“Admit it,” I say. “You kind of liked it.”
“Well I agreed to it, didn’t I?” She pulls at my arm, and her touch sends shivers, that old familiar drug jolt. “Let’s go, please. Xander’s sweet, but I don’t think I can bear to see him again after that.”
“Wise girl,” I say, ruffling her hair.
She shrinks away. “I am so not your child,” she says, then stops in her tracks. “Wait, do we have—”
“That’s for me to know,” I say, “and for you to find out.”
Meredith pushes us up against the wall of the club and kisses us hard on the mouth. She tastes and smells like whiskey. She doesn’t know that we have a girlfriend sleeping back at home; the other me doesn’t know either.
We kiss her back, our breath leaving our body like whispers.
Out in the parking lot, I unlatch my bike from the post after mucking around with my combination. We walk the bike the mile back to the house we rent with two roommates: a boy we went to high school with and another best friend soon to be gone from our life.
In our bedroom we come upon the sleeping girlfriend. The other me shoots me a look; it’s Anne.
“What is she doing here?” she whispers.
I bend to watch her chest rise and fall. “We don’t love her anymore,” I say.
“Well, what is she doing in our bed then? Why did we kiss that girl? Why don’t we love her?” She sits on the edge of the bed. Anne doesn’t stir. We have an unspoken arrangement, Anne and me. We are in a holding pattern, scared to move too far away from what we’ve always known. We won’t say girlfriend but we will cuddle every night between the hours of two AM and ten AM. In the morning, her best friend and subsequent platonic life partner will knock on our door, let himself in. They will breakfast in my kitchen: eggs and sausage and almonds. They will ride their bike into the sun and will not stop riding until their legs are so sore they can barely stand. She has sores from her bike seat. She has come a long way from when I first knew her, and I have come a different way, and there is no meeting place on our path except for in those brief eight hours when we sleep.
“This is no way to love,” I say to myself. “We’re too different now.”
“Yeah,” the other me says, “but it’s nice to have someone to share your bed with every night. Someone who cares about you.”
“We’re happier without her,” I say. “Remember the good stuff, sure, but don’t forget that there’s a reason we broke up in the first place.”
“I remember. I was there the first time around.” She reaches up to touch a necklace that isn’t there. She will still miss him, Daniel, in a way that is not strictly platonic, strictly the grief of losing a long-time friend to a black hole of illness. She will not have changed her number yet. He will call her for years, will make her wish she could close herself up. I forgot, but I saved her from all that too. When he slipped his necklace around our neck: “I never want to see anyone hurt you.” But his was the greatest hurt of all, unintentional. I still startle when I think I see him in a crowd.
“There were other reasons we broke up,” I say. “Daniel was a conven-ient excuse.”
We wake Anne. She holds us both. “You said you loved me,” I whisper so low she can’t hear. “But it was all gone at this point, wasn’t it?”
She kisses me on all four cheeks. “Go to sleep,” she says. “It’s too late for talking.”
I press my fingers to my lips where I can still feel a buzz from Meredith’s kiss.
“Enjoy this part,” I say to the other me. “That girl we saw tonight? She’s going to change our world. She’s going to be our friend for a long time. We’ll stay for the duration of this one, I think. I could use a little waking up.”
Relived memories pass like the regular kind: hazy and over too fast. Here we are having a breakfast of granola with our very first love. Anne. Here, at a friend’s party where Meredith, the cutest girl we’ve ever met, offers us greens on every bowl.
“I’m sort of seeing someone,” I say.
“Me too,” Meredith says. “Some dude. He lives here too.”
Meredith and I don’t kiss again until that night, too drunk to think straight, when she follows me home from a party. I remember walking. I remember telling myself to let her sleep on the mattress in the other room. I don’t remember grabbing her by the hand and pulling her toward the empty bedroom. I don’t have to remember it this time, because I’m here again. I don’t drink as much but I make the same choice. The other me stands helpless on the other side of the room.
