We've moved onto whiskey, after many happy hours, by the time he says he thinks there are a few serious conversations we need to have.
"Don't fuck it up," he tells himself, he tells me. It's cliche at this point, a phrase that the men I meet say to themselves, they tell me, needlessly: I'm usually the one who fucks it up, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes deliberately.
Sometimes I'm the one sending unsolicited, train-of-thought emails, desperate to find the right combination of words that will bring me the attention to ease the crazed panic of losing at love.
Sometimes I'm the one reading about the planned proposal I blew off, relieved I said something to avoid having to say yes for the moment and no for the lifetime.
There was a ring picked out and families were alerted, both of the times this has happened to me.
I'm squirming, twisting back and forth on the bar stool, alternating glances at the rugby game on the television and the rows and rows of amber and gold and clear courage when I tell him, "Well, I can't stop thinking about you, and I want to spend all my time with you, and," I pause.
I sip my Maker's.
I look him in the eye.
I look back at the bottles.
"This is hard for me."
He knows.
I turn to face him.
"I'm totally falling for you."
He smiles and leans in, and kisses my cheek, and presses his lips to my ear, and says, so low I'm not sure I hear it right, "I love you, too," and we're falling in love at the end of the bar in the pub where, several months prior, the ex-boy realized that he needed to marry me, and now I'm the one who got away, and now I am gone.