Breaking the Rules: The Honeybees, book 1 (2 page)

Rationality over emotion was something I’d always liked about Matt in the past, but now I hated it. It had created a stability in our relationship rather than the ups and downs I saw in so many others’ romances.
 

I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts.
Concentrate
, I told myself.
Just focus on right now.
Where could I go? Matt and I were both homebodies, and I realized with a start that I didn’t even have any close female friends anymore. In fact, the last time I’d really had close female friends was back in high school, when I’d been tight with a group of girls who called ourselves the Honeybees.
 

My parents lived in town, but I didn’t want to talk to them right now. My sister, January, was busy developing a perfume and planning her wedding, and I didn’t want to bother her. I enjoyed the company of a few of my coworkers, but we didn’t have the kind of relationship where I could go to them straight from a breakup. That was something that was supposed to be reserved for best friends. And best friends were not something I had.
 

There were just no good options. Another restaurant, coffee shop, or bakery? It sounded miserable. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts and cry. I wanted to be somewhere secure and warm and comforting.
 

The library
, I finally decided. Maybe I couldn’t cry openly there, but it was the best I could do.

I knew exactly where the closest library was, and it would be open for another hour. I started walking toward it with purpose, trying not to think about Matt. I tried to think about anything else.
 

Outside the library, a black and white mottled dog was sniffing around some plants. I loved dogs, though I’d never had them growing up. This dog was beautiful, medium-sized and friendly-looking, though I had no clue what breed or breeds he may have been.

“Hey there,” I said to the dog, and held out a hand for him to sniff. In a single movement, the dog glanced up at me, licked my hand, and returned his attention to the plants, which he was now trying to eat except that the leaves were too big to fit in his mouth.
 

I laughed despite myself, and it felt good to laugh after trying to hold back from crying for so long. “Thank you,” I whispered to the dog, grateful for the opportunity to laugh.

I glanced around then, trying to figure out who this dog was here with, but didn’t see anyone who was keeping an eye on him. And why wasn’t he on a leash?

“Are you lost?” I asked the dog quietly, who again glanced at me as he tried to gnaw off a chunk of leaf. He looked unconcerned with my line of questioning.
 

I stood there watching him, expecting his owner to appear at any moment, but no one did. He didn’t have tags or a collar around his neck, nothing that could help identify him.
 

Then in a split-second decision, the dog lost interest in the leaf and trotted off down the street. I hardly hesitated at all: rather than heading into the library as I had planned, I followed the dog down the sidewalk.
 

We walked past a small grocery and a stationery store, and when someone came out of a hair salon as we were walking by the door, the dog experimentally peeked in, ears perked, before the door shut again.
 

“They don’t allow dogs in there,” I explained to him quietly, and he cocked his head toward me before continuing his tour of the street.
 

On the next block, we walked past rowhouses with more shops down below, and when the dog stopped to sniff and then pee on a telephone pole, I waited patiently for him to finish. “Where are we headed?” I asked, but the dog trotted along without answering, and I followed close behind.
 

When the dog started out into an intersection when a car was approaching, though, I finally touched him. “Wait!” I yelled, grabbing him on both sides of his body to prevent him from darting into the road. My heart was pounding when I straightened up, hands still on his body.
 

“You can’t
do
that!” I said. The dog promptly sat and began licking at his genitals with unconcern.

“I don’t know what to do here,” I told him. “If I just leave you to wander around, you’ll probably try to go into the street again. But it’s not looking like any owner of yours is going to show up.”

The dog glanced up at me and again cocked its head to the side, as though listening. I was grateful to have a distraction from real life for these few minutes. Talking to a friendly dog was much preferable to thinking about the painful humiliation I had just experienced—not to mention the huge life changes I was about to have to go through.
 

The dog got up then and trotted away in a new direction, alongside the street it had previously tried to cross. I followed along obligingly. We passed a few people who gave me strange looks, assuming he was my dog and that I was walking him without a leash.
 

He led me into a park, where he plopped down contentedly in the grass and looked up at me, tongue hanging out. On this side of the park were picnic tables and trees, and on the other, a playground surrounded by benches.

“I’m not going to sit there,” I told him. “This dress—it’s new. I got it just for tonight.”

He just stared at me, panting.
 

Instead, I headed toward the nearest picnic table, glancing back at the dog to see if he would follow. He didn’t, and I felt a welling-up of sadness explode inside of me. Abandoned again.

Sitting down, I stared at him from several yards away, wishing he would come over to me. And then, though I wasn’t wanting to influence his path but rather to follow him in case he was going home, I called to him gently. “Here, pup!”

He jumped up and bounded over to me, as though to say, “I thought you’d never ask,” and then jumped up on the bench beside me and lay his head in my lap.
 

“Oh!” I said, touched by the affection. For a moment I wondered if I should move his head off my dress, but instead began stroking him. I wondered what we’d look like to someone passing by, a twenty-seven-year-old woman in an unseasonable, fancy peacock-blue dress, sitting alone in a park shivering with a mottled mutt.
 

“I’m so glad you found me,” I murmured down to him. “I had the worst day before you came along.” I started crying then, not the body-wracking sobs from in the restaurant, but quiet streams of tears flowing down my cheeks as I told the dog my story.
 

“I feel so stupid,” I said to him. “I thought he was going to propose. After all these years together. And then—boom. He just broke up with me. No warning. Nothing. How could he?”
 

The dog made a throaty sigh, which I took to mean he was on my side.
 

“And now I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t want to go back home tonight and see him. I don’t want to have to move out of our house. Wait—no,” I added as a ribbon of anger moved through me. “He’s the one who should move out. I’m staying put.” I liked our house.

