According To Tara's Statement

Romantic comedies are bullshit. Don’t distill those ninety-minute lies into dating advice.

Instead of slipping my fingers into warm, silky panties, they dangled below cold metal handcuffs. I watched the sun rise in the back of a cop car, covered in ketchup, clutching a rose like a deranged Bachelor contestant.

As the officer took my statement—just hearing my own words out loud—I realized how catastrophically stupid this idea was.

“Thomas Feeney,” the officer said, in the tone of a man whose breakfast was getting cold. “Witnesses report someone matching your description acting erratically outside Jack’s Pharmacy around nine last night. Early twenties, six feet, average build, jeans, white shirt… and a toque. In the middle of June.”

He sighed, readying his notebook and pen. “Care to walk me through what happened?”

“I was having drinks in the pub at the end of the strip mall,” I tried to explain.

Cracking billiard balls and psychedelic rock drowned out the mindless chatter of nameless faces. Overhead, 300 watts of cold light washed over the stained green felt as Jameson eyed the eight-ball. He ran the pool cue through his fingers, delicate and steady as a concert cellist, and then gently tapped the game winner into the corner pocket.

“Suck it, bitch!” Jameson yelled at me.

I ignored his love language, pulled the phone from my jeans pocket, and the screen lit up like a warning flare. Three words stared back at me—well, one word and two letters—that ruined everything.

“Where R U?”

A text message from Tara—the blonde, bob-cut, dream girl who, for reasons unknown, agreed to date me. Although being with her often felt like standing in the Titanic’s crow’s nest, bracing for icebergs carved from mood swings and weaponized silence. In those moments, I would’ve killed to be Jack and Rose on the bow—you know, the part before the freezing death spiral.

Jameson smirked while re-racking the balls, blissfully unaware I was only seconds away from needing a change of pants. I hid my phone under the table and typed like a man diffusing a bomb.

“Hanging out and playing pool just like I told you,” I text back.

My notification chime exploded with the uneven frenzy of microwave popcorn. Tara rapid-fired messages about the nightclub, the dancing, and how I ditched her for that quote, “jerkoff creep named after his mother's coping mechanism.”

Jameson beamed with his patented look, equal parts authority figure and drunken prophet. He planted the pool cue like a wizard's staff, as if he were about to conjure up the wisdom of the universe.

“Tara’s mad at you again,” he said, not bothering to pretend it was a question.

I refused to give him the satisfaction of being right, so I leaned into the drink menu like it was a Playboy centrefold and I was thirteen again.

“You know what your problem is?” Jameson barked.

We locked eyes. I raised a warning finger. “If you say what I think you're going to say, I’ll be very annoyed.”

“Leverage!”

My palm sprang from the table like a catapult and slammed into my forehead. “It’s always leverage with you,” I snapped.

“Hold on,” the officer cut in, raising a hand like it was a traffic stop. “Leverage? I’m assuming we’re not talking about the business-school kind.”

“Not exactly,” I said. “He meant sleeping with someone behind Tara’s back. Jameson thinks relationships are more like a hostage negotiation. His idea of a breakup strategy is being able to say, ‘Cool. Whatever. I already had sex with another woman.’”

The officer blinked at me—once, slowly—then told me to continue.

Jameson had dropped the pool cue and was now flailing his hands like an orchestra conductor mid-meltdown. “What do you even see in this girl?” he demanded.

The first thing that flashed through my panic-stricken mind was: she doesn’t have a penis. Strong start. Then came a jumble flash of her backhanded compliments, defensive shrugs, and that vague memory of her smiling at me without pity.

“She’s the only girl who’ll talk to me for more than two minutes,” I admitted. “I find that to be an attractive quality.”

Our philosophical debate was cut short by another phone ping. A single, lonely chime—somehow louder than an air raid siren in my skull.

The text was one sentence long: Be here in FIVE or we’re done.

Suddenly, the room felt ten degrees hotter.

I’d never considered myself an athlete, but in middle school I ran the hundred-metre dash in eighteen seconds. Based on that decade-old achievement and the beer buzz hijacking my brain, I was suddenly convinced I could breeze through twenty city blocks and shatter a world record.

I threw back the rest of my pint, stood up with the swagger of a debate team captain who just discovered espresso, and declared, “I’m going to save this relationship.”

As I sprinted to the front door, Jameson's muffled voice chased after me, “Have sex with her mom for leverage.”

The night air slapped me in the face as I burst onto the sidewalk. The streetlights stretched ahead like an airport landing strip, and I was clear for takeoff. I ran faster than I’d ever run—for about fifteen glorious seconds. Then my stomach twisted; the six beers and Hawaiian pizza reacted like a school-science-fair volcano. I staggered toward the pharmacy door and erupted a foamy, tropical disaster on the pavement.

“That’s a partial explanation,” the officer said, scratching his head with his pen. “But witnesses reported a man outside the pharmacy flailing his arms and yelling at himself.”

“Yeah,” I said. “After puking, I walked straight into a spider web.”

The officer scribbled something in his notebook, then gave me a circular hand motion—the universal sign for continue, please explain how this got even dumber.

An Olympic-style speed walk and two cigarettes later, I barged into the nightclub—only twenty-seven minutes too late. Good thing my stomach was already empty, because the smell of sweat, fog machine, and regret would have finished the job.

