The Lie (20 page)

I was taking
quite possibly the most foul shit of my lifetime, induced by hours of hard drinking the night prior, when my father called me. He rarely called me so I immediately wondered what the reason might be for that call. I then remembered my drunken decision to call him and inform him that I had decided to refuse the life laid out for me. I couldn’t remember if I was that specific in the message I left but my question about how much I had actually divulged on his voice mail was answered when he asked what I had wanted to talk about.

Although I was more than certain that I ultimately could not follow the same path he had, once again I felt overwhelmed by calm, as if merely having made the decision made the telling of it to my father seem less pressing. I lied to my father and told him that I had been thinking about getting a new car, which wasn’t entirely untrue, and sought his advice in the matter. His most recent purchase was a Range Rover, which he seemed to like, but he recommended that I live it up while I still had my youth. He reminded me that the semester was nearing its end and he asked me to delay the purchase of a new car because he was actually thinking of getting me one he thought I would like as a gift to let me know how proud he was of what I had acheived to date, which was little more than doing exactly what had been expected of me.

He ended the call by telling me that he loved me, which was more rare than receiving a phone call from him at all. I quickly remembered ending the voice mail I left him with a similar “I love you,” which must have sparked some latent paternal emotion in him. My decision was unchanged, but it remained untold at the end of the conversation.

I hung up the phone and was preparing to wipe when I received another call, this one from Kyle seeking my advice. He explained that Heather had called him the day before and invited him to dinner. He questioned her motives, wondering if she could possibly want to get back together with him. The mention of this possibility brought an excitement to his voice that worried me. His basic question to me was how to conduct himself in order to make their reunion the most likely outcome. I finished my shit and sat on the toilet without wiping for the remainder of the conversation.

I asked him why he would ever have even the most remote interest in welcoming back a whore who sucked another man’s dick while they were together. He seemed to think that enough time had passed since that event to allow for some fundamental change in Heather. I tried to explain to him that people don’t change, they just have momentary steps outside of their true character, isolated actions contrary to their true nature. If she seemed like a changed person it was due to one of these moments. Kyle maintained that the dick she sucked might have been the isolated action and her true character was what he was seeing now. I had no rebuttal. It was like arguing against the existence of God with a born-again Christian. If people are unwilling to see reason, there’s not much that can be said to open their eyes.

Nonetheless I gave it my best attempt. I tried to take him back to the moment when he was made aware of Heather’s transgression. I attempted to conjure those old feelings of betrayal and hatred that had made Kyle capable of fucking the whore I set him up with. It was a fruitless endeavor.

I then tried logic. I reminded Kyle that he currently had a girlfriend who was better suited for him in every way than Heather ever would be, maybe than any woman he would ever meet would be. Rationally speaking she was easily in the top 5 percent of the most compatible women in the world for Kyle. Surprisingly, Kyle couldn’t argue this point. He agreed with me, but cited that Erin just didn’t make him feel the same way Heather did.

When I brought to his attention that in order to become involved with Heather again he would have to smash Erin’s heart into dust, he said it would be difficult but he would do what he had to do. I tried to make him understand how bad he would be hurting Erin, not because I cared about her but because I knew he did. I likened what she would have to go through emotionally to what he felt when Heather sucked another man’s dick. He said he fully understood the emotional impact it would have on Erin but claimed it would be worse for her if he stayed with her never being able to be truly happy and always wondering what could have been with Heather.

I attempted one final line of reasoning by comparing Heather to the devil, which neither Kyle nor I believed in, but he understood the metaphor—pure evil, but an evil with a mind and motive behind its actions. I asked him if the devil asked him to dinner would he attend. He laughed but I pressed the point. If you were asked to dinner by someone you knew ultimately was a bad person or had hurt you in some way that was so profound you had become someone different, as I maintained Kyle had by citing the evidence of his newfound ability to have a one-night stand and his newfound inability to be happy with a girl who was perfect for him, would you ever want to give that person the opportunity to lay another trap for you? The answer seemed clear to me, but Kyle dismissed my analogy as ridiculous.

At that point I questioned why he called me at all if the advice he sought was so easily tossed aside. He told me he was nervous and he realized he really did want to get back together with Heather and had hoped for my blessing if that was to be the outcome of the night. I assured him that he would always be my friend, no matter what horrible cunt he ended up with. If he wanted my blessing in the matter of choosing a slut to end his life with, it would have to be Erin. I could not in good conscience tell him that I thought it was a good idea to be involved with Heather in any way.

