by Penny Wylder
“How could I ever have been attracted to you? Did you honestly think I’d want this body?” Zayne shakes his head and pushes me away, into the mud. I land on my hands and knees and skid away from him. “You’re a slut, Clove. A disgusting, horrible slut. You deserve this. You deserve to be exposed to the world for what you really are.”
There’s some distant part of me, far away and trapped, that rebels against this. That wants to shout at him, No. I’m not. But that part is locked deep down in my subconscious. I can’t unlock it, can’t make myself wake up. All I can do is cry and nod in agreement. Because look at me. I am pathetic. Gross. A slut. He’s right. I deserve this.
I wake up with tears on my cheeks and a pounding ache in my head that won’t subside. I groan and roll over to check my phone, an old habit that I’m going to need to kill fast if this keeps up. Because all I do is open it to find another scroll of texts, another torrent of abuse waiting for me. All those assholes saying the same thing that Zayne said in my dream. I deserve this. I’m disgusting, unattractive, a slut.
Notice how they call me gross and yet too promiscuous in the same sentence. Notice how I’m hot if I might bang them, but gross if I won’t, and if I do bang them, I’m easy and loose and a terrible slut anyway. Can’t win either way. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
I skip to my text thread, and my heart swells a little at the messages from Andy and Celeste. It’s all supportive, asking if I need to talk and if they can bring me over some wine. I squint at the time and sigh. It’s already 9pm—I slept most of the day away. I’ll probably be up all night sleepless now. And anyway, Andy and Celeste will be home by now or off having an adventure somewhere without me.
Don’t worry about me, guys, I’m fine. Just need some alone time to chill with reruns.
Tell Samantha we say hi, Celeste replies immediately. They know me too well. Sex and the City is always my go-to moping show.
But this time, I don’t even feel like I have the energy to turn that on. Instead, I put on some loud music and lie in bed staring at the ceiling, replaying the last few days in my head.
All I can think about is how stupid I’ve been. How blind.
When the knock first sounds at my door, I ignore it, figuring it must be a delivery guy who got lost on the wrong floor. When it persists, I force myself to roll over and lever my body out of bed. Whoever it is has progressed to ringing the doorbell now, over and over.
I shuffle toward the door, rubbing sleep from my eyes. That’s when I hear his voice.
“Clove? Are you okay?”
My stomach churns, and it takes every ounce of self-control I have not to double over and heave from the sudden rush of anger, hurt, worry.
But of course, he doesn’t know that someone showed me his other profile. He doesn’t know that I know exactly who he is now. What kind of a lying, sneaking scumbag he is underneath his kind words and the front he puts on for the world.
“No,” I tell the door, arms crossed over my chest. Against my better judgment, I lean down to steal a peek through the spyhole. Of course, he looks as frustratingly, impossibly handsome as ever, dashing in his pressed uniform, hat off and cradled in one hand, his hair messy from being underneath it all day.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, and the frown on his face is so sincere, his concern so convincing, that it makes me sick to my stomach all over again.
“Just go away, please.” I force myself to speak loud enough to get through the door. It takes effort. My voice is scratchy from sleep, my throat thick with emotion.
“Clove, talk to me. What’s going on? Did something else happen with the photo?”
“Go. Away. Zayne.”
“Please, just tell me what’s wrong, Clove. Whatever it is, we can talk about it, work through it.”
Almost without thinking about it, I realize that I’ve turned on my phone. Pulled up the app and scrolled to the message. I stare at the images of the texts he’s been sending, the dates stamped across them. I glance back and forth from that damning evidence to the handsome, desperate-looking man outside my door. Is he faking this? Is he this good an actor?
My gaze lands on one message in particular. An exchange with a girl whose username is MissMisMatched. Half of me wants to laughingly appreciate the pun, especially given who she’s talking to.
Zayne’s message to her is the one that sticks in my head. The one that stings. The one that makes me realize this isn’t a joke or a fake.
Trouble sleeping? he asks her. That opens the conversation, which quickly turns to flirty talk of what they’re both doing up so late. (Him: I work the graveyard shift some nights, so I’m always up late looking for intriguing distractions). The words resonate, a little too familiar.
I open up my conversation with Zayne. Scroll up to the top, past all of our sexts and flirty back-and-forths, and even the photo image I sent him that started this whole mess.
I scroll all the way up to the top, and I stare at those two words, written in damning black-and-white on the screen.
Trouble sleeping?
It’s how he first started talking to me. The opener he used after we matched, when I was still trying to figure out how to respond to him. And here he is, just a couple of days later, using that same opener on another girl, after he told me he wanted to delete this app altogether.
“Goodbye, Zayne,” I tell the door loudly.
He protests, calls after me to wait. But as I turn and trudge back to my bedroom, I pause just long enough to turn the volume of my speakers up all the way. Music blasts through my rooms, drowning out his knocks and shouts. Eventually, even the distant faint ring of the doorbell fades away, as I presume he finally gives up on me as a lost cause and heads up to bed.