Under the sweeping lights of the dancefloor, I spotted Tara’s best friend, Kimmy. She was straddling a tall stranger, a man with long dark hair and the expression of an android running on battery-saving mode.

“You’re a big fat jerk!” Kimmy screamed over the music. “You don’t deserve a girl like Tara.”

“Where is she?” I asked, trying to move closer, but the floor felt like someone had paved it with bubble gum. Staring at my shoes was easier than meeting Kimmy’s soul-burning eyes.

“She’s gone to bed,” Kimmy snapped. “So forget about texting her.”

I’d forgotten she worked early—part of the grounds crew at the golf course, mowing grass and raking bunkers to save for college. In about six hours, she’d be out the door.

“You know her best,” I pleaded. “How do I fix this? How do I win her back?”

Kimmy scrunched her face, ready to scorn me again, but before she could unleash hell, the strange man beneath her jerked to life. His head lifted, turning toward me with flaming eyes that were wildly bloodshot, like a candy cane melted in a hurricane.

“Grand. Romantic. Gesture.” he spoke, as if reciting sacred scripture.

Kimmy and I shared a glance, raised matching eyebrows, then turned back to absorb the wasted wisdom about to spill out of him.

“What does every great love story have?” he murmured, his eyes drifting upward as if the ceiling tiles were rearranging into constellations. “A man… professing that love. Loudly. Boldly. A gesture so big the universe is forced to stop and look.” He tapped his temple with an index finger. “Women—the female spirit—they live for that kind of attention.”

Maybe it was his words, or maybe it was the marijuana fumes leaking from his jacket, but I suddenly had a vision—no, a full-blown revelation sent from above. It was so obvious what I had to do: mimic the main character from a romantic comedy.

I’d wait outside Tara’s house all night and surprise her with flowers when she left for work.

“Hold the phone,” the officer said. “You decided to take the advice of some trashy, modern-day Rasputin?”

“To be fair, he looked more like John Lennon.”

The officer sighed, the way a man does when he knows he’s about to lose a poker game. “Kid… honestly? You might’ve been better off trying for some leverage.”

My Walk of Destiny started with a stop at the 24-hour convenience store, where the Portuguese version of “I Will Always Love You” blared from behind the counter. Between a cooler of energy drinks and a wheezing nacho cheese machine sat a bucket of single roses—asymmetrical, yellow-scarred, and clearly rejected from better stores.

I grabbed one, plus a hot dog and a fistful of ketchup packets, and ventured back into the night, plastic bag swinging like Cupid’s quiver.

It was after midnight when I landed in front of Tara’s house, her white hatchback parked beneath a streetlight that made it look like it had ascended from a higher plane. I sat cross-legged on the lawn, like a kid waiting for story time—not a restraining order.

By one o’clock, I was convinced this gesture was worthy of a Shakespeare play. I rehearsed which romantic movie line would win her back:

“You complete me.”

“No one puts Tara in a corner.”

“I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

By two o’clock, the mosquitoes were out in full force, and I looked like I was doing the Macarena on the front lawn—solo, uninvited, losing.

By three, hunger hit. I tore open ketchup packet after ketchup packet, drowning the hot dog in a red river. I raised it for a heroic bite, and that’s when the underground sprinklers erupted, turning the quiet night into a full-scale monsoon.

Startled, I flung the hot dog into the air. It performed a 720-degree twist worthy of a gold medal gymnast, then smacked into the front of my white shirt and somersaulted down my pant leg. Panicking, I grabbed the plastic bag and tried to use it as a napkin, but all that did was smear the ketchup around and grind it deeper into the fabric, like I was marinating myself.

By four o’clock, it still looked like I had wet my pants.

By five, the whole thing felt like trespassing. The sun crept over the horizon, casting a blackish-purple glow—the colour of a fading bruise, much like my heart.

When the porch light flicked on, I scrambled to the sidewalk, smoothing my hair and lifting the rose above my head like a white flag of surrender.

The front door swung open, and Tara’s silhouette filled the void. Long legs, a golf course uniform, and the kind of posture that made the porch light halo around her like she’d been summoned.

Our eyes locked.

But the look on her face wasn’t admiration. Or excitement. It was the expression you’d give a clown that just crawled out of a storm drain and tried to offer you a balloon.

She stepped back. The door shut. The porch light died, along with the rest of my dignity.

“Say what you will about the police,” I told the officer. “But you guys showed up fast. I was only halfway through singing ‘My Heart Will Go On’ under her bedroom window when the red and blue lights started flashing.”

The officer began to flip through his notebook. “According to Tara’s statement, she opened the door to find what she described as her ex-boyfriend in blood-soaked clothing, holding a long-barreled firearm.”

“Long-stemmed rose,” I corrected him.

The officer closed his notebook, exhaled through his nose, “We can’t charge you with anything, so you’re free to go. But one word of advice, kid, next time you feel a grand romantic gesture coming on… go watch Rambo instead.”

He opened the back of the police car, and I stepped out into the morning light, a broken rose in hand. I walked home through the park, shoes squishy and shirt stiff with ketchup.

Up ahead on the path stood a cute, long-haired brunette in a white t-shirt, splattered with mustard stains as if she’d also angered the gods of love and condiments.

I slowed. She looked up.

“Hi,” I said. “My name is Thomas.”

She smiled. A real smile, warm and unbothered.

“Hi,” she replied. “My name is Leverage.”