“Okay…that’s okay…I don’t totally…I just wish you would’ve…why didn’t you say something?”
“I know it was okay, within the rules, within everything, it wasn’t stipulated. But, Will…fuck. Will. Will. Will…” She was spinning out again. “I don’t know what to do.”
“What do you mean you don’t know what to do?”
“I’ve been seriously messed up.”
“You were allowed three. Those were the rules. We didn’t specify that it had to be—I just don’t get why you’ve been hiding th—”
“I don’t mean…you’re not understanding. Because I’m not really saying…It was, I don’t know what to do. My whole…my head. I don’t know. I haven’t been able to…and I don’t know.…I’ve been fucked up by…I’m fucked up, I’m fucked up…”
Her eyes were shut again and her body rocked with the record skips.
“You’re saying…you liked it.” He stared at her.
“It’s not liking it. It’s that…something happened. To me. And I’m just so fucking confused.”
“What are you trying to say? Just say it to me. It’s just me. You’ve already said most of it…”
“It’s why I’ve been so…this whole time, this whole trip.…All the shit that’s been making me feel so out of control. I haven’t been able to think straight. I’ve barely been able to sleep. I haven’t been myself at all.”
“But not just because you had sex with a woman. You’re saying something else.”
“I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“Are you saying that you enjoyed it more than you expected?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“Are you saying that you think you might want to have sex with women again?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.”
“Are you saying that you think you might be gay?”
“No! God! I’m not gay…I don’t know. Will. I just…I don’t know what’s going…It was something that just, the entire thing was completely different than anything else.…I’m not even talking about the sex. I just felt…I don’t know what I’m saying. I felt nothing for the other two. I felt nothing, I felt weird but not so guilty or bad about the other two. I just didn’t think about them for a minute afterward. But this one…it fucked me up.”
“Fucked you up how?”
“I just…I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve thought about it constantly…”
“You fell in love.”
“No! Christ. No no no.”
“You said you felt guilty about Adrien Green. The other day…”
“Not…that’s not…”
“After the museum, in the park…that guilt. All that Catholic volcano shit. But it was actually…”
“All those things that happened to me, the new things. And the staying up all night, that wasn’t…it just…I don’t know what I’m trying to say to you! I’m so sorry. I’m so so fucking sorry for not telling you at dinner. But I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know what to do I don’t know what to do…” She was gummy-mouthed, the skipping record again.
“Whit, we don’t lie to each other. What is happening? This whole thing, the whole point of it was that we’d be straight up, that we wouldn’t pull this shit on each other.”
“I know. And now you know…”
“But how do I know that’s it? How do I know what’s real and what isn’t?”
Now he was the one who was rocking a little. His eyes were locked on the top of her head. She still had her head between her knees, and she was wiping her nose with her forearm.
“Why didn’t you just tell me?” he said.
“I just hadn’t figured it out yet,” she said. “I didn’t know what to make of.…And then when you said you hadn’t had a third, I didn’t know what to do. I just knew I couldn’t tell you then.”
“And so you broke the deal.”
“I didn’t know how to say it. I still don’t know how to say it.”
“So you just straight up lied.”
“No, no—at dinner, I said two guys.”
He looked at her and she made the mistake of looking up at him. She shouldn’t have said it again, she shouldn’t have underlined the calculated loophole.
“This is so fucked,” he said. “You lied and then you kept lying and then you accused me of all sorts of bullshit on top of everything else to make yourself feel better about what you’d done and how you’d withheld it. To try to drag me down into it with you.”
“You fucked Jenna!” she said. “You betrayed me, too. Don’t put this all on me.”
“No, I didn’t,” he said, shaking his head softly, calmly, sadly again. “I just said that to get you to fess up. I didn’t touch her. I didn’t do a goddamned thing, because I never fucking would. I swear on everything in my life and yours. You just weren’t going to tell me unless I said it.”
She saw something in his face that convinced her unequivocally. She knew he hadn’t done it. She’d known deep down all morning. She crumpled further into herself. She was weeping this time, the heaviest tears yet. He let her bob there in heaves and sobs.
She heard him moving from the living room to the bedroom. She was so exhausted. She wanted to die, but first she needed to sleep. She stood up to join him there, and she saw him smile at her softly for the first time in an eternity. But as she approached the threshold, he gave the door a shove, and it closed with a click in her face.
She heard music coming from the bedroom. The door was still shut. She’d lain down on the couch with a pillow over her face to shade the blaring sunlight, but hadn’t been able to sleep. Her laptop was in the bedroom and so she couldn’t even catch up on queries from work—not that she would’ve been able to draft a cogent email anyway. It was all her fault, she knew. It was her body’s fault and her mind’s fault. Her head hurt badly. She was on the other side of being drunk again. She poured herself a glass of water in the kitchen and collapsed on the couch. She was a
