by JD Hawkins
Once we’re done, I drive us both back to our apartment and try to steer the conversation away from talk about maternity leave and baby showers by asking Lorelei more questions about what’s going on in her own life. I’ve spent so much time with Nate recently that I’ve missed a lot. She’s reluctant at first, too concerned about my state of mind and well-being, but once I convince her that I need the distraction and I want to get caught up, there’s no stopping her.
From the drive, to the walk up to our apartment, to the point at which we’re sitting in the living room with a couple of drinks (mine non-alcoholic, of course) she gives me a full checklist of her thoughts. From her indecisiveness about changing her hair color, to the book she’s reading about psychopaths, to the intern at work who she’s sure likes her but is six years her junior. It’s a relief to listen, to feel like I’m being a good friend again.
Eventually, talk turns to her favorite topic: the Bad Boy. I groan and pretend I suddenly have stuff to do, but she ignores me and continues to expound on his virtues (which as far as I can tell are just having a hot voice and talking about sex) as if it’s for my own good.
“I can’t believe you still haven’t even checked him out, Jessie. Seriously.”
“I plan to keep it that way. The last thing I need is another asshole in my life.”
Lorelei sighs. “He’s so not an asshole.”
“He sounds just like one,” I tell her.
“Owning your sexuality is practically the first commandment of feminism!”
“I don’t think that’s exactly correct, but I guarantee you he is not a feminist,” I snort. “He’s a predator.”
“Either way, he’s talking sense! That’s why you have to hear him for yourself,” Lorelei says, her voice getting more excited as she pulls out her phone, jumps up from her chair and sits next to me, squashing me against the armrest.
“Ugh,” I moan, “really?”
“Yes. Let me just show you this one… No, this one… Wait…this one – oh this one was amazing.”
I let out a deep sigh and resign myself to my fate as Lorelei starts the video and holds it in front of us. The video loads and a sculpted torso, its lines accentuated by the side-lighting in the semi-darkness, comes into the shot. I suppress a laugh and watch.
“You can spend a lifetime trying to figure the opposite sex out. You can read books, experiment, travel the world, and still feel like they’re speaking a language you don’t get…”
Something immediately feels wrong. Something about this video. His voice compels me, not so much what he’s saying, but the way he’s saying it. It feels familiar. The rhythm, the cadence, the intonation. I put it down to whatever it is that’s made him popular and continue watching.
“You can learn the hard way, pick up the bruises and read them like runes to get a little closer to the truth. You can let yourself be swayed by all the gurus, conmen, and sleazeballs out there who claim to have the answer…”
I let out a little snort at the irony, and Lorelei shoots me a quick, placating look. I turn back to the video, the sense of unease growing despite the ridiculousness of what he’s saying.
“You wanna figure out what the opposite sex wants? You already know. Listen to your body, your feelings, your primal urges. Get rid of all that surface bullshit, and learn to be an animal again. A creature of emotions and sensations and—”
“Stop the video,” I say suddenly.
“What? He’s just getting to the good part!”
“Stop it!”
Lorelei obliges and pulls back a little to look at me dubiously.
The hand I bring to my mouth is shaking, and I’m struggling to breathe properly. I feel my body go deathly cold.
“Jessie? What’s wrong?”
I look at her, and even though she’s right next to me on the couch, I feel like I’m calling at her from a thousand miles underground, the shock of realization pounding my consciousness into its deepest recess.
“It’s Nate,” I say, my voice trembling so much it turns the words into drawled moans with multiple syllables.
“What?” Lorelei says. “Forget about Nate, Jessie. Jesus. I thought you were having—”
“No,” I cry desperately, jabbing my finger at the phone for a few seconds before I can bring the next words to my lips. “Him. The ‘Bad Boy.’”
Lorelei gazes at me in confusion.
“It’s Nate. That’s him,” I add, the words tumbling out of my mouth almost involuntarily.
Lorelei’s eyes widen and she glances at her phone, then back at me.
