moment the basketball stopped its rhythmic circles between his palms. He looked up, but didn't look at her, choosing instead to look straight ahead.
"Hey," she said.
His mouth flattened into a thin line, and the ball resumed its circular rhythm between his hands.
"Eric, please, look at me," she implored him.
He tossed the ball aside and watched as it rolled into the bushes at the side of the driveway. It was several long, agonizing seconds before he finally turned his head, eyes flitting over her as if the barest glance of her offended him.
"You disgust me," he told her quietly.
Her breath hitched into a sob, stung by the bluntness of his statement. "Eric, I—,"
He stopped her with a shake of his head. "Donna, just don't."
"But I—,"
He turned his head to look at her sharply then. "You what? You hit her, I will never forgive you for that."
Her eyes swam with tears.
"Goddammit Donna." His eyes swept condescendingly down her figure. "You're what? 5'9"? 10"? She's half a foot shorter and fifty pounds lighter for fuck's sake." He dragged a hand down his face, biting down on the wave of anger he still felt when he thought of the mark on Jackie's face. "Jesus."
"I'm sorry, I—,"
"Save it," he countered shortly, hopping off the hood of the Cruiser. "Please move out of the way, I'm gonna pick her up from work now."
"No, Eric, please." Donna's hand shot out to grab his arm.
He shook it off.
She started crying in earnest, and he warred with something in himself and finally heaved a sigh, turning to spare her a glance. "What, Donna," he said tonelessly.
"I'm sorry, Eric. I just- I love you. I love you."
He shut his eyes tight, suddenly bone-weary and tired of her antics. "Go home, Donna."
"No, please just, please hear me out," she cried, sobs hitching the end of every word.
He glanced at his watch, wanting to be with Jackie, and only out of deference for all their years as friends and neighbors, did he acquiesce and he stood and allowed her to speak.
Her pulse quickened when he made no move to leave, and despite the stony expression on his face she fell over herself in a rush to get her words out.
"I understand, I understand now. About you and me. I see that you did everything because of me, because you love me, you love us. I-I should have known then, that what you did you did for me and I see that now. I see that now, so Eric, you can stop pretending, you can stop… stop punishing me because I see that now."
He let her words fill the silence of the air around them, wondering if he should really just go and leave her to figure it all out on her own. There was a hollow in his heart that only Jackie could fill, and with the cloud of his departure looming in the horizon, every moment and every thing that he did that wasn't spent with her seemed like a gross waste of his time.
He walked around to the side of the car and pulled the door open. "Bye, Donna."
She rushed around, pushing the door close with one hand. It shut with a loud bang.
"Wait," she cried out in disbelief, "did you not hear what I said?"
"I heard."
She drew in a shaky breath. "Okay. Okay… And?"
He shrugged. "I heard you. You can think what you want, but it makes no difference to me and Jackie."
He pulled the car door open again, making to get in, and then changed his mind, opting to face her once again.
"Donna, understand this. I love Jackie. I love her in a way that I doubt you or anyone else can ever even begin to comprehend. I did love you once, but with Jackie, with what I feel for Jackie, makes me realize... Makes what love I felt for you pale in a way that is—," he broke off, shaking his head slightly to look at a point somewhere over her shoulder.
When he spoke again, his voice was lower, deeper, and filled with an emotion that he could not fully contain within himself.
"She's everything, Donna. She's my everything. She completes me. With her… I feel that I can do anything. And the thing is she just—" he stopped again with an inward chuckle, sounding almost disbelieving.
He looked back at Donna, "She just is. The amazing thing about her is that life gave her so much, but when it took it away... So brutally away...She… she never asked for it back, never lost her spirit, her capacity for giving, for loving, never asks for more. And for her I'm… enough."
He took a deep, heartfelt breath, lost in thought. "I've never been enough for anyone before. And especially now... But..." A small smile lit his face, and he continued, but it was as if he had forgotten that Donna was still standing there.
"She doesn't want more," he repeated, "while here I am… wanting to give her the whole world."
He blinked, registering her presence once again, and Donna, more than a little upset, gripped the edge of the car door tightly. Jealousy pooled and her lips thinned.
"You speak of her like you used to speak of me. And two years ago you were a boy, with a boy's idea of love. You're-you're a man now. So. So. Of course you'll feel, y-you'll think that your feelings for her are more. It doesn't mean that."
She saw him raise an eyebrow and she moved impulsively forward, talking a mile a dozen, sounding more querulous and plaintive by the minute. She refused to let him get a word in edgewise, her sole intent to bulldoze her way into getting him to break down and see sense. To see that she was right.
"You'll throw away our entire history? Years and years together? Everything we've gone through and experienced and made, together, for her?"
She wasn't much shorter than him, and it was no effort for her at all to stick her face barely an inch from his.
"Eric," she said, her voice thin and high, and standing so close that he could see the fine hairs on her cheeks. "This is insane, you know this is insane. She doesn't know you like I do. Compared to how long we've been together, it's-it's laughable."
He looked at her, really looked at her, and saw her for what she was. He thought of Jackie, her unconditional support, quiet undemanding ways, steel and grace built into one small, dark, feminine package and a sense of calm and certainty filled him.
"She is what I want," he said simply.
He stepped back from Donna, and then finally got into the car.
Donna jerked, tried to stop him, but something in his manner intimidated her enough to stay put. She stared at him, unable to recognize the man before her yet at the same time desperately wanting him to be hers.
"You-you... You're wrong," she said at last. "We've been through so much. And now when you're finally—," she broke off, wrestling with a gamut of emotions, fighting bitterness and an overwhelming sense of injustice that she felt was being dealt her.
"It makes me feel that Ja-," —her mouth wrinkled in distaste— "that she's caught a bigger fish."
He looked at her and then looked away, accepting the fact that she would never be able to see things differently.
Donna was always all about Donna, and a relationship with her would be a relationship in which she came first in everything. Love to her was like weights on scales. She gave out only what she could get back, and she was constantly readjusting the balance to make certain that they were always slightly more in her favor.
He shook his head in resignation, making sure to meet her eyes once more. "Good bye, Donna," he said, a finality in his tone that chilled her. And then after that, with a quiet sincerity, "Have a good life."
He left her standing there in the middle of his driveway, staring after him as he drove off down the road, every meter taking him further away from her and one step closer to Jackie.