"I can't believe it! I can't fucking believe it!" Warren threw up his hands in the air when they were back in the apartment.

"Seriously Warren?" Emily glared at him from her position on the couch. "Were you that eager to go that now you're so upset?"

"You asked me to leave in the first place!" he shouted, standing beside her, exasperated.

"Yes, because you wanted to leave."

"Have you now acquired the superpower to get inside my head and read thoughts that aren't even there?"

Same old fights. Same old dialogs. Some old sentences that end in exclamation marks. They had been following the same script since the three weeks Warren had come home.

"In case you don't remember, I've known you for more than two years," Emily replied in a faux-calm voice, trying to bring all her conflicting emotions under control.

Warren just glowered at her for a moment before going in and slamming the bedroom room shut. Emily closed her eyes and rested her head against the back of the couch, while he flopped onto the bed, their bed, with his legs dangling over the end and an arm on his face.

They both started to reminisce over the first time they had met. It was kind of an on-the-spot instant-effect thing for both of them. Warren was new in the city, while Emily had been living in New York City since she started college. They had met at a friend's party– Hannah, their mutual friend. Warren was looking sort of lost among all those people he didn't know, while Emily was her usual chatty, extroverted self. Like it's said, opposites attract. Both saw each other, noticed each other and Boom! got attracted.

It took Warren three minutes of Emily's steady, suggestive stare to come and talk to her. They exchanged numbers and it was only after two two–hour long phone calls that he could summon enough courage to ask her out on a proper date.

After nine dates it finally dawned on them that apparently, both had found something in each other that they had been lacking in their lives and their own selves.

Emily found steadiness, thoughtfulness, worrying and prudence in Warren, which she totally lacked. Warren found impulsive-ness, excitement and the devil-may-care attitude in her, something he had been too afraid of..., until her.

They both fit each other, as cliché as it is, and that's the realization they got one day at the movies– the day they made their relationship official and exclusive. They were twenty three then.

After a year of steady dating, Emily asked Warren to move in with her. He lived in her apartment for a month before they found another place together in Brooklyn. They had been living comfortably, peacefully, lovingly until the ‘Big, Stupid Mistake’, on the top of some other small mistakes. Sure, they had fights before that too—their clashing natures ensured— that but those normal, fights-that-every-couple-has were lukewarm. Not like the recent ones. Never like these.

The ‘Big, Stupid Mistake’ was Warren's decision to go to Monterrey for four months. Being the head of the marketing department of his company, he decided to do some extension advertising in Mexico. He was sure that Emily would support him.

But Emily kind of  didn't.

What pissed her off was the fact that he never bothered to ask her with a question mark. Instead, he came to tell her, with a full stop.

"Warren, we've been living together for eleven months. You could have respected our relationship enough to ask once, at least," she had said sadly.

"I'm asking you now."

"You're telling me. There's a difference."

"No there isn't," Warren said and rubbed her arm to placate her.

"Really? Would you not go if I tell you not to?" Which she'd never do. Emily sometimes presented people with hypotheticals that would never happen from her side. Warren called this habit 'annoying and dramatic'.

"No." He himself wasn't sure if this was a complete lie or half lie.

But Emily came around pretty quickly after her initial disappointment went away because it was for Warren's career, after all, and it was too much to expect him to make his career decisions with her permission. Yes, they were in a very serious relationship and he should have asked her as it was going to affect their relationship too, but Emily knew that it was not her place to not let him and that if their roles were reversed she would have expected him to support her too.

The real problems came after he went away. They both were depressingly miserable, more or less like Bella Swan. Okay, that's a stretch but it gives the idea. Emily continued her engineering job, Warren continued his advertising job, they always talked every alternate day, but the distance was getting to them.

Emily had always been moody but her mood swings became more intense day-by-day. Sometimes she was okay with him going, but then somedays she was sad or angry. The same went with Warren. He regretted the day he made this proposition to his colleagues, not only because of his sinking relationship but also because the trip was doing more harm than profit to the company itself.

Finally, seventy nine days later, he called Emily to tell her that he was coming back the next day.

"But it's only been about two months. Not that I'm complaining, of course, but the idea was for four months," she said over Skype.

"Was. This thing has caused us nothing but loss; I've told you that."

"It's all right. Just come home and everything will be fine. I know you'll figure out something."

Both were giddy over the aspect of seeing each other, over the aspect of bridging the figurative distance that had come between them because of the literal distance.

The moment Warren stepped in the apartment, he started to go on and on about how the trip turned out to be a fiasco and that's when he used the infamous "A Real Big Mistake'.

They both thought that everything would go back to normal now that he was back, but it didn't. Warren had to put more and more labor in work to make up for the Big Mistake and when they were ordered to work from home due to coronavirus pandemic, it got worse. They had to dedicate more effort and time into work and their schedules were so different that they didn't get to spend time with each other at all. Emily worked in the morning while Warren's shift was around evening.

Everything was hectic. Piles of crap upon piles of crap.

Warren was already feeling like everything had changed in the two and a half months of his absence and Emily felt like Warren had changed in that time.

They started to snap at each other, argue, fight, sleep on couch, until it exploded into this big, big fight, when she asked him to move out.

Two years' relationship, ended just like that. Because of the distance that misunderstanding and lack of communication can cause. Or maybe it's the other way around. The misunderstanding and lack of communication that distance can cause.

And now, after the proclamation of breakup, Warren was stuck there until ‘further notice’.

Fucking great, they both thought at last.

A/N: Hey Awesomers. Have you guys read “CALL ME BY YOUR NAME”? If you haven't do it RIGHT NOW. It's really freaking great great great great great.

Please comment your opinion on my story too.

Love,
Ray.