I gave one final attempt at breathing some sanity into his clouded mind by asking him if he knew of her excessive drug use. He claimed he knew she used drugs recreationally but didn’t think her use was excessive and he supposedly understood that some people in college have to go through such a phase of personal exploration and in his mind there was nothing wrong with it. I further reminded him that it might very well have been that so-called recreational drug use which led her to sucking another man’s dick and quite possibly a whole host of other whorish activities that Kyle had no idea about.

I ended the conversation by wishing Kyle good luck, and explaining that that meant I hoped Heather was taking him to dinner to ask him to help her move or to tell him that she was pregnant with another man’s child or that she was getting married, et cetera. I restated my final position on the matter, which was that Heather was the worst thing that had ever happened to Kyle’s life since I’d known him, and I warned him to be careful above all else. If she did initiate some kind of conversation about reuniting, I asked that before he made a decision he give me an opportunity to talk to him one more time. He promised he would and he thanked me for talking with him.

I hung up the phone, wiped my ass, and thought for a few more moments about the possible outcomes of Kyle’s dinner with Heather before going back into my bedroom and refucking the slut I had fucked the night before who was still in my bed. After I fucked her I tried to initiate a conversation with her about the nature of people and if they’re capable of change, but she seemed uninterested so I made her suck my dick and tried to imagine what it would be like to truly love a woman as Kyle seemed to. I was unsuccessful.

For me, the lie of love, like so many other lies in which most people found false value—God, morality, the idea of right and wrong, et cetera—melted away in the flame of truth and reason.

That night,
in terms of making mistakes, was one of the worst ones in my entire fucking life, hands down, no-holds-barred, no questions asked. There were a few times in my relationship with Heather when I had the opportunity to just walk away and everything would have been fine. That dinner was absolutely one of them and, of course, I fucking didn’t.

I had to tell Erin that I was going out with Brett. Brett and I hadn’t hung out as much as we used to since I started spending virtually every night at Erin’s place. I used that as the reason why he wanted to hang out. I also told her that we might end up getting drunk and I might end up staying at his place. I didn’t even know why Heather wanted to go to dinner with me but I wanted to prepare for all possibilities. Erin was completely fine with it, suspecting nothing and completely trusting me. I really did love her. Fuck. I still can’t believe I fucked that up as bad as I did.

Heather picked me up at McElvaney at seven, like she said she would, and took me to Nick and Sam’s, the same place I took her once to try to show her how much I cared about her and that I was capable of doing something nice for her. I didn’t know if her motives were the same or if she just liked the place or if she wasn’t creative enough to figure out a place of her own or what the deal was. She looked fucking incredible. Her tits were pushed up and she looked like she might have even lost a little weight or something. She was wearing these tight jeans that made her ass look like you just wanted to take a fucking bite out of it. I liked having sex with Erin a lot, but I don’t think I ever had the same kind of visceral, animalistic urge to just fuck her brains out that I had almost every time I looked at Heather and especially on that night. Despite all of her faults, that’s one thing Heather knew how to do really well—look like she wanted you to fuck her.

The ride over was kind of weird. Neither of us said much. It was small talk mostly. She said, “How have you been?”

I said, “Fine. How about you?”

She said, “Pretty good. How is your girlfriend doing?” This was an interesting question. She brought it up fairly early in the night, which I thought could have meant one of two things: (1) She was trying to remind me that I had a girlfriend and this dinner had nothing to do with anything remotely approaching a romantic night out with her, or (2) she was hoping I didn’t have a girlfriend so she could fuck my brains out, as her wardrobe indicated.

I said, “She’s doing pretty good,” with just enough hesitation to leave open the possibility for Heather to interpret what I said as indicating a hidden problem with the relationship.

I said, “How about you? How’s the boyfriend?”

She said, “We haven’t been together for a while now.”

I said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

She said, “Don’t be. It’s all for the best. I kind of found out he was like a serious asshole in the end.”

I said, “I see.”

And then we didn’t say much until we got to Nick and Sam’s. Once we got there we were seated at the same table we ate at when I took her there. I wondered if that was coincidence or if she had called ahead and asked for the table specifically or something. She didn’t mention anything about it so I assumed it was coincidence.

