“But Nika! Please! I’ll really find another job and start making more money!” Dima begged his girlfriend—well, now his ex-girlfriend.
“No matter what you say right now, it’s just another story to make me change my mind! But no! That’s it! I’m done! I’ve had enough!”
“What do I have to do to make you believe me?!” he shouted. “What should I swear on for you to trust me?”
“I don’t need you to swear on anything!”
“Then what do you want?”
“I want you out of my apartment! I want you to pack your things, leave your keys, and never come near me again! But since we live in a small town, that last part is pretty tough, so I’ll settle for the first two!”
“I’m not going anywhere!” he declared after Veronika’s words.
“Seriously?” she asked, surprised.
“Yes! Seriously! This is my home! We live here together! And you, in case you forgot, are my girlfriend! My beloved girlfriend!”
“Your beloved girlfriend has been asking, begging you for over a year to get a job, to earn some real money, instead of sitting at the computer day and night hoping to pull cash out of the screen!”
“But I was really trying to earn money online! It’s not as easy as it looks, Nik!”
“If you failed once! Twice! Three times! Ten times! You could have kept at it, but you also could have—no, you should have—gotten a job anywhere! As a mover, a bus driver, whatever! Just to bring something home! But instead, you just sat there tapping on your keyboard, staring at the screen! And that’s all you ever did! You didn’t even do anything around the house, Dim!”
“I’ll change, I swear! Just give me one more chance!” he went on whining.
“No! I gave you so many chances! I’m done! I’m not putting any more money into a black hole! I’m done hoping you’ll get it together and realize how hard it is for me to support both of us! And it’s a good thing my parents helped me buy this apartment, because if I was renting, I wouldn’t have managed on my own! But of course, you didn’t think about that! Or maybe you just didn’t want to think about it… Right… Why bother worrying about things you don’t like, when you have someone feeding you, giving you drinks, cleaning up after you, and paying for everything! Right?” Veronika ranted.
“But I love you…” Dima said, as if grasping at his last hope.
“And?”
“What do you mean, ‘and’? You don’t love me anymore?” he snapped, quickly switching from begging to arrogance.
“I did love you, I gave you all those chances, I asked, I begged, but how did you repay my love? Exactly! You didn’t care about my love—you didn’t just not care, you threw it away! You used it! And I, like a fool, kept loving you and believing you’d change! That you’d at least do something!” Nika replied.
“Please! Don’t kick me out! I’ll change…”
Listen, the more we talk about this, the less I feel anything like love, sympathy, or even pity for you—just pure contempt! Contempt, Dima! Stop humiliating yourself! For once in your life, be a man and take responsibility for your actions! You didn’t want to work—there’s the door! And yes! You’re only taking what you brought with you!
“What do you mean?” he asked, confused.
“I mean exactly what I said! My computer and laptop stay here! I bought those for us back when we were still ‘us’. Now, they’re just mine! And finally, I’ll be able to actually use my own things for a second or third time instead of you taking them over right away!”
“Are you kidding me? I bought the computer myself!”
“Seriously? With my money! You used my card at the store! The only thing you actually did yourself was pick out the parts—because I don’t know much about that stuff!”
“Nika, that’s not fair!”
“Take your ‘not fair’ and get out! What’s not fair is living off a girl who let you move into her place! What’s not fair is making promises you don’t keep! And what’s really unfair is acting like you’re the victim now! Everything else is totally fair!”
Dima hung his head in shame, grabbed it with both hands, and let out a desperate scream, realizing he was losing this battle. After sitting like that for a while, he finally spoke again:
“But where am I supposed to go?” he asked, trying to grasp at any excuse he could.
“How is that my problem? Didn’t you have a place to live before you moved in with me?”
“Yeah… At my mom’s…”
“Then go to her!”
“Nik, I can’t go, she’s renting out my old room right now!”
“And why should I care? What makes you think any of that interests me at all?!” Veronica finally couldn’t hold back her frustration.
“Because…”
“Say something about love and I’ll hit you over the head with something heavy!” she warned immediately.
And with that, Dima decided not to finish what he was going to say. Instead, he sprawled out on the couch, making it very clear he had no intention of leaving or packing up his stuff.
Nika wasn’t about to waste any more words on him, so instead of arguing, she went out of the living room and called the police to have them throw this freeloader out of her apartment—or take him away, she didn’t care either way. And that’s exactly what happened. Dima never heard her making the call, because she wisely went into the bathroom and turned on the cold water so he wouldn’t overhear. The connection in there wasn’t the best, but she still managed to get through.
When she came back out, Nika just started doing her own thing, totally ignoring her ex being in her apartment; and he seemed fine with that too, turning on the TV and flipping through channels, looking for something interesting. He would have loved to use any of the streaming services, but a week earlier Veronica had cancelled every subscription and signed out of all her accounts on the TV, just to cut Dima off from all the perks of living at her place.
After a while, the police arrived. They didn’t take Dima with them, but they did help Veronika get him out of her apartment. While he was still trying to find something interesting to watch on TV, she packed up her ex-boyfriend’s things, and together with his bags, he finally left her place. Nothing more, nothing less. Except—he didn’t leave the keys behind. So Veronika immediately searched online for a locksmith, called him, and the next morning he came over to change the lock on her front door.
A little over a month later, when she had almost stopped thinking about her ex, Nika was coming home from work and found Dima’s mother waiting for her in the building entrance.
“Hello, Veronika…” she greeted her shyly.
“Um… Hello, Larisa Valeryevna…” Veronika replied, flustered.
“I’ve been standing here for about three hours, waiting for you…”
“Why? What did you want?”