Again? she mouths at me. She tries to tug me back, whispers, we’re not a cheater.
But how does the saying go? Once and always.
Meredith pulls my tights half-off and buries herself between my legs and it’s been so damn long since I felt anything fresh for anyone—sweat goes stale after too long on the body, and sunshine dims each evening—that I grip my hair tight in my hands and pull as hard as I can, a punishment for love, for the fuck-up of fucking another woman while Anne sleeps soundly in the bedroom we’ve shared since her new girlfriend Cathryn and her roommate Dana started fucking. I’m repeating a cycle she can’t escape from. It’s inevitable that we will end and begin like this again and again. I need to cut the cycle open, like a goddamn bedbug cuts its mate.
I’m supposed to fall asleep here. I pretend. Meredith stops, says my name. Shakes me a little. Huffs. Then she kisses me on the mouth, on the cheek. She brings my arm down over her shoulders and curls into me.
“So fucking cute,” she says. “I’m in some fucking trouble with you.”
This time, in the morning, I’m standing with Anne as she screams at me. My sister and her husband are there to pick up some things from the garage.
“Drama drama drama,” my sister says.
“We didn’t do anything,” I say. “I passed out drunk.”
“Why are you lying?” the other me says, leaning down to gather my underwear from the floor where I must have kicked them off. Meredith is on her way out the door.
“It’s the script,” I say. “It’s what I’m supposed to say.”
She shrugs. “What difference does it make if it’s verbatim?”
“Yeah fucking right,” says Anne. She leaves the house in a huff, skids out of the driveway in a haze of upturned gravel.
That night, I tell my friends I don’t remember a thing. “You had sex,” they say. “Meredith told us.”
“Shit.” I’m driving. I grip the steering wheel. “I’m such an asshole.”
“You already knew that,” the other me says.
At home, Anne waits for me. We’re supposed to go to a party together, our first party in years. She’s realized that we’re not long for our love. She’s begun to give me mementos from our past, to remind me that I was once hers and hers alone.
“Nothing happened?” she says.
“No,” I say. “Apparently, something did happen. I’m sorry. I don’t remember a thing. I must have blacked out.”
We talk over things, the word girlfriend, what it means to share a bed with someone, whether the world will end at the next scheduled apocalypse. We agree to try this thing officially. The other me rolls her eyes.
“You said this part was fun,” she says.
“It’s beautiful,” I say. “Everyone makes so many beautiful mistakes.”
But each morning Anne leaves. She returns each night. She finds a new place. We move her in. Meredith hangs on by a thread. Sometimes, when we’re all together, Meredith gets misty-eyed and abandons ship, texts me something sweet once she’s gone.
I can’t, I text back. I show the texts to Anne.
The other me throws her hands out. “This is already a shit show,” she says. But she’s starting to like Meredith. Sometimes they take shots of whiskey together and flirt on the couch.
Meredith, myself, and I stake trash bags to the grass outside, wet them down. We slip and slide. Anne watches from the sidelines, teases us all about acting lik
e children. She mocks us when we drink too much. She doesn’t like to dance.
Meredith storms out one night, but this time when she texts it’s I won’t see you anymore. I don’t text her back. I know that she is serious. She doesn’t say things without meaning them.
“This isn’t working,” I say to Anne.
“It’s her, isn’t it?” Anne says.
“Yes and no. We keep trying but it’s just not there. You’re not here. I’m not here.”
“We’re at different places,” she says.
“This is absolutely the right decision,” the other me says. “Third time’s not quite the charm.”
Anne pushes her. “I like her,” she says. “She’s not as worn as you. Is that because she hasn’t fucked as many dudes?”
I purse my lips to keep from snarking back. Anne’s hurt. Even as we say goodbye, I’m itching for Meredith’s soft lips, for that leer that means I’m in for it. For those vulnerable nights when Meredith tells me, back turned, about depression. How it’s a thin word that will break if you push it too hard.