“Are you sure?” she asks, her own voice full of shock now, too.
I take the phone from her and stare the image, surprise and incomprehension giving way to a rapidly boiling anger.
“Shit…” I whisper softly at the image.
“It might not be him,” Lorelei says, almost as if she’s pleading for it not to be so. “I mean, one six-pack looks a lot like another.”
“You see that mark there?” I say, my voice going from quavering mess to heated hiss. “That’s a scar he got when he was a kid, doing a dumb bike jump off a tool shed roof with my brother. I’ve spent months sleeping against that scar. Believe me, it’s him.”
“But the voice? It doesn’t sound like—”
“It’s him. That’s the voice he uses in…” I let out a spurt of air, still struggling to find my feet in this new reality. “In bed. That’s his fucking bed voice.”
I stare at the paused image, shaking my head as the cold chill down my spine turns into a fiery anger rising in my chest.
“Maybe it’s not so bad,” Lorelei says, taking the phone slowly from my hands like it’s a weapon she’s afraid of. “Maybe there’s more to it.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I say, jumping from the couch and pacing quickly up and down the room. “How can there be more to that than that?! He’s a pig!”
“Jessie, calm down, please,” Lorelei says, perched timidly on the edge of the couch as she watches me stride from one side of the room to the other.
“No. I’m not calming down. I just found out that the guy I’m pregnant by – one of my closest friends – is also an internet-sex-pervert-guru-philosopher-asshole. Calming down is not a viable option. Anger is.”
I stride so vehemently I almost get dizzy, my heartbeat and my breathing quickening to match my steps. I feel full of heat and frustration, a balloon ready to burst violently.
“Jessie,” Lorelei says, sounding almost frightened, “just…try to think about it rationally. You always knew he was a player, didn’t you? That he liked to screw around, have a lot of one-night stands. This is who he was, sure. But maybe not anymore? It’s not like—”
“What was that thing you said a few weeks ago?” I say, stopping suddenly and pointing at Lorelei. “We were in the kitchen, Nate was here. You said he stopped.”
Lorelei pauses for a second and screws her face up a little as she tries to remember. “’Bad Boy’? Yeah. He did.”
“And then he came back…” I say, feeling a whole new rush of turbulence shake through me.
“Yeah,” Lorelei says, seeing where I’m going.
“He came back,” I say, in a hushed whisper, before gritting my teeth. “While he was with me…the fucking…he was in the kitchen with us even and…”
The murky image comes into focus, pieces falling into place, and the facts are so clear, so stupidly, annoyingly clear that I feel like an idiot for missing them.
It’s too much. Too ridiculous. Fury, exasperation, and lucidity overwhelm me. I consider slamming the table over, throwing myself out of the window, and allowing myself to crumple to the floor all in the space of a split second, and in the end, all I can do is laugh. The laughter of someone giving up, despairing and hopeless.
20
Jessie
Lorelei does everything in her power to drag me along to a movie premiere that she’s been invited to cover for her gossip column, but it’s still not e
nough to make me go. Once I promise her for the thousandth time that I’m fine, and just need some time to myself, and a big tub of ice cream, and no, I won’t watch any more of his entries, Lorelei leaves me with the promise that she’ll call to check up on me. I nod gratefully and wait for the sound of the door shutting, then go straight to the computer.
And so began one of the worst nights of my life.
Cross-legged on the office chair, Haagen-Daaz on my lap, and lit only by the glare of the computer screen, I embark on a journey of a thousand humiliations. A stomach-churning ride through the darkest side of the man whose baby I’m pregnant with. There are hundreds of videos, each one seemingly more graphic, more explicit, than the last. A personal horror movie that lasts for hours. I try not to cry, but by the fourth my sweatpants are drenched with tears, and the tub of ice cream has melted from the heat of my misery.