“But I can’t stay here forever,” I continued. “I didn’t even eat all of my food, and I’m getting hungry. I wish I had a taco or something.”

At the word “taco,” the dog perked up, ears at attention, and sat up staring at me.

I laughed. “Do you want a taco too?” I asked. “Is that what you’re trying to say?” His ear twitched as he kept his alert eyes on me. “Okay, then. That’s your name now. Taco.” Content, he lay back down in my lap.
 

I told Taco everything, from how Matt and I had met our last year in college and how our lives had become intertwined, how he had been so supportive when I was searching for jobs after I’d graduated with a teaching degree, how he’d found a job as a back-end Web developer easily out of college. We’d lived apart for the first six months after graduation, but it had quickly become apparent that it made more sense to cohabitate.
 

We’d moved into a tiny one-bedroom house, and that’s where we’d been ever since. It was true that over the years we’d stopped talking to each other as much, and Matt kept to himself, preferring the company of gamers and other strangers on the Internet to most people in real life, but that was just because he was shy. We didn’t fight, though, and that was what I loved about the relationship. It was stable, steady, predictable—just like Matt.
 

“I always just assumed we’d be together forever,” I told the dog, still lazily stroking his silky fur. My leg was warm where his furry head lay, though goosebumps prickled my arms. The repetitive motion of petting him was almost hypnotic, and between getting the words out and petting the dog, I was starting to feel a little better. It didn’t matter that the dog had no idea what I was saying.
 

“I just…I just want everything to go back to how it’s been,” I said. “I’ve been working toward this for so long. I finally have a stable life. And now he’s taking that away from me. But it’s not just that.” I looked down at myself, remembering the reflection I’d seen in the glass door of Les Etoiles. “I think I let a lot of stuff go because I assumed he and I would be together. I’m overweight, and I didn’t even notice. And I don’t have friends anymore—I don’t even have anyone to talk to about the breakup. Except you, of course.” I stroked the dog’s head, thinking.

“And what’s worse…” I whimpered at the sudden memory. “What’s worse is that I realized the other day my high school reunion will be coming up in a few months. I can’t believe it’s been ten whole years. And what do I have to show for it?” I sighed heavily, and the dog shifted positions, keeping his head in my lap, and looked up at me. I looked back at him.
 

“You’re right,” I said. “I can’t just wallow. I should figure out what I need to do to get back on track.” Decisively, I pulled a small notebook and a pen out of my purse and opened to a fresh page in the book. I would do what I always did when I needed to get things in order: make a list. The only difference was that this time, it wasn’t a list of errands to run or groceries to buy; it was a list of steps I would take to get my life back in order, to return to the stability I longed for, before I’d need to face my old classmates and admit to the direction my life had gone.
 

What do I need to do to get over him?
I asked myself. Well, first off, I would need to make some new friends. In retrospect, I couldn’t believe how little time I’d spent with people who weren’t Matt over the past few years. But how does one make new friends in their late twenties?

“Join a group!” I said out loud, and the dog stared straight into my eyes as though to agreed that this seemed like a good plan. I wrote it down.
 

What next? I wanted to lose weight, maybe fifteen pounds, before the high school reunion, so I’d need to start exercising. Besides, I could definitely use some endorphin rushes in the next few weeks.
 

“And I’m going to get healthy,” I told him. He licked my hand, which I took as a sign of agreement. I wrote that down as well.

Then I thought back on times in my life when I’d been stressed or frustrated. The time after college when I’d had trouble finding a job sprang to mind. How had I distracted myself from feeling bad about myself when I was going through that?
 

Well, I’d had Matt around, for one. What else?
 

“Oh!” I remembered now. “I took a painting class at the community college.” It had been a great escape from the real world. Maybe I could find a new hobby like that again that would keep me occupied and my mind off Matt. “Start a new hobby,” I wrote in my tight, neat handwriting, reading it aloud to the dog as I did so.

“And I think my life would feel more stable and purposeful if I had something I were working toward—anything that’s a long-term project, you know?” I could’ve sworn the dog nodded.
 

I finished the list, sat up straighter on the concrete bench, and read the words aloud to the dog, who listened intently.

Sophie’s Rules for Getting Life Back on Track Before the Reunion

1. Join a group and make new friends.
 

2. Get healthy.
 

3. Start a new hobby.
 

4. Always be working toward a goal.
 

The moment I’d finished my list, I felt better. Now I had a plan of action—I just needed to implement it.
 

And then, in sudden inspiration, I figured it out. “Running!” I said to the dog. I could follow all of these rules at the same time through running. It was exercise. It was a new hobby—something I’d tried occasionally since high school but had never stuck with. And as for my goal? I could train for a 10K perhaps—maybe even a half-marathon!
 

No
, I decided.
No half-anything. If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it right.
 

“I’m going to run a marathon,” I told the mutt triumphantly.

I set down my pen, satisfied. Yes. That was it. I would get over Matt by training for a marathon. And I would join a running group to train with, and make new friends. My life would return to stability—a new structure of stability, but stability nonetheless. I would learn to be single again, would learn to be self-sufficient, would create a life I was proud to tell my former classmates about.

It was less than two hours since I’d had my heart smashed into pieces, but I had a plan. Was it foolish to think I could run a marathon when I’d never even run consistently? Maybe. But I was not one for half-measures. Starting right now, I was training to run a marathon.

And just like that, the healing began.
 

“I guess we should get you to the animal shelter,” I said to the dog. I pulled out my phone to find the nearest one, and saw for the first time that I had five texts and a missed call from Matt. My phone had been on silent since before I’d entered the restaurant, and I was glad for that now. If I’d seen those texts as they’d come in, I would have read them, and they probably would’ve brought me more pain. Now, though, I had more important things to do.