After we sat down and ordered there was a little more small talk. She asked me how my classes were going and pretended to care and I asked her how her sorority shit was going and pretended to care. I wanted to just flat-out ask her why she decided to take me to dinner out of the blue, but I knew that would probably make me seem desperate or overly anxious to her, which might turn her off, and then whatever chance I might have had to get her interested in me again would be blown. So I waited.

It was sometime just after we got our food and started eating that she started the conversation that would ultimately lead to everything going down the shitter. She said, “So, like, I know you’re probably like, ‘Why’d she take me to dinner?’ and I don’t know if you’ve been thinking about me at all since we saw each other and like had that conversation or anything, but I’ve been thinking about you like a lot.”

I said, “I’ve thought about you, too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Like, what have you thought about when you think about me?”

“You’re the one who took me out to dinner. I think it’s on you to tell me what you’ve been thinking about first.”

“I don’t know. I guess like I’ve just been thinking a lot about how things used to be when we first started going out and like I miss that, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“So what have you been thinking?”

“The same thing pretty much. I miss how things were, how they used to be.”

“And do you think that like we could ever have that again or…”

“Are you asking me to get back together with you?”

“I don’t know. Is that what you want?”

“I’m asking you here. I never wanted us to be apart. You were the one who ended it. So now I’m asking you if you want to get back together.”

“What if I do?”

“Then that’s another whole conversation, but if you’re not absolutely sure this is what you want, it’s not even worth starting that next conversation.”

“Okay, I’m sure. It’s what I want, Kyle. What do we do now?”

“And you’re sure this isn’t just because you and your boyfriend broke up and you’re just lonely?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, if we’re talking about me breaking up with Erin and us getting back together, you have to be more sure than that. I don’t want to break her heart for you and then two months from now you’re cheating on me with some other frat guy.”

“I promise you that will never happen again. I know I never really said I was sorry for it, but I am. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done in my entire life and like if I could take it back, Kyle, I totally would.”

“I know.”

“So are we like a couple again or what? How does this work?”

I was surprised I was thinking rationally at that point at all. I wanted to take Heather back to my dorm room and kiss her and hug her and fuck her and wake up with her and fuck her again and just spend the whole day in bed with her and not think about anything else. But the situation demanded some practical thinking. I actually thought to myself that I might need some leverage if I was going to get back together with her. I actually planned out what I thought was a minor power play. I was so fucking stupid. Heather had me wrapped around her fucking finger and I thought I was gaining some kind of psychological advantage by saying, “So everything’s out in the open now—how you feel, how I feel—but I’m not entirely sure this is what I want. I’m going to need some time to think about this, and if we are going to get back together, I’m obviously going to have to talk to Erin.”

She said, “I know. I don’t want to rush you or anything. You have to like be completely comfortable with this, too. So you do what you have to do.”

We finished eating and talked a little more about the possibility of us getting back together. At one point she said, “I promise you if we get back together it’s going to be the best makeup sex of your life.” I’m pretty sure I got an immediate hard-on.

At the end of the night she drove me back to McElvaney and said, “Do you want me to come in?”

And I fucking wanted that more than anything, but I remembered how Heather made me feel when she cheated on me. And I realize it was all semantics if I was going to break up with Erin anyway, but I never wanted to make anyone feel like that, least of all her. And this didn’t tip me off at all, by the way. I wouldn’t fuck Heather because I remembered her making me feel like I wanted to die when she sucked some other guy’s dick. That didn’t even make me pause for a second and think about the fact that I was about to get right back into the shitstorm with her.

So Heather left. I told her I’d call her in the next few days after I had thought about everything and decided what I wanted to do. I sat on my bed for about thirty minutes, thinking alternately about fucking Heather and breaking up with Erin. My roommate wasn’t around—I think he was rushing or pledging or something—so I took the opportunity to jerk off once to calm myself down. I was pretty worked up from thinking about having sex with Heather and I knew I needed to be rational.

It didn’t take me that long to figure it out. Like a dipshit, I decided to get back together with Heather. I knew it was going to be one of the worst and most difficult things I had ever done, but I had to break up with Erin and be with Heather. For some sick fucking reason I thought that was the only way I could be really happy, like I was when Heather and I first started dating.

