We were on my bed the first time his girlfriend called.
“Should I answer?” he asked, his phone vibrating on my blue sheets.
“Would you normally?”
He picked up, and welcomed a beloved stranger into my bedroom. His voice was even, the way familiar souls fall back into conversation over the phone rather than start anew with plastic formality.
She asked what he was doing, and he gave an answer as forgettable as our afternoon chewing on greasy sandwiches at the bar, staring at sports I never watched alone but enjoyed beside him. It’s eerie watching someone lie. You reflect on all the times they seemed so honest and normal to you.
She repeated her questions. Once for him to answer, twice to convince herself. Cheating is only explosive in its initiation and reveal. Otherwise, it’s a very calm and passive process.
I climbed on top of him and straddled his thighs as he spoke. It was brazen and inappropriate and one of his favorite things about me.
I kissed his neck and his words reverberated in my head, as if I were part of the conversation, too.
“I’ll see you later,” he reassured her. “I love you.”
She murmured it back and he hung up.
Alone again—her voice an echo of ignored advice—we confirmed everything I imagined she worried about. The stuff of nightmares when you finally let someone in. The feeling of knowing and loving everything about someone, and ignoring the doubt of any of that being true.
***
It wasn’t always like this between us. There was a time when we were just friends, and I thought I could protect him from himself.
We were out with a group of friends once when he drank too much and spent the rest of the night trying to pinch my ass. I drove him home after last call.
We arrived at his address, and he loitered in my passenger’s seat, hoping I’d give him a reason to stay. Heavy and swaying, he leaned over the console to try his luck.
“I’ve always liked you, Connie,” he said, his breath muddied with the stench of beer.
“I know.”
Men always think they have to admit their attraction, as if we didn’t already know. Most times, we know long before they do.
“It’s always fun when we hang out,” he said. He lurched forward and I dodged his lips, flattening myself against my car door.
“We do have fun,” I said, pushing him back into his seat. “But you don’t want to do this. You have a girlfriend.”
He agreed and argued all at once. He had enough alcohol in his system to act on his desires and claim plausible deniability later.
Back then, it was him trying to kiss me, and me lying on his behalf.
“You’re going to regret this,” I said. I nudged him toward the door with a smile. “Good night.”
The next morning, he thanked me for not letting anything happen. I was so drunk, he told me. I do really care about her.
I spent the day feeling good about myself. It was a wholesome high, the kind you get from leaving a generous tip or picking up litter on the sidewalk. I felt noble for being a “relationship savior”—a woman who held something pure and fragile in her hands and chose to defend it. Call it a case of superhero syndrome, but I had spared a defenseless civilian from the worst kind of heartbreak.
Or maybe I was the super villain, milking a monologue dedicated to my own greatness, my only redemption being the mercy I showed someone I had endangered in the first place.
***
I was 22 or 23 when my love life turned to shit. Or rather, my outlook on love.
I felt foolish for investing time, hope, and heart into other people.
I felt burned from caring too deeply.
And most of all, I felt jaded.
I was in a state of disbelief that relationships could work in my favor, that all the effort of dating could possibly ferment into something tasty and intoxicating, instead of the usual regret and sour emptiness the morning after.
The superhero syndrome started to fade and I realized the city didn’t need saving—I did.
I had no place ripping off my freshly-ironed work clothes to reveal a righteous identity, because I simply didn’t have one. I was just an average civilian, looking out for my own in a city of outright chaos and heart crimes and injustice.
I stopped resisting.
He approached me again on a separate occasion, one where he was more sober and I was more angry at the world, and it finally happened. We continued seeing each other on those terms: tipsy and pissed and needing to touch each other. He would fight with his girlfriend and come find me. I would fail to form any worthwhile connection and send him a text.
Like clockwork, we would massage this twisted partnership from pleasure to pain and back again. As incremental and as compounding as time, our attachment grew from sex to something more threatening—a craving for one another, even after our bodies had nothing left to offer.
“I don’t like when you hang out with other guys,” he once told me. I was applying face cream before bed. It was one of the few nights he could stay over without raising suspicion.
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“I know you can do what you want, but I guess I still get jealous.”
“You legit have a girlfriend. I am single.”
He would always apologize after that. For putting me in that situation. For making me feel that way. For making me think we could un-fuck the past and be something normal. It was comforting to think someone else was to blame here. That being on the receiving end of I’m sorry redeemed me somehow, when I knew exactly what I signed up for.
***
Looking back now, I’ve stopped quantifying loyalty on a scale of execution, which assumes the act of being physical with someone else—whether it’s a touch or kiss or more—determines a relationship’s shift from “intact” to “broken.”
A more accurate measure of loyalty would judge someone’s intent, rather than their actions.
It’s easy to pinpoint when a person physically strays, but it’s much harder to determine how long it took the body to catch up to the mind.
Had I agreed to my friend’s advances the first time instead of the second, would it really have changed the value of his loyalty initially, or lack thereof? What’s the significance of a monogamous relationship when the restraining factor is a lack of opportunity instead of the self-discipline of those involved? If the consent of another woman, or third party, is the only thing protecting the sanctity of a monogamous relationship, then there was never a true promise of exclusivity.
In my case, the cheating didn’t occur when I formally had his body beneath mine. It happened when I had his attention, his willingness, and his intent.
***
“I think you should change my name in your phone,” I said. I kept thinking about how her voice sounded through the speaker, the hollowness of her pauses.
“She wouldn’t go through my phone,” he said.
“You don’t know that.”
“What should I change it to? Domino’s?”
“Why would Domino’s text you….”
“I don’t know. What do I use then?”
“Pick a generic guy’s name. If she goes through your phone, she’ll be looking for a girl’s name.”
He tapped on my contact information. With a few drags of his finger, I no longer existed.
And it was like we were back in my car again—parked and in the way of life in motion around us.
Him leaning in, leaving his sour breath and essence on my interior.
Me, wafting the evidence of our moment out the window, erasing myself, still trying to protect him.
***
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