It doesn’t matter what this guy was into before. So he goes onto an app, and it takes about twenty minutes for me to find what I’m into. A “date” in name. But really a hookup. One and done.
We meet at a bar. She gets tipsy and I get voracious. We all know where it goes from there. I even let her stay over. Not out of any generosity of spirit, but because I know his shame will only push deeper if she’s around. If he can sense at all what’s happened, he probably doesn’t want to come back.
Which is, right now, fine by me.
She actually looks touched when I ask her to spend the night. Grateful. It makes me want to laugh at her.
One and done.
Fun and stun.
Done and run.
I hold my tongue all night so I can get more from her. The next morning, though, when I’m still in his body and she’s still in my bed, I shake her off mercilessly. Tell her it was no good, and that I only asked her to stay out of pity. She gets angry, and I yawn. After she storms out, I take a nap. Then I head back to the gym.
A couple of his friends text him. I don’t reply, and they don’t try again.
I call in sick to work. Then I check his bank accounts and decide that tomorrow he’ll quit his job. He had no idea, but he’s already served his last day.
When you’re given a Ferrari, you don’t trade it in for a Camry.
This body is mine now.
RHIANNON
Alexander’s parents are out of town a lot. Something involving their jobs and needing to travel. They don’t see each other that much, and they don’t see Alexander much. At first I thought it was cool that they were never around—I could spend as many hours as I wanted at his house, doing homework on the lime-green couch in his room, curling up next to him for study breaks. He’d read me poems or tell me stories, and we’d never have to worry about a knock on the door.
But now, even though I enjoy the freedom their absence gives us, I think it’s a little sad that they leave Alexander alone so much. His room makes much more sense—the way he creates all these intricate distractions, all these creative ways of having conversations with art and color and light when there aren’t any real conversations to be had with other people.
I’m thinking about this after school on Monday, when I’m back on the lime-green couch, supposedly doing biology homework but really wondering about how our lives work.
“Do you miss them?” I ask Alexander. He’s on the bed, supposedly reading Robinson Crusoe. “Your parents, I mean.”
He doesn’t ask me why I’m asking the question at this particular moment. Instead he says, “Yeah. I do.”
“Couldn’t they arrange it so they didn’t leave at the same time?”
“They used to do that. When I was little. But it was always Mom who had to stay back—not because she’s a mom, but because her job was a little more flexible. Unfortunately, that didn’t last. The traveling’s a part of what they do, and if they want to keep their jobs, they go where they have to go. It sucks, but it pays the bills.” He stops for a second, then starts again. “No. That makes it sound worse than it is. The honest truth is that they like what they do, and they’re good at it, and even though it sucks that they’re gone, it would suck even more if they were miserable.”
“That makes sense,” I say.
The honest truth is something Alexander says a lot. It’s something he believes in. He’s always telling me that one of the best parts of our relationship is how natural it feels to be truthful with one another—the last people he dated weren’t as truthful, and the relationships skidded because of that.
I know he’s right. And I know I am much more truthful with him than I ever could have been with Justin. I am discovering that the best possible relationship is one where you can say whatever is on your mind—no matter how random, no matter how hard, no matter how silly—and the other person will always be open to hear it. I have never had that before. With A, it felt that way, but we didn’t have the time to do it. We were always too caught up in figuring out how our relationship would work, or how it wouldn’t work. With Alexander, I can ask about his parents, or I can ask about dinner, or I can tell him about a cartoon I watched when I was six, or I can read a sentence from my biology book to him in a Kermit the Frog voice—I can say whatever I want, ask whatever I want. He is open to whatever words I send his way. I don’t have to worry anymore about saying the wrong thing. About landing on the certain words, or certain thoughts, that turn out to be emotional land mines. I know he’s not going to shout at me or tear me down for saying something stupid. It is incredible to have that pressure lifted.
He can do the same with me, of course. He can say anything, ask anything. But that was never a problem with Justin. The problem always came when I opened my mouth.
The problem with Alexander is different. The problem with him is that he gives me the honest truth, and I give him the dishonest truth in return.
Or maybe it isn’t a problem. I don’t know. Because it is still the truth. I don’t lie to him. It’s just that the truth I give him has sentences missing.
I told him about Justin. That was hard. Not because I thought he’d take Justin’s side or think less of me or decide that any girl who’d stay with an asshole like that wasn’t worth being with. If I hadn’t really known Alexander, I would have been afraid of all of those things. But because I knew Alexander, the thing that made it hardest to talk about was my own embarrassment. It didn’t bother me that Alexander would hear what I had to say—it was that I had to hear it. I had to sit there in his arms and listen to how I’d narrowed my vision so that all I could see was Justin, all I could care about was Justin. He didn’t treat me well, and it rarely occurred to me that I could be treated better. Neither of us really knew what we were doing, but we didn’t recognize that. We thought it was love.
Now I know: Love isn’t so straightforward. It’s never a matter of telling yourself to do it and doing it. It’s never a matter of someone else telling you to do it and doing it. It can’t exist between two people if they can’t also feel it exist outside of them, too. It can involve hurt, but it shouldn’t make you hurt all the time. Then it’s not love. It’s a trap disguised as love.
Alexander knows I fell into the trap. He knows I didn’t set it, but he also knows I laid my own traps, too. I told him all of this partly to be honest and partly to warn him. I knew he wouldn’t be scared away.
He said Justin wasn’t a threat to him or to me anymore. He also said the girl I was when I was in love with Justin wasn’t a threat, either, because she was gone now. I told him I appreciated him saying that, but the old me will never be gone. She’ll always be alive in me somewhere. I just have to make sure she’s never in charge again, no matter how loud she gets, demanding to have her way.