by Meg Ripley
“What’s wrong, babe?”
I push down the instinct to just start screaming at him, but it’s hard. “We need to talk,” I say again. “Are your roommates here?”
“No. Nate’s down at the dining hall and Chester is looking something up in the library,” Ethan replies. He gives me a little smirking grin. “Need a little pre-finals stress relief?”
Bile quickly rises in my throat. It takes everything I have to keep myself from vomiting right there.
“Just let me into the room,” I say, already exhausted.
After finding out what Ethan had been doing behind my back—apparently, for more than a year, according to the date stamps on his videos—I can’t even remember all of our dates, our nights together, all of the special memories we’d shared, without feeling like they’d all been tainted. He could have given me an STD; in some of the videos, he wasn’t even wearing a fucking condom! He could have knocked someone up.
Apparently, none of that was all that important to him, though, and now everything about the man I loved had been totally ruined. I couldn’t even deal with his attempts at being charming; it just felt revolting.
“Is something wrong, babe?” Ethan lets me into his dorm but it’s starting to occur to him to wonder why I’ve even dropped by, and why I’m not responding to his leering and smirking in my usual way.
How is it possible that, in less than a week, he can go from being this charming, sort-of-sweet-underneath-it-all asshole, to just a regular old asshole? I ask myself.
I let the door close and lock behind me, taking my phone out of my pocket. Before I even went to class that morning, I made sure I had everything saved on my phone; everything I needed as evidence. I open the screenshots and give myself a second to decide if I really want to do this.
“Tell me about this,” I say, holding up the first one: Ethan’s Tinder profile. “And this,” I add, flipping to the next picture: a screengrab of one of his amateur porn videos, showing his face. I keep flipping through them and Ethan goes from looking like a cocky, horny lover to a sulking, spoiled child.
“This is your fault, you know,” he says once I’ve shown him all of the pictures.
“What?” I thought nothing that Ethan could say could possibly surprise me, but I can’t believe he’s going for this tactic.
“You wouldn’t do any of these things with me, so I had to find someone else who would.”
“Without telling me? Without even seeing if I might be okay with it? Without using a condom half the time? You could have given me some kind of fucking crotch rot, Ethan!” I stuff my phone back into my purse before the anger can get a hold of me strongly enough to make me throw it.
“Don’t be such a prude,” Ethan says, rolling his eyes. “Come on, Nora. We both know we love each other. This isn’t even the kind of thing that should worry you.”
“It worries the hell out of me that you’ve kept it from me for...I don’t know—like a year or better?”
“How did you even find out about it?” he hissed.
I shake my head. “That’s not important. What’s important is that you’ve been cheating on me all this time, and you’re too much of a goddamn coward to even admit what a piece of shit you are,” I say.
I hear my voice rising. I know I’m almost screaming, but I can’t stop myself.
“What are you going to do, Nora? You gonna dump me?” Ethan rolls his eyes again. “Come on. If you weren’t such a prude, this wouldn’t have ever happened. But it’s out of my system now. If you’re jealous, maybe I can show you what I’ve learned, and then we can put this all behind us.”
My jaw drops. I can’t even believe Ethan is uttering the fucking words that are spilling from his mouth right now.
“It is not prudish for me to expect you to be honest with me, for me to expect you to break up with me if you apparently need a bunch of strange women slobbering on your cock to be happy and satisfied. It’s not prudish for me to expect you to have the common decency to not cheat.”
“We have our whole lives ahead of us,” Ethan says. “Give it time, and you’ll forgive me for this.”
“I never will,” I tell him. “I didn’t come here for you to explain this. There’s no explanation that could ever be good enough. I came here to tell you that I know what you’ve been doing, and we’re over.”
“We can’t be over,” Ethan says. “We’re going to New York together. We’re going to be engaged in like, a few weeks—as soon as the ring I designed for you is done.”
“No,” I say through gritted teeth. “Not happening. Hope you can get your deposit back, because I will never wear that fucking ring in my life. I am never going to touch you again. I’m never even going to speak your fucking name again.”
For the first time, Ethan looks truly panicked. He stares at me, and I watch his mouth open and close, open again, and then he’s just staring at me like that.
I turn to leave his room. I’ve had all I can stomach of this conversation—Ethan blaming me for his cheating, insisting that I’ll forgive him, that everything will be fine between us, when there’s not even an ‘us’ anymore. If I stay much longer, I’ll just start screaming, making a huge scene out of it, and I don’t want to have a dozen people watching me leave the dorm building in tears.
“Wait! Nora, come on!” Ethan grabs my arm and I turn on my heel. Now, I’m not even sad anymore, just flat-out angry, and I reach for his wrist and dig my fingernails into his skin until he lets out a stupid, shrieking yelp, and starts to loosen his grasp. I bend his hand backwards as far as I can, and shove him away from me, and then I’m out the door, hurrying down the hall.
I hear a few people’s doors opening and closing; obviously some folks overheard some part of what happened between me and Ethan, and they’re curious. But my blood is roaring in my ears, and all I can think of is getting back to the privacy of my room before anyone can really notice me. I hate the idea of anyone seeing me crying over Ethan, or figuring out that’s why I’m crying. I manage to keep the tears in my eyes as I ride the elevator to the ground floor, and I make myself slow down a bit on the way to my own dorm building.
