I was calm and sure of myself as I confronted him. He looked at me and said, “Have you ever loved somebody and wanted to make them happy? Sometimes you do something against your own basic morals because you don’t want to disappoint that one person you care so much about. Somehow, you just can’t get the person you are closest to to hear what you’re saying or how much you are hurting yourself trying to make them happy. As you continue to struggle with living with yourself, you ignore the voice in your head which keeps telling yourself you are doing things you promised yourself long ago you would never do.”
He then looked at me with those blue-gray eyes, which seemed to cut right through my soul.
“No, I guess you wouldn’t. By the way, how are things going with Rick?”
I don’t know whether it was his words, his eyes, or the smile on his face letting me know he understood me better than I thought he did that cut me the hardest and the deepest. Before I could recover from the wound, he continued, “The saddest part is you know there is still something inside of you that other people can’t seem to see because they only see you as some sort of property on somebody’s arm. But how does a watch tell its owner, whom it loves, that it wants to be more than a prized possession without losing the love of the person it is cherished by? Even being a watch and being close to them is better than not being near them at all.”
One time at Kristin’s house, I had seen him naked as he was getting out of the shower, but I had never seen him stripped bare until that night. I actually started to see what Kristin saw in him, and I think he knew he had finally won me over as somebody who understood him. We stopped pretending we were in control of our lives and we were happy with how our mid to late twenties were going. We became friends. We didn’t judge each other or any of our life choices. I was glad to have him in my life.
A couple of weeks later he had a piece published in The New Yorker. It was a satirical essay about New York’s elite and their treatment of the poor. The older rich date the younger poor, but it’s not considered prostitution because of terms like “dating” and “relationship”. Sex is being exchanged for fancy dinners, jewelry, and gifts of money. And if this isn’t enough sex for the elite, and they look for it on the streets where sex is exchanged for actual money, then the women trying to pay for their basic needs by selling the only thing they have left, their bodies, are thrown in jail while the rich get off.
Jack was praised and condemned for his work. He was then praised for his condemnation. I thought it was funny and extremely well written. The rest of proper society didn’t know how to take him at parties. On the one hand, they wanted to be seen talking to him because of the success of the article. On the other hand, he was an outsider, who they had been kind enough to allow in their society, and he returned the favor by mocking them.
I don’t know what Kristin thought of it. I don’t think she took it personally as an insult to their relationship. In some ways, his growing fame made her stock go up in society, but he was quickly growing out of her shadow and was becoming her equal in the power couple. She enjoyed the fact he was still younger than her and he was becoming important. It meant she snagged a big, younger fish.
While he was being ostracized by the society that was proclaiming him a genius, he began to spend more time with just me and Kristin. He would go on double dates with me and Rick. He would do jokes about Rick, which would go over his head. Kristin and I would try not to laugh. Rick being Rick never got it.
I probably shouldn’t have laughed at the jokes and insults, but a part of me felt Rick had them coming to him, even if I thought I loved him.
It was around this time that Jack’s relationship with Kristin started to fall apart. I don’t know when or how the trouble started. The first sign I saw of it was one time when we were hanging out without Rick. I was complaining about my sex life. Kristin offered to loan Jack’s services out to me. She may have tried to pass it off as a joke, but you could tell from the look on Jack’s face he didn’t take it as a joke. He was already dealing with people thinking his relationship with her was that of a male escort and a rich woman. He didn’t need her putting him down.
I tried my best to make him feel better about what she said by refusing the offer, but that doesn’t really help anything. She continued with the argument of how good he is, as if that would make him feel better. He just said, “Well, I don’t think I would be much good. I’m not a prized horse you put out to stud. My services are only good for those I care about.”
A few weeks after that incident, he gave me a manuscript he had written. All he said was, “I think you’ll like this. It’s about a girl torn between a guy that looks like Channing Tatum and a guy who looks like Adam Levine.”
He never said it, but I think he wrote it about me. The Channing guy was Rick. I was blinded by his classic good looks and muscular body. I couldn’t see everything else he was doing to me. The pain was worth the pleasure of having that body to comfort me. While I was dating the man I shouldn’t, there was a less classically good looking man, who was really hotter, standing in the wings waiting for me to make a decision before he would save me.
Whether I was supposed to or not, I gave it to a friend in the publishing industry. That’s when he became really famous.
I did it because I cared for him. I thought it would be my way of saving him from the gigolo image he had gotten. If he could escape being just a watch and become an actual person, I felt like there was hope for me, too. Life had another way of working it out.
As his fame grew, he started to come out of Kristin’s shadow and be seen as his own person. Younger women were hitting on him. They had fallen in love with the character he had probably based on himself. Then older women started to pursue him, too. When who you are with determines your value in a society, he was a commodity that others wanted in order to improve their own stock.