I call Meredith as soon as Anne leaves.
“I’m moving to Colorado in November,” Meredith whispers one night. That means we have four months, and it makes it sweeter, that end-date staring at us from the future. Meredith holds both of me. We imagine the day she’ll go. We feel comfortable with permanence as long as it’s temporary. We imagine ourselves kissing her as she loads herself into her car, our face wet and our voices strained at goodbye. We write a poem and call it “November.”
A month into our relationship, I pull Meredith into the kitchen and tell her that I love her because I know she wants to hear it and I can’t stop thinking about her. She flirts with other people and I don’t care because they’re just words and looks and it doesn’t impede what we have. She accuses me at every turn of loving other people.
But it’s her and her only. It’s her because she pulled me from a dangerous loop.
Then it’s still one month until our scheduled end, her move to Colorado, and I catch her with Cathryn. Meredith admits to it straightaway as we stand in the rain outside my house, hoodies up. The other me stands beside me. I tell Meredith to go.
“I mean, look at how you got together,” the other me says as we watch Meredith walk away down the sidewalk of our backyard.
“It’s not her leaving that gets to me,” I say.
“Then what is it?”
I shrug. “I’m hurt,” I say, “but it’s because she ruined what would have been a beautiful ending. She’s just a confused girl. She’s so young.”
“Not much younger than you.”
I shake my head. “No, she is,” I say. “She’ll grow up. But right now she’s young and scared, and I wouldn’t have known how to help her. It’s good that she’s going. I only wish she would have taken a different route.”
But down my back yard there is only one sidewalk. She pauses at the fence and looks back at me, her hoodie obscuring her red cheeks.
“Did we really love her?” The other me presses her hands against her chest, as though to warm her heart. “I can’t tell.”
“It’s hard,” I say. “I still don’t know.”
I grab hold of the other me’s hand. There’s only one path, and we’ve already traveled it.
Next thing, we’re in a garage apartment on Halloween. Across from us sits a butch woman in a Chick Magnet costume. We kiss her. We fade. Short and sweet.
“This next thing,” I say to the other me, “is something you may not understand.”
We’re in a room lit by the orange string of lights strung around its ceiling. Anne’s old roommate, Dana, stands naked at the foot of the mattress on the floor. She slaps a ruler against her open palm: Do you measure up? the ruler reads.
“Kiss her,” Dana says, motioning to Cathryn, Anne’s ex, the woman Meredith fucked. I kiss Cathryn. The other me furrows her eyebrow, pulls me away. Cathryn kisses Dana, the timid woman turned dominatrix-lite while I follow myself into the bathroom.
“What the fuck is this?” the other me says.
“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s revenge. It’s everything coming full circle.”
“It’s ugly,” she says. “It’s wrong.”
“No, there’s something beautiful in this,” I say. “It’s not immediate on the surface, but it’s a method of forgiveness.”
“Maybe sex shouldn’t be a vessel for forgiveness.”
“Sex can be whatever it needs to be. Sex can be whatever you want it to be. Sex can be nothing, even, if you play it right.”
I jerk away from myself. “You can’t judge things when you haven’t seen the whole story. You’ll see. You’ll know eventually. Sex isn’t about love all the time every time.”
She lets go and crosses her arms. “Shouldn’t it be?” she says, and I can’t tell if she’s telling or asking.
I shrug. “We’re not exactly the same people,” I say. “I can’t answer that for you.”
“Is this fun for you?” she says.
I think back, to the first time, the second time, the third time I slept with these two. A mess of memories. I thought, for a moment, I might find a routine with them both. But then the painful truth crept in: I wanted to forge my own path. If monogamy wasn’t for me, I wanted to find that on my own terms.
I never once thought monogamy wasn’t for me with Dover.