One of the sophomore BFA students, Jamie, says hi to me as I’m walking past her, and I give her the best smile I can manage, say something about the finals for Drexel being brutal, and just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
In three weeks, you’ll have graduated, you’ll be off campus, and you can forget you ever even met Ethan. The first two would just be a matter of fact; I know better than to believe the third thing will really happen, though. But I have to at least pretend to believe there will be a day when I barely even remember my now ex-boyfriend’s face, when I’m not walking around like I have a jagged, cold diamond in my chest instead of a heart.
I have to believe that I can recover. It’s just really hard to imagine right now.
Chapter Three
Jacques
“Hey, have you heard old Claude finally found a tenant for his place?”
I spray down my tattoo station with antiseptic and shrug. “Good for him,” I say. Claude owns the apartment directly across the alley from mine; it should probably concern me more than it does that he’s found someone to rent it, seeing as how it’s so fucking close to my place, but after the day I’ve had, I don’t have it in me to give a shit.
“Apparently, it’s some American girl,” Christophe continues. “Some artist.”
“Good for her, then,” I say, wiping down the table and spraying it again for good measure, thinking back to that last client of mine who looked entirely too sketchy. At least he was in and out of here in no time, just getting a small, dumb-ass tattoo of a cartoon character right above his ankle.
We’re about to close for the evening, and Christophe never seems to be able to focus on cleaning up his station at the end of the night, which makes it take twice as long. Usually, all I want to do is get to the bar, have some beers and see what fine piece of ass I can take home with me
, but tonight, I’m headed straight home; I’m beat after finishing the 6-hour back piece I worked on earlier today.
“You’re not even a little bit curious?”
I shrug off Christophe’s question. “Fuck that,” I tell him. “After all the shit that went down with Amandine, I promised myself that I wouldn’t tie myself down to anyone for a while. I’m just looking to have fun and get as much ass as possible, man.”
I start to check my inventory of inks, gauze, nitrile gloves, antibiotic ointment—the whole mess.
“American girls are pretty easy from what I hear, dude,” Christophe points out as he finally starts to disinfect his station for real. “And you can talk them into doing some really freaky things.”
“Pfft,” I say. I notice I need more yellow, and I’m almost out of gloves. “I have more than enough options right here in Rouen already.”
“Hey, look at it this way,” Christophe counters. “You can get in there and tap that ass, and by the time you’re tired of her, she’ll be on her way back to the US.”
I roll my eyes. “If it’s so important to you, why don’t you take a shot at getting in her pants, man,” I say. “I just want to keep working on coming up with some new designs, practice with the Four Pistols and let the pussy come to me.”
I grab some inventory from the supply closet and check over my station one more time before heading out of the shop for the night.
By the time I get home, I’m bone-tired. I start to pull my shirt off before the door is even shut behind me and let it fall to the floor on my way to the bathroom. I strip off my jeans and kick them into the corner. My boxers come next, then I’m standing on the bath rug in nothing more than my socks.
I turn on the shower and wait for the water to heat up as I pull off my socks. I step under the shower head, turning around so the jets pulsate over my back and neck, relieving the tension that’s built up after leaning over clients all day. For a second, my mind wanders to what Christophe brought up this afternoon: an American girl’s moving into old Claude’s place, right across the alley. I wonder if it might be worth picking her brain about life in America, if the opportunity came up.
I start scrubbing myself down, trying to imagine what would bring a young American to Rouen for any length of time. It’s not a big city like Paris, but it’s not a tiny village, either. There’s the university—maybe she’s a student?—but it’s still hard to imagine why she’d pick this town to come to.
Whatever, I decide. Unless she wants a tattoo or is interested in checking out the music scene, there’s no real point in talking to her.
I finish my shower and dry off, wrapping a towel around my waist before heading into the kitchen to grab some Thai leftovers and a beer from the fridge. I head into the living room, snatching the remote off the coffee table as I flick on the TV and triumphantly collapse onto the couch. Flipping through Netflix, I’m drawn to a new American series they’ve just released and start watching the pilot.
Tomorrow, I’m meeting with Pascal, Yann, and Sam for practice, if Pascal can get his ass out of bed before five. My phone rings and I head into the bathroom to grab it; sure enough, It’s Yann.
“Yo, Jacques,” Yann says as soon as I pick up. “Pascal’s working late so we’re going to meet at three, is that okay with you?”
“Yeah, works for me. I can get my groceries before then and be ready to load up the car.” Pascal lives outside of town, on a farm he inherited from his parents; it’s where we practice, since there aren’t any neighbors to piss off out there.
“Christophe told me there’s some new chick moving in across the alley from you. You seen her?” Yann is weird when it comes to girls. He loves them, he’s protective of them, but he’ll go after every last one who’ll give him the time of day. He’s one of the favorites with our fans for that very reason.
“Nah, dude,” I say. “If Claude’s just talking about it now, she probably doesn’t even have her papers to be in the country yet, you know? She probably won’t be moving in for a while.”
