Eat Your Heart Out by Katie Boland

safe again, but when he looks down at his hands, they’re trembling. He rests them on his knees under the table, and when he looks away from them and up again, Grace is staring at him.
    â€œThat’s fucked, Sam. If you aren’t grounding a relationship on love, then why do it at all? Maybe people are not meant for relationships or monogamy. My parents aren’t happy, your parents aren’t happy. What the fuck is everyone doing?”
    â€œSettling? Probably settling?”
    Silence settles between them, but no one in the bar seems to notice. Strangers speak louder than before.
    Then Sam looks at Grace, exactly the way she wants to be looked at, but she can’t see it.
    â€œOh my God, there’s this fucking lunatic in Chicago, near my building, and every day he would call out to me, ‘Sweetieface! Sweetieface! You’re such a sweetieface!’ Usually, I’d ignore him, or wave, or give him the finger, but finally I was like No, this guy talks to me every day. He looks harmless, right? So I go up to him, and I say, ‘Hi! I’m Grace,’ and he says, ‘Hi, I’m Mark or Dave’ or something, I can’t remember his name.”
    Sam knows this is a story she’s wanted to tell for weeks. It’s rehearsed. She saves stories like this. She doesn’t want to tell them to the wrong person, looking stupid or crazy, so she’s waited, until she’s drunk with someone who doesn’t scare her.
    For someone who is so interesting without effort, he’s never met anybody more terrified of being plain.
    â€œAnd it’s fucking freezing out, right? This is, like, two weeks ago, so I ask him if I can buy him a coffee and then we start talking a little, and he says to me, ‘Sweetieface, there are two types of people in this world. There are people who play it real safe and never go for what they want, they might not even know what they really want. Then there are the people who know what they want, who feel it burning so much inside them, so that they have no choice but to just go out and get it.’ Then he goes, ‘Usually, they don’t get it, but they try. So there are people who try and there are people who don’t try. The people who don’t try, they look like they win because they don’t obviously lose. But the people who try and lose, they win. Because they’re brave.’ And it really made me think, you know? Maybe it’s not men and women. Maybe it’s brave and not brave.”
    â€œYeah. Which one are you?”
    For a moment everything is stripped from her face.
    â€œI feel like I’m brave, but I don’t know. I’m scared shitless a lot of the time. What are you?”
    He’s not brave, and he knows it.
    â€œI want to be brave.”
    Sam allows himself, for the briefest of moments, to touch her hand. He holds it gently at first, then tighter.
    â€œI’m hammered,” she says. “Let’s smoke.”
    â€œYou don’t smoke,” he says, not looking away.
    â€œI smoke when I’m drunk. Come on, Dad, let’s smoke.”
    Grace and Sam stand outside. It’s cold, and the street is buzzing with the feeling that exists only at Christmastime. It’s the hope that change is around the corner, good change, underscored by the nostalgia of all that hasn’t changed, all that will never change. Colourful Christmas lights shine on a tree above them. Tinny sounds of a radio carol float from some joint across the street.
    It’s good to be home, thinks Sam.
    Grace takes her first real drag, and then can’t breathe.
    â€œI told you, you don’t smoke!” Sam says, laughing.
    â€œFine, but it’s still fun,” she says, coughing.
    Grace leans on Sam, unable to keep her balance. Sam thinks it’s the fresh air, or the cigarettes, or both, that’s made everything go to her head.
    â€œSa-a-am, I’m cold,” she slurs.
    Grace goes to