The truth of those threesomes with Cathryn and Dana: I wanted Dana, the woman who had never fucked me over, who had never slept with two of my exes, but in order to have sex with her, I had to have sex with Cathryn too. They were a matched pair even if Cathryn cheated on her. I was acutely aware that Cathryn was both superior and inferior to me simultaneously. That women chose to be with me in the light and her in the dark. That women got from her what they couldn’t get from me.
“It’s not particularly fun,” I say to myself. “But you never know if you don’t try.”
One thing I was always proud of: I knew what I really needed, and maybe I tried to need something different, maybe I tried many things, but I was always honest, in the end, with myself.
“I guess,” she says. “I’m so tired. Doesn’t this get tiring?”
She’s still the relationship one. The one who wants a promise before the naked glimpse.
I remember not-sleeping. I remember crying until my cheeks burned. I remember lying on my wood floor and playing the same song over and over. Heartbreak is terrible and wonderful and numbing, and I missed it when I was stable.
“It’s hard,” I say.
“Then why not stop?”
“Because it’s all hard. Not just this. Everything. Being alive,” I say. “It’s hard, but it’s what you know and so you go with it. Go with it.”
“I’ll go with it,” she says. “If it seems like something worth going with.”
I peek out the door. She’s right; I didn’t enjoy this night, or the night after, or the night after. I wanted complicated and I got complicated.
I grab her hand. “You’re right,” I say.
My muscles ache. My mind’s numb, not just my body.
“I need a break,” I say. “This is the part where I need to be by myself.”
“Let’s do that then,” she says. “Let’s be by ourselves.”
We spend the week we would have been with Cathryn and Dana writing, reading. We don’t go to class; what’s the point, when we’ll only have to leave again and forget all we learned about Physical Anthropology and Statistics. We spend evenings with friends who will later move away.
One night I buy a gram of weed and place it into a metal tin. FOR DOVER, I write on it. FROM YOUR SECRET ADMIRER. We drive by her house and leave it on her doorstep. She might think it’s creepy. She’ll probably think it’s a prank being played by her friends. But she’ll smoke it nonetheless.
I try to see her through the front window, but there’s no one home.
At home I show the other me her picture on Facebook. “This is it,�
�� I say. “This is her. Maybe you can do it different, when you get there. Maybe you can keep from fucking it up.”
She tries to smile. “If I’m you,” she says, “doesn’t that mean we’ll make the same mistakes?”
This is where I said I would leave her. But I don’t want to let her go. I stay a little longer.
We go to the astronomy center for their monthly star party. We lay on a blanket and name the constellations. She remembers many that I can no longer name. I know only a few she hasn’t yet learned.
“What do we do, in the future?” she asks.
“It’s a surprise,” I say. I can’t tell her about the numerous shitty desk jobs, the two years of cleaning houses, writing essays on the side, in stolen hours, losing friends to make time, trimming the fat to make time. No more painting. No more running. Until we catch a break: one book deal, then two, then a third. Dover’s celebratory dances. Then the stress. Then the disappointment that success did not fill the void. Then a man who came along and made me feel desired again. Then the need for a wreckage that would move the rock blocking me from more, from new ideas. A stalemate of a house. Another advance, this one enough to pay for the procedure but no more than the one trip through.
At the end of our week, myself and I are watching a movie on my old beat-up couch, and I get a phone call from a guy who was in one of my classes, someone I used to buy weed from and flirt with when there wasn’t anyone else in the picture. The tattooed misfit. Jeremiah asks me over. I look over at the woman who is both me and not-me. She won’t like this one: no-emotions, hardly even a kiss between us.
I try to hold on, but I feel us slipping into his apartment. And if we don’t, if I let us keep ourselves from going there, we won’t get to our final destination.
Because I don’t want to shield her from the ugliness that is sex with the wrong people—because I want to instill in her that regrets will not ruin us—I keep us there long enough that she can see our mistake, long enough that she can look him in his face, then go. Go again. Go again. Go again. Jeremiah and Michael and Grayson and Eliot.
Uncanny Magazine Issue 32 Page 8