He tried to make things work out between him and Kristin. He says their relationship ended because she destroyed the beauty he once saw in her. To compete with the younger women, she turned to plastic surgery. He told her he liked her the way she was. She couldn’t ever seem to hear the words he was saying. He said that was what hurt the most about it all. You love somebody, and you know they are doing something to try to please you. But the person is so intent on what they think you want and need that they miss the point entirely.
He told me, “My growing fame is hurting a person I honestly care about. It started with the article in The New Yorker. The perception of me was changing in society, so she tried to change to fit how people saw me. Now my novel has hurt her even more. She’s changing to be with somebody who hasn’t changed. But there’s nothing I can do to make a woman feel beautiful when she thinks she has to change to make me happy.”
He said he went from being a watch to a golden statue of a god where unwanted sacrifices were being made. He only wanted to be human and to be loved for being human. He just couldn’t get anybody else but me to see him that way.
As his relationship with Kristin was imploding upon itself, I was having issues with Rick. We had been dating for two years. I knew the relationship wasn’t perfect. I saw how imperfect it was once I read Jack’s manuscript about me, even though he wouldn’t admit it was about me. He could point out how I went on diets just to please Rick, or how I would accept his cheating on me because I wasn’t a good enough girlfriend. Two years of my life had been spent with Rick. I didn’t want to throw it away, especially when I thought it could still be fixed.
Part of me also didn’t want to admit that Jack saw me and my relationship for what it really was. He came from a middle class income and didn’t attend any of the best schools. In a lot of ways, he was very common, even if he held romantic ideals about being a gentleman and what it was like to be in the upper class.
As my mid-twenties were starting to become my late-twenties, time became more important to me. There was a part of me that thought getting pregnant might help push Rick towards the marriage is
sue. Instead it was more like the nail in the coffin.
I was single and pregnant. Jack was still seeing Kristin, even if their relationship was rocky. He made sure I knew that, even though he was there for me throughout the pregnancy. He would go with me to doctor’s appointments and other things. When the doctor or the nurse would think he was the father, he would tell them he was just a friend. When they left the room, he would turn to me and say, “’Friend’ sounds a lot better than “the man who is sleeping with my best friend.”
When I was six months pregnant, I attended a wedding alone. Rick and I had broken up by this point. He apparently didn’t like a woman who was gaining weight from carrying his child.
Jack was there with Kristin, but they were quickly becoming a couple in name only. Everybody knew they were breaking up, even if they hadn’t made it official yet. Whether it was to escape being with a woman he no longer loved, or to be with me, he asked me to dance. He didn’t just ask me to dance. He came over to me and held out his hand for me to take. He kissed it and said, “May I have the honor of dancing with the most beautiful woman in the room?”
“I’m the most bloated woman in the room and could possibly be the fattest woman in the room.”
“Yes, but you’re still the only natural woman in this place, which I will take any day over implants and liposuction.”
His smile and eyes were dazzling.
I got up and started dancing with him. He held me close to him, but he held me and danced with me like he was doing the waltz while everybody else was just slow dancing.
“I’m already knocked up, Jack. We don’t need to dance and bring attention to ourselves.”
He leaned in close to me and whispered, “I hate to tell you this, but we lost our reputations a long time ago with our actions with our most recent companions. Don’t you know I’m the Genius Gigolo?”
“And I’m the Socialite Slut.”
“If we weren’t destined for each other, then true love is just a horrible myth we grow up believing in.” He said it with his typical playful smile, where you can never tell if he is telling the truth or making fun of the world we’re living in.
I wanted him. It was not that he was just kind and funny and handsome. He was charming and graceful. He was the last of a breed of men who could be called a gentleman. Something I had never really seen in the social scene in New York. And I don’t think he had seen it either. He just grew up believing in an ideal he was excluded from being a part of because of the family he was born into. When he started to become rich and successful, he wanted rich people to be like he imagined them to be and not how they really are.
“If I hadn’t been with Rick the night you met Kristin, would you have chosen me over her?” I asked it with the courage I had been lacking the past few months. The risk of losing him was now less than the chances I could actually be with him.
“Well, now, Miss Catherine! That is a loaded question. If I didn’t know you any better, I would say your hormones are out of balance. Is it true the female sex drive increases during pregnancy?” He smiled at me as if he was playing dumb to any feelings he might have for me.
“Word on the street is you two are breaking up.”
“Lies. They’re all lies. We have no intention of breaking up, especially since we officially broke up last night. But don’t let that get out. We are at one of the biggest weddings of the year. News of the break-up and now my dancing with you would overshadow this glorious event. Anyway, what would people say about me?”
“Probably that you have a sick, sexual desire to make love to a pregnant woman.”
“At least they can’t claim I got you drunk to take advantage of you and to advance my career.”
“No, you wouldn’t be taking advantage of me.”
I look him in the eyes. He looks back at mine. He chooses his words carefully.
“I’ve already destroyed one beautiful woman by dancing with her at a wedding. I’m not going to take this opportunity to do the same to her best friend.”
“Even if it would be a chance to correct your poor life choices during the first dance?”
