“You look fantastic by the way,” he said giving a charming smile.
“Thank you. You look good too,” I replied. “Your parents seem nice by the way.”
“Oh,” I gave a fake laugh. “Yeah, they’re alright I suppose.”
We started minor chit-chat after that, it felt a little forced. I was happy when the food arrived and we had something new to talk about, i.e. food and how it tasted, which actually led us on to other related subjects like the weirdest things we’d ever eaten’ and what people eat around the world.
I only managed about a third of my serving, I wasn’t feeling so hungry. I was mainly sitting there wondering why I was in fact sitting there? My mum’s words were going through my head and Christine’s comment about never settling for less, plus Chris’s and Lisa’s advice about having fun. But was I having fun?
I looked over at him and asked myself loudly in my head, is he the man for me? The answer was pretty straight forward and loud, the answer was no.
“What’s wrong Alex? You’re staring at me, and you don’t look happy?”
I looked down at my napkin knowing what I had to do and knowing I would inevitably hurt him. I couldn’t quite believe that I was about to break it off with this amazing guy. Had this been a month ago and I had seen his ’file’ so to speak, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but much had happened the last few weeks and I couldn’t ignore that. It wasn’t fair to him either.
“Look Dave.” I forced myself to look at him. “You know how I said that it’s complicated, what I’m going through right now.”