“I wish it never would have come to this, Tamora. I thought we could work things out like civil people,” James tells her. They are drinking wine as they wait for their food in a classy Italian restaurant on the Lower East Side, sitting at one of the tables on the sidewalk; eating among the pedestrians, the cars, the pigeons, the rats, the helicopters, the drones, the trucks, the bikes, the e-bikes, the motorcycles, the light breeze and shade of the restaurant awning offering pleasant mitigation of the day’s striking heat.

“This is civil,” Tamora replies. Boy, does he know a damn thing about being civil? she thinks to herself. Boy, should I have just gone out to find a man to fuck in his bed just to get the score even? Then we could all live a beautiful life, revenge setting things right. Or maybe Beyoncé was right: I should wear her skin over mine, so you could finally be with your perfect girl.

“Well, you didn’t really give me a choice. I want my dog back.” Tamora starts laughing, picks up her wine glass for a sip.

In a monotonous voice, “You’re hysterical. Here I thought you wanted to actually apologize,” she takes another sip of wine, “but I also knew it would be an anomaly for you. I guess I’m just as bad as you, choosing to believe you again and again and again – even after you and your shit are all gone.” He stares at her with his lips barely parted, as though he searches for the right word, but it will never be found. “I still love you,” she blurts out: in case he had somehow forgotten all the things she ever said to him that led up to the day he came home to find all his things in the lobby of their apartment building, in case he tucked all those arguments into a nasty little pocket in his heart where he couldn’t see or hear them ever again, she wanted to remind him that she did not ever act towards him out of spiteful anger. Rather, it was a justified rage born from her survival instincts and self respect; these are two sides of the same coin. One cannot protect a life they do not revere.

James only spreads his lips apart as if to finally speak: I love you, too, running marathons across his tongue, but he clamps his mouth shut to avoid this sentiment. “I didn’t come here to get in another argument. You gave me all my stuff, but you forgot to give me my dog.” He pauses, realizing he made a poor choice. He should have appealed to Tamora’s sentimentality while it was still alive for him. “I’m sorry I lied about wanting to apologize. You wouldn’t answer my calls or texts or emails or DM’s until I mentioned that I would. And I love that dog so much,” he tells her. “Almost as much as I love you.”

She looks up from her hands, which she had been picking at on the table, and into her ex-lover’s eyes. “Fuck you,” she says. At that moment, the food arrives at the table, both of them receiving the same rigatoni dish. Tamora thanks the waiter before turning down to her food dejectedly, playing with it with her fork a moment. She starts: “You are a liar. If you loved me, you’d not have done what you did. And you would definitely not sit across from me, talking about what’s civil, while you spit profane lies at my face, all for a dog you seem to love more than me. You disgust me. How often did you buy the dog food? Or feed the dog? Or walk her? How often did you take her to the vet when she was sick even though you had to miss work? Oh, that’s right, it was me who did that. In fact, do you even know the dog’s fucking name?”

“Sadie!”

“Do you remember what that’s short for? What’s on her doggy birth certificate, James?” He loosens his tie to breathe easier, all of a sudden feeling the sweat under his armpits, now a drop sliding down his face sent from his right temple.

“I-I don’t know, Tamora-“

“Sadist!”

“What?” James spits.

“We named her Sadist, remember? We thought it would be funny,” she tells him, eyes glossed over watching the traffic and pedestrians pass by. “Excuse me?” she stops a waiter walking by their table to ask, “Can I just get a box for this? And we can get the check, now.”

“Absolutely, miss.” And he’s off into the restaurant. James somehow found time to clean his plate off during their conversation while Tamora continued to play with her full plate of food until the waiter returned with a box for it.