He’ll get over it. He can find some other girl to string along. Someone else to mess around, while he messes with a few dozen other girls’ heads at the same time. Me, I’m over it.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway, as I crawl into bed and bury myself in the covers. But I’ve already slept a lot today. I know I’m not going to be able to get back to sleep, not for a long while. So I just pull the comforters up around my head and stare at my ceiling, willing time to pass faster. If it does, then maybe this bruise on my heart will heal faster, too.
11
Right. I’ve moped long enough.
I wake up bright and early the next day and put on my war paint. I do my makeup to the nines, professional as hell. I put on a pencil skirt, a formal blouse, and even switch my belongings from my usual slouchy old hobo purse to a structured, tailored bag that I bought a few months ago. It looks like a briefcase, all professional lawyer-chic, but I’d been too lazy to switch purses ever since I bought it.
Today, however, calls for the new purse. It calls for breaking out all the big guns, in fact.
Today, I’ve decided I’m going to get my job back.
I can’t stand sitting around this apartment any longer. I need to pull my life together and put it back on track, and that starts with a polite, face-to-face, professional conversation with my boss. I fire off an email to her just as I’m strapping on my heels—the demure, mid-height ones that are perfect for business meetings, but not high or sexy enough to be suggestive. The last thing I want today is to come across as sexy in any manner. I want to be professional, family-friendly, and the face of everything my company stands for.
After all, that’s how I plan to convince them to let me come back.
I write the email in a deliberately straightforward way. I have to stop by the office today, so I was hoping we could speak about the situation and ways in which we may look to remedying it.
I don’t ask her for a meeting, because if I ask, she could say no. Instead, I’m going to just show up and not take no for an answer.
I’m not sure it will work. I’m not sure anything will, at this point. But I have to try.
Battle armor donned, I square my shoulders in the mirror and give myself one good stern nod for good
luck. Then I wrench open my door, and nearly trip backwards over myself in surprise.
Zayne rolls into my apartment, his head drooping to one side, neatly pressed uniform crumpled and wrinkled. As soon as his body touches the ground, he startles awake, pushes himself back into a sitting position and rubs sleep from his eyes. But there’s no disguising what happened here last night.
He clearly spent the night sleeping on my doorstep.
“Zayne…” I bite my lip, shaking my head. I don’t know what to say to him. Nothing seems right. I step over him and stride across the hall toward the elevators. “Try not to drool on my welcome mat,” I call over my shoulder.
“Clove.” His voice sounds almost as bad now as mine did last night. Scratchy and thick with sleep. “Please, wait, I need to talk to you.”
“Anything you have to say to me, you can say to my voicemail. I’ll delete it right along with all the creepy messages the other assholes are leaving me, but still. You can get it off your chest there.” I press the elevator call button decisively.
“What happened?” He struggles to his feet and staggers across the hall toward me. He catches my hand just as the elevator arrives at my floor. He holds my wrist, not too tightly, gently enough that I could pull away if I wanted to. But his skin against mine reminds me of things I don’t want to remember. Of all the ways he sets me on fire, ignites me in a way that nobody else can. “Yesterday morning when I left, we were great. Then I got back from work, and you refused to see me, just kept telling me to leave. Clearly something happened, Clove, so please, tell me what it is. We have something real here, a connection, don’t we?” His eyes bore into mine. I can’t stand the sincerity in them. I can’t stand the way my heart screams at me to trust him when the proof of his untrustworthiness is sitting just inches away in my phone, damning, impossible to ignore.
“You owe me this much,” Zayne murmurs, his voice dropping low with feeling. “At least tell me what’s going on.”
I swallow hard. “I could ask you the same thing.” I can’t meet his eyes. Not with all these thoughts racing through my head. I stare at the floor between us instead. “Why do you have two dating profiles?”
Silence.
I look up, after it stretches on long enough, and find Zayne grimacing, running his hand through his hair. “Well? Are you going to deny it?”
He meets my gaze, and I ignore the shock of pain in my gut. Hold his eye, because dammit, he should at least need to look me in the eye while he lies to my face. “No,” he says. “I won’t deny it.”
The blow lands hard. At least he didn’t lie, I think, distantly. But it doesn’t help very much. The truth still hurts.
I pull my hand free from his. The elevator doors have long since closed again, but when I stab at the button, they open once more, ready to whisk me away from here. From him.
“Clove, please, wait.”
I step into the elevator, but he steps in with me, pins me against the back wall with his hands on both of my shoulders, gripping me tight, desperation in his eyes. “I can explain,” he says.
I laugh once, sharp and bitter. “Right. Like you’ve explained everything so far.”
“I only made the new profile for you.”
My eyebrows shoot up so high that it’s a wonder they remain attached to my face. “You think that’s helping your case? You made a whole profile to trick me? Great.”
“No, that’s not… Not to trick you, Clove. To match with you.”
“What the hell are you talking about.”
He’s digging in his pocket now, pulling out his phone. I reach past him to press the ground floor button, but hesitate halfway there. The elevator doors close, leaving us suspended in midair above my floor, but I still, I don’t hit the button. Part of me wants to know, too badly, how this story pans out.
I hate that part of me.
“Clove, that night when I fought off your stalker… It wasn’t the first time I noticed you.”
