Frank had been living with Giada for about a month and it was not exactly turning out to be the dream he had envisioned. It had started off very nicely. Giada was lovely and her apartment was lovely and Frank had greatly enjoyed living in it with her. It was a far cry from the hellscape he used to live in with Oscar and Ramsay. For one thing, he hadn’t seen a single bug in the entire time he’d lived there. He was ready to call it perfect.
And then things started to turn slightly sideways. The apartment was still nice and Giada was still lovely, but Frank didn’t seem to fit with either, no matter how hard he tried. As time wore on, they spent more and more time with her friends and less and less time with his friends. Her friends were all lovely, like Giada, but not all that interesting. Every single one of them was either married or engaged. Frank realized he was quickly on his way to only having couple friends. They go together for brunches or for classy dinner parties where people drank in moderation and wore collared shirts. Frank didn’t want to have to wear a collared shirt to go to someone’s apartment. He only wanted to have to wear collared shirts at weddings and funerals and nothing in between.
Frank had assumed that the longer he lived at Giada’s apartment, the more it would begin to feel like his as well, but that never happened. He was never allowed to move his own things in, like his own art or his own dishes. Giada even threw out one of his dishtowels because, according to her, it was old and didn’t go with the kitchen décor. His mother had given it to him for Christmas so it wasn’t old at all and it was a green dishtowel. Frank couldn’t see how it didn’t go with anything. It was only green.
And then it occurred to him that it wasn’t actually the dishtowel, it was him. He didn’t go with anything in Giada’s life. He didn’t go with her friends, he didn’t go with the apartment, and he barely went with her. She was so polished and sophisticated. She shouldn’t have had any interest in being with him. What she really needed was someone who would wear collared shirts on any day of the week and who understood why a green dishtowel didn’t go with their white appliances.
Frank couldn’t figure out why Giada was even with him. When he really examined it, they had nothing in common and were barely compatible. She wanted to watch HGTV in sweatpants every night of the week, even weekends, and then have salad at brunch with her best friend Christine and her husband Marco because they’d just had a baby. It was at such a brunch that it finally dawned on Frank what she saw in him; he had been a fairly respectable single man when she’d met him and she wanted to be married. Giada wanted to get married, like all of her friends, and she wanted to have her own babies. She was terrified of being left behind and Frank was just a semi-attractive, reasonably good man with sperm.
Frank brought it up when they got back to her apartment (it would always just be her apartment) after brunch. She did not take it well. She cried a lot and then told him they should probably break up and then Frank was homeless. And it all happened in under an hour.
At this point, Oscar and Ramsay had already rented out Frank’s old room to some dude named Spencer, who seemed fine, but Frank generally hated, mostly because he’d displaced him from his fallback home. When Oscar had asked Frank to move his stuff into storage, Frank had been fine with it because he’d still been under the delusion that he and Giada were in love. It was no longer the case. Frank could look for a new place, but it would likely take a while and anything longer than four hours was too long at that precise moment in time. Frank only had one other option.
“Fortunately, she didn’t let you take any of your shit with you so there’s very little for you to unpack,” Sybil commented wryly when Frank turned up at their apartment with a duffle bag and a box of books. He didn’t own a tonne of clothes so that literally amounted to all the essentials he’d brought to Giada’s with him in the end. That should’ve been a sign.
“Also fortunately, Chris and Sybil are moving out,” Ye added, eating yogurt and looking disinterested. “So we will soon have a spare room that you can officially live in and pay rent for. Fair warning, I’ll be moving into Sybil’s old room when they go so you’ll be taking mine and it’s essentially a glorified walk-in closet. On the plus side, as aforementioned, you own basically nothing so you should be able to make it work.”
“And we get to keep the couch,” Suze chimed in. It was a really nice couch, which was convenient because with Chris and Sybil still living in the apartment, the living room was Frank’s temporary bedroom and the couch was his temporary bed.
The first time he saw Oscar and Ramsay after the break-up, Oscar was furious.
“You bastard!” He cried as the three of them sat in Oscar and Ramsay’s living room, their new roommate nowhere to be seen. “I told you it was too soon to move in together and now I have to live with a creepy twin.”
“What’s creepy about him?” Frank asked, rolling his eyes.
“I just told you,” Oscar returned. “He’s a twin.”
Frank rolled his eyes again for good measure.
“Thank you for your kind words of support in this trying time,” he told Oscar sarcastically.
“He’s just being overdramatic,” Ramsay said, which was a gross understatement if Frank had ever heard one. “The new roommate is fine. Sorry about your shitty luck. Although, technically he’s right and we did tell you.”
Frank shook his head and gave up. He’d find support somewhere else.
The Roehampton Chronicle 