“Well, let me know when you see her,” Yann says. “I’ve never been with an American chick.”
I laugh at his stupidity. “Yeah, whatever, man. She’s going to have half the guys in Rouen after her because everyone around here thinks American girls are easy,” I point out.
“Well, if American girls are easy, then it shouldn’t be a problem,” Yann points out. “Maybe she’ll need someone to protect her.”
I laugh again and use this as an opportunity to change the subject. “So, you’re bringing the beer to practice tomorrow, right?”
“Right,” Yann says. “Remember: three o’clock!”
“Got it. See you then.” Throwing my phone onto the cushion next to me, I get back to eating my dinner and drinking my beer, grabbing the remote to unpause the episode I’d started to check out.
An hour later, just as I’m about to turn in for the night, I notice a light from my living room window and decide to peer across the alley to see what’s going on. Claude is there, apparently cleaning the place up, getting it ready for his new tenant. I crank open my window and lean out; Claude has the windows open, probably to keep the fumes down.
“Hey! I heard you’re getting a new tenant!” I call across.
Claude looks up, startled, and then walks over to the window to say hello.
“Yeah, I posted it on one of those websites, and she called and said it would be just the thing,” he tells me. “Seems like a nice girl. Just finished her degree in art.”
“Pretentious, right?”
Claude shrugs. “She seems nice,” he says. “She paid me the deposit with no problem and even helped me set up something called PayPal to do it. She should be here tomorrow afternoon.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Wow, tomorrow? That was fast.”
“Her flight comes in sometime in the morning, but she won’t get here until later that evening,” Claude says. “Something about wanting to take a quick detour on her way from Paris.”
“She’ll have plenty of time to check out Paris,” I point out, and Claude nods. “She must be traveling light if she’s going to be here after tromping around Paris all day.”
“She’s having some of her stuff shipped, and she’s only coming with what she needs for the next week or so. She’s probably using the short-term storage lockers at the train station or something,” Claude points out, and I nod.
“Christophe and Yann are both pretty excited,” I tell him. “Can you pass along anything about her that I can share with them?”
“Not much. She’s twenty-one, here for a year, then going into a graduate program for art. Seems nice, but who knows?” Claude shrugs. “She’s cute, though.”
“How do you know?”
Claude gives me a little grin. “I had her send me a picture, so I’d know it’s her when she picks up the keys tomorrow,” he says.
I laugh at that. Christophe and Yann, at least, will be pleased to hear it. “Does she speak French?”
“Eh, not very well, but she’s able to get her point across,” he says. “Good thing, too. I haven’t spoken English to anyone since I was working full-time.”
I haven’t spoken English to anyone since I was in school, so he’s at least got one up on me. I wrap up the conversation and close the window, wondering if it might be worth it just to see if all the hype about this American girl amounts to anything.
She’s probably just like every other girl, I remind myself as I turn down the blankets and get into bed. I have to wonder though: why would someone choose to come to Rouen? Why would she come all on her own, at that? Nothing Claude told me makes me think she’s got a boyfriend moving in with her, but of course, she might not have mentioned that to Claude.
I fall asleep, wondering just how easy American girls actually are. I’m willing to bet that Christophe and Yann will both be disappointed.
Chapter FOUR
Nora
By the time I get my keys and finally walk throug
h the door of my new apartment, my head is aching from spending the day in constant movement through Paris and then via train to Rouen, surrounded by the French language. I probably should have waited until after I’d had some time to settle in Rouen to go back into the city, but since I’d had to land in Paris anyway, I figured I would take some time to at least check out a few things before I went to my new home.
I put the keys down on a little ridge along the wall next to the door and lock the door behind me, shoving my rolling suitcase across the kitchen floor. The rest of the stuff I’d scavenged from my life back in the States—the stuff I couldn’t bear to part with, or let my parents hold onto for me—would come in a couple of days, but for the time being, I have clothes and a couple of pairs of shoes, my laptop and toiletries. I keep kicking the suitcase in front of me, through the kitchen and down the short hallway alongside the tiny living room, into the open door of my bedroom.
The real selling point of this place when I’d seen it online was that it was partially furnished. There was a bed, which my new landlord had been nice enough to make up for me, an armoire, a kitchen table and a battered old couch in the living room. I have water and electricity, but no internet access until I can get a France-based bank account set up first.
I won’t have to buy too many things, and for that, I can be grateful. While I’d been sitting in a cafe in Paris earlier in the day, freshly through Customs and Border Control, I’d put in my order for dishes and some cooking supplies from a company called Hema that a friend of mine recommended.
I take a moment to look around a little bit, to make sure everything is as it should be. “Actually, this place looks pretty great,” I muse out loud, taking a few minutes out of being bone-tired to appreciate my new home.
I’d been hoping to take a short trip to France before everything fell apart with Ethan. Discovering how deep his cheating went and breaking up with him had made it impossible for me to even think about starting my master’s degree in the fall. Instead, I’d talked to my parents about my trip, and they’d agreed that they’d give me cash instead of my graduation present so I could take a longer break away from the States.