I scowl at him. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’ve been wanting to talk to you for years. Trying to find ways to get closer to you. But you never noticed, never saw me standing there. I thought a few months ago, when you joined this app, that maybe this would be it. The way I could get through to you. Finally connect. We matched, actually, three months ago. On my old profile.”
I frown. “What?” No we didn’t. No way. I would remember that.
He’s nodding. “But you unmatched me almost right away. Before I could even message you or say anything.”
I grimace. I do have a tendency to do that. When my app gets too clogged with matches, I trim it down. Swipe left again on any guy who I’m not 100% sure would be my type, just to clear the space for guys who are more my speed. “Prove it,” I hear myself saying anyway, because I still don’t think I would have missed something like that. Zayne is hot as hell in his profile pictures. Would I really unmatch him?
You spent years walking right past him, part of me points out. And besides, it’s not like his profile said anything much about his interests or hobbies. Or even his job. Maybe I just assumed we’d have nothing in common. He was pretty but that was about it.
Zayne, for his part, has sprung into action. He scrolls through his phone, and then hands it to me. I stare at the app page, both unfamiliar and familiar all at once. It’s his other profile, his real one. There are a few dozen messages sitting unread—probably from all those girls he’s been messaging while we’ve been apart for a few hours, I can’t help thinking, because even if he explains this profile, it still doesn’t explain why he’d lie to me about wanting to get off the app when he clearly doesn’t want to stop messaging other women yet. I ignore those and watch as he swipes onto my profile, searching by previous matches.
There I am. Right on the screen, in the same pixels that damned him yesterday.
Previously matched, it says, but there’s no contact button, no way to message. He’s right. We matched at some point, and then I unmatched him.
“But…” I trail off, biting my lip.
He heaves a sigh. “Clove, I liked you from the start. I tried to talk to you on here, but you shut it down. And you never noticed me at the door. So that night when that asshole tried to follow you home, and you finally seemed to look at me—really look— I had to jump on that chance. The only way to talk to you, I figured, was a match like this. I already knew you were on the app, and we live in the same building, so I figured if I made a new profile, it’d pair us soon enough. And it did, thank god.” His eyes bore into mine, as if he’s willing me to believe him.
I want to. So badly. I want to just give in, quit asking all these questions, trust him. But that’s so hard to do. Especially after everything that’s happened. Everything I’ve seen.
I shake my head. “Okay, so you made a whole profile just to stalk me. Great. That’s a real point in your favor.”
“It wasn’t to stalk you, Clove, it was just to start a conversation. If you hadn’t been interested, I would’ve dropped things right away. But you answered, you struck up a conversation with me. It went both ways.”
“Right. And how special was it really? More entertaining than the other dozen conversations you have going on right now?” I roll my eyes and hand the phone back to him.
“What, these?” He laughs, a scoff in the back of his throat. “I haven’t checked this profile in weeks. Especially not since I met you.”
“Then why do you have so many unread messages?” I point out, rolling my eyes. Now I do lean past him to jab the first floor button.
He’s faster though, and double-taps it to unselect the floor, leaving us suspended in midair once more. “Clove, look.” He opens his message section and points me at it. “See these last read messages? They’re from weeks ago, some of them months.”
I stare at the inbox, my brow furrowing. “That can’t be right.”
Now it’s his turn to scowl. “What, I can’t possibly be telling you the truth?”
&nbs
p; “What happened to all the conversations with the other women?” I counter, crossing my arms.
“Other… What? Clove, there are no other women. There haven’t been since we met.”
“That’s not what I saw.”
“Saw where?” His frown has deepened even further, though I don’t think it’s directed at me. He looks a million miles away now, thinking hard.
To bring him back to reality, I pull my phone out of my pocket. Now it’s my turn to open my app and pull up the messages that came in yesterday. I flip the screen around, hold it out for him to see. At least today the incoming calls and spamming sext-messages from total strangers have calmed down enough that I can safely use it. Enough to show him this, at any rate.
He reads. With every line he reads, his eyebrows rise higher, and his jaw clenches. By the time he reaches the end of the messages, he looks furious, angrier than I’ve ever seen him. His fists are clenched at his sides, and his whole body trembles from the force of his fury.
“How fucking dare she.”
I swallow again. Against my better judgment, against all of my instincts, I believe that anger. He can’t be this good of an actor, no way. “Your ex?” I ask, a hesitant tremor in my voice.
He clenches my phone so tight in one fist that I’m almost afraid the screen will shatter. “How did she even…”
I gently pry my phone from his fingers, mostly to save its life. “Did she make up those conversations? Because some of them…” I pull open the one where he’s talking to another girl. Trouble sleeping? “Seem awfully familiar.” I lift one pointed eyebrow.
Zayne grimaces. “Some of them are real. Probably most of them, I don’t remember. But the dates are all wrong. Look.” He scrolls through his phone. It takes him a while, but he eventually locates one of the conversations, the one with CandyCane. Sure enough, it took place almost two years ago. Same with another one, shortly afterward, with XtraSaucy. In fact, almost all of the conversations are from that time period. The screenshots are real, identical to his account message history. All except for the dates which had been carefully, meticulously altered.