I go numb as the man on the screen continues to talk in graphic terms about his sex life, struggling almost to believe it’s really Nate, but knowing somewhere deep inside that this is more Nate than the guy I felt I knew. Every word seems to push me further away from him, and every encounter he talks about makes me a little colder toward him, until I lose every sense of connection and compassion I built up with him. Years of friendship are torn away, and my feelings for him are overwritten by a steely, calm indifference, the best emotion I can muster for whoever the person on the computer screen is.
And that’s before I even get to the recent entries, the ones Nate made after we got together. I know I’m there because the comments all mention Nate’s ‘disappearance,’ and in the first video back there’s a difference, a new tone. Darker, sexier, more serious – and even more stunningly unbelievable.
If realizing for how long, and how seriously, Nate had been making these videos pushed me to the point of despair, seeing him make a video about fucking – while the only person he was fucking was me – makes me boil once again. Suddenly I’m out of my seat, screaming at the screen with more hardcore venom than any football fan in the country. I’m pacing up and down, my hands wringing an invisible Nate’s neck as he talks about the finer points of going down – in a video posted a day after he did it to me. There are other offenses, other examples, other humiliations, and I cringe so hard I almost turn inside-out, get so angry I elbow-drop my couch and throw punches at the pillows, find myself so shocked I have to rewind parts to double-check I’m not imagining this.
Around midnight, going through the last – the most recent – of his videos, I’m finally half-insane and distraught enough to answer back as the sound of his sordid thoughts fills the room. With the last video done, I sit back down in front of the computer, the sudden silence almost unbearable. I almost don’t notice that I’m crying again, given that it’s become almost irrelevant now, and through the blur of tears I stare at the giant play button.
This was the guy I thought I could have something real with. The guy who’s just described in no less than three minutes how to make sure a woman enjoys anal sex. The guy who has three videos about involving food in the bedroom, one giving tips on harmonious threesomes, and countless vlogs devoted solely to doling out sex advice or answering heaps of e-mailed questions. A guy who can talk for four minutes about nipples.
Actually, forget all that. I can deal with nipple-talk. That’s not what’s making me bawl my eyes out. That’s not the part that makes me want to throw this computer out the window, and then follow it. The problem is this: in every single video, Nate makes a point of mentioning how much he hates the idea of settling down, how much he loathes commitment. His devotion to staying single and free from accountability – it’s almost obsessive. The man on the screen hates marriage with a passion, fears it and detests it to the depths of his very soul. I mean, I always knew Nate didn’t believe in getting married, but to see him tear into stable, serious relationships at every opportunity, to see just how deep his dislike – bordering on fear – goes, is more than I can ever forget or forgive.
This is a guy I would have to be stupid to think could be anything more than a one-night stand – let alone a father, a husband. Even just thinking that thought makes it seem impenetrable, hard and cold. A slab of truth that chains me to it. Nate won’t ever be the guy I need him to be – and where does that leave me? Alone. Until this baby arrives, and then…
I drop my head onto the desk, forehead against the keyboard, and let the wave of sobs and hurt come to the fore again, draining me of what little energy and fight I have left.
Lorelei wakes me up in a frenzied panic, cooing when she notices the ice cream stains and the red marks on my face. I emerge from an uncomfortable dream in which I’m falling headfirst into a cave, and she helps me to my room and undresses me like I’m wasted, then sets me to bed.
“What time is it?” I say through the pounding in my forehead as she pulls my sweatshirt off me.
“Three AM.”
“Shit,” I moan, as she adjusts the blankets and I flop backwards. “I’ve got work tomorrow. My call time’s in five hours, I have to be on set by—”
“No you don’t! Jesus, you can’t go to work in this state. I’ll call them in the morning.”
I try to protest, but the heaviness in my eyelids pushes me back toward those gloomy dreams.
I wake up to the smell of coffee and the sound of Lorelei on the phone. For a few seconds I experience the bliss of nothingness – and then the memories of the night before enter my mind like annoying stabs. They’re quickly followed by the freight-train of fear that comes with being late for work. I throw the covers off and run out of my room toward the bathroom.