And once my decision was made, I started getting nervous and thought I might get scared and not be able to break up with Erin if I waited until the next morning, so I walked across campus to her apartment and rang the doorbell.

Erin answered it and said, “Hey. You and Brett called it early, huh? Weren’t there any skanks for him to nail? Or did he already nail them all and call it a wrap?”

I walked in and sat down on the couch and said, “We have to talk about something,” and that same feeling that seeped down my neck and into my gut when Heather told me she sucked another guy’s dick came back. My face didn’t get hot like it did with Heather, but my stomach felt horrible and I started sweating.

Erin said, “What’s wrong? You look terrible. Are you okay?”

I said, “I don’t know how to tell you this.”

She said, “You know you can tell me anything. I’ll love you no matter what.”

There was a split second where I thought I wouldn’t do it, a split second where I thought I could stay with Erin and be happy forever, a split second where I saw the mistake I was about to make and understood I didn’t have to make it, but only a split second. It felt like I was jumping off a cliff as I said, “Erin, I love you, but I can’t stay in this relationship anymore.”

She couldn’t even talk. She just sat down next to me on her couch. She didn’t cry or ask any questions or anything. She just sat there. I felt like I had to explain myself and I felt like she deserved the truth.

I said, “I know this is really shitty, but I didn’t go out with Brett tonight. I went to eat dinner with Heather. She wants to get back together.”

Finally she said, “And you want to, too?”

I said, “Yeah.”

She said, “Wow. After all the shit she put you through, ignoring you for her sorority, doing drugs behind your back, cheating on you, you’re going to get back together with her?”

I said, “Yeah. I’m sorry.”

She said, “Don’t be sorry. You can’t help how you feel. I just don’t get it. I love you more than anything. I thought you loved me—”

I said, “I do.”

She said, “Well, not enough to choose me over a cock-sucking sorority whore. I’m sorry. That was…I shouldn’t have said that.”

I said, “It’s okay.”

She said, “No, it’s not. This is someone who’s obviously very important to you, someone you love. I shouldn’t have said it. I just want to ask you what it was about me that was never good enough. I could kind of feel it through our whole relationship. I didn’t think it had anything to do with Heather, though. Was it always her?”

I said, “I don’t know. I love you, Erin, I really do. You’re an amazing person, it’s just—I don’t know, it’s not the same.”

She said, “The same as Heather, you mean?”

I said, “Yeah. I’m sorry.”

And then she started crying and I wanted to crawl into a fucking hole and die. She had been nothing but loving and kind to me for our entire relationship and that’s how I repaid her. Erin was really an amazing person and I’m sad she’ll never be in my life again. That might be my biggest regret of all of this shit, that she hates me more than anyone else at this point.

As she cried she got up off the couch and went into her bedroom. Just before she shut the door she said, “I’m going to stay in here. Can you please just get whatever you have in my apartment and leave? I’ll send you anything that’s in the bedroom.”

I said, “Yeah.”

She shut the bedroom door and I got my toothbrush, an extra pair of tennis shoes I kept at her apartment, and my
Dune
collector’s edition DVD. I went back to her bedroom door and said, “Erin, I’m sorry.” I just heard her crying inside. She didn’t say anything back so I left.

I walked back to McElvaney and over the course of the walk I went from feeling like a douchebag to feeling like a man reborn. It was surprising to me how quickly the guilt from dumping Erin subsided when I started thinking about Heather and getting excited about us being a couple again.

When I got back to McElvaney I took a shower and planned on going to sleep and waiting a few days to call Heather so I could maintain whatever power I thought I had over her in the situation, which was less than none. Instead, as soon as I got back to my room from the showers I called her. I said, “So I made my decision.”

She said, “And…”

I said, “I think you should come over tonight and I’ll tell you in person.”

She said, “Seriously? Oh my God. I’m like so happy. I love you so much.”

I said, “I love you, too. Now get over here as fast as you can. My roommate’s gone. We got the whole shitty dorm room to ourselves.”

She said, “Okay, I need to take a shower and then I’ll be over.”

I said, “Okay, I’ll be waiting.”

She said, “Kyle, I love you.”

I said, “I love you, too,” and despite all the things that were wrong with the relationship we were about to start up again the words felt right in a way they hadn’t since I last said them to Heather.