“It’s just that… Veronika…” she began nervously. “Can we talk in your place? Or maybe somewhere else? Because what I want to discuss…”
“What do you mean by ‘what you want to discuss’?”
“It’s about Dima…”
“And what about him? Did something happen?” Veronika asked, now a bit frightened.
After all, he used to be her boyfriend, not a stranger, and she was scared by the thought that something might have happened to him.
“How should I put this… Oh, Veronika, let’s just go inside…”
Veronika immediately unlocked the door to her apartment, barely managing to fit the key in the lock because her hands were shaking from fear of the news Larisa Valeryevna had come to deliver.
They walked into the apartment, took off their shoes in the living room. Veronika didn’t rush the woman, because the torment was so evident on her face that Veronika was actually too afraid to ask anything.
“Veronika… Here’s the thing…” she started nervously, then immediately fell silent.
“Would you like something to drink?”
“No, thank you, dear… I just don’t know how to start saying what I need to say…”
“Just say it as it is!”
“I know it was really hard for you with my Dima, that he caused you a lot of trouble and inconvenience, and also…” she trailed off again.
“Yes, that’s true! But what happened, Larisa Valeryevna?”
“Veronika, please take him back!” Dima’s mother suddenly grabbed Veronika’s hand and began to beg.
“What?!” Veronika exclaimed. “What do you mean by that? I thought something happened to him… But you came to plead for him! You!”
“What else could I do, dear? He’s gone completely off the rails! He doesn’t want to do anything! Just sits at home! Watches TV and that’s it! He doesn’t even have the will to live in his eyes anymore!”
“And what does that have to do with me?! Why do I need to know this?”
“Well, you’re the one who kicked him out! He didn’t want to go, but you called the police! For him, that was like a stab in the back, you know?”
“And it was okay to stab me in the back all the time, right? To keep feeding me empty promises and declarations?”
“But he tried for you! He spent so much time online, trying to find a way to earn money! For you!”
“Well, I didn’t feel it at all! You know what I did feel? That everything I earned just disappeared! Like throwing something into a black hole and hoping it’d eventually get filled!”
Just give him one last chance! The very last one! Call him, invite him back to your place! I know if you do, he’ll finally get his act together—without you, he’ll just waste away on my couch! I’m really worried about him, don’t you care at all? Or maybe you can just come with me right now and talk to him? You were the whole point of his life…
“Stop! I told you, your son is never living with me again, no matter how much you try to defend him! If you care so much, then you support him!” Veronika sharply interrupted the woman.
“But how can this be? He really loves you…”
“Seriously? You too? Loves me?” the girl laughed. “He only loves himself, no one else! Not you, not me, nobody! Right now, he’s just feeling sorry for himself. But I’ll tell you this—I don’t feel sorry for him at all! He’s the pathetic one! I don’t even want to see him, I’ve tried to forget about him like about wasted time, but then you show up with that sour face, first confusing me and now trying to hang a stone around my neck so I drown with your precious Dimochka! Well, I’m not drowning!” Veronika declared to her ex-boyfriend’s mother.
“Well… I thought Dima just said that stuff about you out of anger, but it turns out he was right about everything…”
“And what exactly did he say?” the girl asked, curious.
“Oh, nothing special… He just said you’re not at all how you tried to seem before, when things were good between you! As soon as things turned bad, you don’t treat the illness, you just try to cut it out at the root, not caring about anyone or anything…”
“He actually said that?” she laughed. “I didn’t expect such poetic language from your son! He’s a real poet!”
“And you’re a greedy brat who broke my boy’s heart! He loved you more than anything in the world, and you…”
“Get up and get out of here!” Veronika barked.
“What?!” Larisa Valeryevna was outraged by such disrespect.
“Should I repeat myself? Or what?”
“No, first you listen to me, and then I’ll go!”
“Oh really? So I’m just supposed to sit here and quietly let you throw dirt at me, and not say a word back? In my own apartment?”
“Why should I care where we are? Yours, mine…”
“No way, this is my apartment and only mine!”
“It doesn’t matter whose it is—it doesn’t make you a good person! In fact, the opposite! You threw such a good boy out of your place… If I hadn’t been there, where would he have gone? What would he have done? Slept at the train station? Under a bridge?”
“Yeah! And he’d have turned into a full-on troll!” Veronika laughed.
“That’s it, out you go!” Veronika grabbed Larisa Valeryevna by the forearm, but she immediately pulled away and shoved the girl so hard she lost her balance, fell to the floor, and hit her back on the coffee table.
“If you don’t get out right now, I’ll call the police and they’ll take you straight to jail—not just your crazy son!”
“Just you try…”
But Veronika was done listening to this two-faced woman. She immediately grabbed the phone from the coffee table she’d just bumped into and quickly dialed a number…
“Hello… Hi… Could you please send the police to this address…”
Larisa Valeryevna was so shocked and scared, her eyes nearly popped out of her head. She dashed into the hallway, threw on her shoes, and disappeared into the night…
“Hello, Nik, what’s up? Are you drunk or something? – came a woman’s voice on the line. – Nika!!!”
“No, not at all… It’s just that Dima’s mother just showed up, and we almost had a fight… I just wanted to scare her a bit…” the girl answered as soon as she heard the front door close behind Larisa Valeryevna.
“Ah! Got it! So, did it work?”
“Absolutely!”
“I’m glad! Want me to come over?”
“Thanks, Dasha, that would be great!”
“Alright, I’ll be there in about twenty minutes; you can tell me all about what happened…”
“I’d honestly rather forget about it than talk about it!” Veronika objected to her friend.
“One day you will forget, but right now you’re going to tell me everything!” Nika could hear the smile in her friend’s voice.
“Alright, come over…”