“I’ve got rules, Cathy. I won’t date the best friend of one of the women I’ve dated. It’s bad enough having women discuss my performance in bed with their best friends. I don’t need women comparing their experiences.”
“But you can be my friend and draw attention to us by asking me to dance?”
He smiled. “If the pregnant woman would rather sit alone at a table and prove to the world she is a social outcast, I can take my humanitarian efforts elsewhere.”
Even though I knew he was joking, there was a truth behind his eyes. I gave up on him being a substitute father to my unborn child, or at least on us being a couple.
“No, I would rather have you stay.”
He kissed me on the forehead. “Good. You truly are the most beautiful woman in the room. I don’t think I could put up with everybody else’s attitude tonight.”
We continued to dance, but we talked less. We were enjoying the feeling of being able to touch each other and what could have been if we had made other choices in life.
My son will be five this year. Jack has always been there for me and my son. He has taught him to play catch and to pee standing up. He has been closest thing my son has ever had to a father. He’s changed dirty diapers and given me breaks when I needed to sleep or just relax from taking care of somebody else. He was also there for adult conversations when baby talk started to take its toll on me.
I pointed that out to Jack one time. He said, “You’re my best friend. I help you take care of your child. And we don’t have sex. That might sound like marriage to you, but I see no reason to make it legal and get the government involved in our lives. It will just screw up everything.”
I can’t tell what he wants. Maybe he’s conflicted and wants something that violates his rule. I only know I haven’t dated anybody else. I don’t want to be in a relationship if he should ever change his mind.
Even with the women he has dated, I don’t know what he wants. I haven’t met a woman yet who doesn’t think he should be in a relationship that would lead to marriage. Knowing his independent streak, he could be resisting marriage because it is what everybody else wants for him, or he is waiting to be with somebody he won’t date because of his rules.
I’ve dated bad boys in the past. He is the worst.
Chapter Three
Jack and I have existed in what he has called “The Phantom Friend Zone” for the past few years. We’re more than friends, but we’re not “more than friends.”
On his thirtieth birthday, he got drunk. It’s not just that he got drunk. He got drunk and drunk dialed Kristin. She called me and told me to pick him up.
I had seen him earlier that night. I had gone out to celebrate with him, but I had to leave because being a mother doesn’t really allow me to take a night off. Apparently, that was the case with the rest of his friends, too.
When I found him, he was severely drunk. He wasn’t just celebrating. He had been drinking to forget. I put his arm around my shoulder and helped to walk him out. He pointed out two women at the bar and said, “I could have had a threesome with them, but it seems some woman has poisoned my heart to where I only want her.”
I took him back to my place. I didn’t want to leave him alone like this. I stripped him down to his underwear and tried to put him in bed.
“I need to pee.”
I helped him to the bathroom. He leans over the toilet and is doing the best he can to stand there. I notice his massive erection, which is popping out of the top of his boxer-briefs. I free him from his underwear and point him at the toilet, even though he is fighting against me.
“Don’t tell Cathy you saw me this way.”
He doesn’t know I’m standing beside him. I try to comfort him. “She won’t find out. Just go to the bathroom so I can put you to bed.”
His dick starts to get a little softer as he starts
to pee. I flush the toilet, pull his pants back up, and wash our hands. As I’m walking him back to bed, he garbles out, “It’s my birthday. How did I end up alone?”
I lay him down on the bed. “Shhh. Just go to sleep, Jack. It will all be better tomorrow.”
“When I was a kid, I thought my birthday wishes didn’t come true because I didn’t have enough candles. How many candles do you need before your wishes finally come true?”
I start to run my fingers through his hair and caress his chest. “I don’t know. What did you wish for?”
“I wished I had chosen Cathy over you that night, or at least that we hadn’t had sex. Things would be so much easier now.”
As he’s confessing things I’ve longed to hear, he doesn’t know I’m taking care of his drunk body because of how I feel for him. I helped him pee knowing that is how he needed me at that moment, just like he once helped me change diapers, play with a fussing kid while I tried to sleep, or brought me dinner when I was too much of a mess to go out in public from taking care of a baby all day.
As he babbles on about me, I hold him tight. I take in the smell of his skin and am thankful for this one chance to have him like this where he doesn’t have to think about what is right or wrong. I kiss his neck and shoulders and know this is the only time I will ever have to put my arms on his chest or to wrap them around his waist.
He confides in me that he drank vodka tonight knowing it would act the same as Viagra on him. He tells me Kristen (me) is his booty call. He begs me (thinking I’m Kristin) to take advantage of him so he can pretend it is actually me. I refuse him, even though he protests it’s his birthday. He’s entitled to birthday sex.
I hold him even closer as I begin to cry. I’m loving him as I’ve always wanted to and as I’m finding out he is wanting me to, as well. I don’t take advantage of him in this state. Instead, I grant his birthday wish and love him as myself without the sex.
His Rules Page 2