“Hold on, I’ll call you back, okay?” I hear Lorelei say in the other room, before she hurries over to stand in the doorway of the bathroom.
“I’m fucking late for work,” I say scrambling recklessly around in the sink to wash my face.
“No you’re not,” Lorelei says, calmly. I turn to look at her. “I called in sick for you.”
“What? But I can’t call in—” I stop myself. It only takes a deep breath to realize Lorelei did the right thing. I smile a little and hug her. “Thanks.”
When we break apart Lorelei looks at me like I’m a patient.
“I’ll make you a coffee, come on.”
Once I’m dressed and sitting in the living room, Lorelei brings me a big latte and I take it eagerly. She settles herself on the chair perpendicular to me, like a psychiatrist, and I let myself smile at the idea, but it disappears quickly. Smiles don’t stick when you have the kinds of worries I have.
I nod toward her computer. “Shouldn’t you be working now?”
“I can hand it in whenever,” Lorelei says casually. “Do you want to talk?”
I sip slowly from the coffee, but the mental fatigue and numbness seems to extend to my tastebuds.
“What’s there to talk about?”
“Jessie…” she says, making my name sound like a sigh. “You shouldn’t have watched those videos.”
“Yeah,” I say, nodding. “I should have. That’s the father of my child. The guy I thought I…” I don’t say the word. I can feel the tears building up in my sinuses already, and I’m scared even thinking the word would open the gates.
“I know it seems bad right now, Jessie, but Nate isn’t the worst person on the planet.”
I freeze halfway through bringing the cup to my lips in order to glare at Lorelei.
“Isn’t he? The guy has been making videos about his sex life for years now. He spends half the time talking about techniques and positions – some of which I wouldn’t even think were possible if he hadn’t done them with me – and the other half of the time talking about marriage like it’s an Illuminati plot to castrate all men. And the worst part is that he did it even while we were together. I mean, who does that? What kind of guy would do that?”
Lorelei looks at me sympathetically before shrugging.
“I don’t know. I admit it’s kinda weird. But at the same time, it’s
kinda not. So he played the field, never expected to commit, and did those videos. Maybe they were an ego-boost, maybe it was therapeutic for him – I don’t know. But something changed when he met you.”
“Pfft.”
“It did, Jessie. You can see it in his videos. And by the fact that he hasn’t spent the past few months picking up more girls in bars. He’s been coming here. To be with you.”
“It was just sex.”
“Was it? Do you really think so?”
I look at Lorelei and find that my breath is shuddering. It’s the hope that kills you. Is Lorelei trying to kill me?
“Still,” I say, shaking my head so hard my hair tosses against my face, “it’s fucked up. Am I really going to raise a kid with a guy who makes videos about fucking random women? I don’t think he wants to be part of a family.”
The doorbell rings and Lorelei gets up, holding her hand out to stop me from going.
“Well. It would certainly make the ‘birds and the bees’ talk a lot more interesting.”
I smile into my coffee cup. But not for long.
The voice at the door is too far to hear clearly, but I can tell from Lorelei’s concerned voice that it’s not good news. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, my muscles stiffen, and I suddenly start wondering why our apartment doesn’t have a fire escape.
“Hold up!” Lorelei says, her voice getting louder. “Wait!”
Nate steps into the living room, the sight of him literally taking my breath away. Lorelei follows close behind and looks from him, to me, then shrugs.
“I need to talk to you, Jessie,” he says. “Please.”
I look from Lorelei back to Nate, then back to Lorelei, my mind doing flips. Too many emotions and thoughts flooding through me for me to act on any of them. Nobody tells you about the calm that comes when you reach critical mass, nobody tells you about the zen you get when you feel like it can’t get any worse. I place my coffee cup slowly down on the table and, still looking at it, say, “It’s okay, Lorelei. He’s right. We should talk.”
