When I was eighteen, I got my first and only boyfriend. He seemed wonderful up until my birthday, when he fucked another girl. That marked the beginning of a long period when we couldn’t bring ourselves to break up, and we flushed whatever good there was left right down the toilet. After that, I started sleeping around, and I acted like a complete jerk more often than not—like the time I had sex with a lanky artsy guy at the party of another friend who had a huge crush on me. Or when I crashed in my friend’s tiny apartment on her cramped couch and brought home some guy I’d known in high school. But I didn’t think any of it was really important. Just two pieces of meat kneading each other, trying to find an orgasm that would make them forget, if only for a fleeting second, how empty their lives are.

He takes it personally. “What does that say about me?” he asks. “All these guys are so fucking ugly, and you keep adding more and more to the list.” Sometimes he gets so worked up he says, “An attractive man like me can’t be with a girl who’s slept with so many creeps.”

The Ex II

The Ex II

He always speaks so fondly of his Ex. They meet up pretty often, and I’m really uncomfortable with it, but I’m not exactly in a position to interfere. I think she’s still into him. He told me recently that they’d been hanging out, watching a movie, and they’d kissed, and he could have slept with her if he’d wanted, but he didn’t because he knew it would hurt me. It’s all so disheartening—the way he talks about her so brightly, with such warmth in his voice, and how he’s always comparing me to her. He’s already told her everything, including how I’d given him chlamydia, but he guards all her secrets fiercely. I think he still feels bad about the way their relationship ended, back when she was still in high school. After her family found out that he had two kids, they didn’t want her to have anything to do with him, and they tried to come between them. Complete fucking Romeo and Juliet bullshit. Sometimes I try to get him to trash her—but it’s like he thinks she’s some sort of saint, and he’ll concede only that she’s had her problems, she’s sensitive, and she’s never given him an STI.

Girlfriends

Girlfriends