The Lie (24 page)

I hadn’t honestly
ever given it much thought in my entire life. Buying an engagement ring seemed like a thing I’d do eventually, but it always seemed like that “eventually” was far off, way down the road. And yet, there I fucking was sitting in Robbins Bros. on Dallas Parkway showing the fucking pictures of rings Heather had diagrammed to some lady named Margaret. At that point I hadn’t really decided when I was going to propose to her or anything, I was just interested to see how much money I was going to have to sock away to be able to afford the rock she wanted. Even now it’s hard to believe how fucking brainwashed she had me.

Margaret looked the pictures over and said, “It’s actually much easier to select a ring if a girl does something like this—you know, gives you an idea so you don’t end up getting something she doesn’t like. That’s a girl’s worst nightmare. I remember my first husband just went out and bought a ring without asking me what I wanted, and well…let’s just say there’s a reason he was my first husband and not my last.”

From the way she laughed it seemed to me that she had probably done that exact joke five times a day for the last ten years. I played along and laughed, too, because I was a douchebag who didn’t know any better then.

After around half an hour of looking at different rings and having shit like color and clarity explained to me, I was getting the idea that the kind of ring Heather would want was going to set me back somewhere in the neighborhood of seven to ten thousand dollars, which was money I had no chance of saving anytime in the foreseeable future. I made a little bit of money working at Mac’s Place, but it was a very little. It was honestly just enough to cover going out to eat every once in a while with Heather or going to see a movie. The rest of the money I had saved up I knew I needed to cover my rent. I thought briefly about going back to the dorms to save money, but I liked having my own place too much, or I guess I should say that I liked having a place where I could fuck Heather without a roommate always being around.

I knew Heather wasn’t really expecting me to propose until the following year, but after seeing how excited she got about that other girl in her sorority getting engaged, I knew it would be a big deal for her if she could be engaged before her senior year. It disgusts me how much of a fucking chump I was, but at the time I just wanted to make her happy. Maybe there was even some part of me that was afraid she’d suck another guy’s dick or find some other reason to figure out that she didn’t want to be with me. I wanted to lock her in. I wanted to make sure that what I went through when she broke up with me our sophomore year never happened again. On the drive back to campus I had pretty much made the decision that I was going to ask Heather to marry me before the end of our junior year, preferably even before winter break, which was around two months away at that point.

When I got back to campus I had to do some work in the advanced biology lab. As I was walking into the building Erin was walking out. We hadn’t seen or really talked to each other since the night I broke up with her the previous spring. We both saw each other, so it couldn’t be ignored.

She said, “Hey.”

I said, “Hey.”

She said, “You want to go grab a coffee or something?”

I said, “Sure.”

And she led the way over to the Hughes-Trigg market and we got coffee at Java City, the exact same place Heather and I got coffee the first time we saw each other after we broke up. It was strange how similar it all felt, but despite the similarity in the scenario there was something missing with Erin. When I had this exact same interaction with Heather I remembered feeling a spark of hope. With Erin that just wasn’t there, for me anyway.

We got our coffee, sat down, and she said, “So how have things been?”

I said, “Pretty good. You?”

“Pretty good, too. School’s going well. Parents are doing good.”

Then we just sat there for a minute or so and Erin said, “You and Heather still together?”

I said, “Yeah.”

“And you’re happy and everything?”

“Yeah, pretty happy.” I didn’t really care if Erin was dating anyone, but I thought it would have seemed like I was being a dick if I didn’t ask her so I said, “You seeing anyone?”

She said, “No. Not really.”

I didn’t really know what to say to that. Despite everything that happened between me and Erin, I still liked her, still wanted her to be happy. The way she said she wasn’t seeing anyone was almost like some kind of accusation that I was the reason she was single. It was weird.

She said, “Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this, but I still love you, Kyle. It’s been a long time since we broke up and I still love you. I know you have Heather and it seems like that’s going well for you, but if anything ever happens between you guys or if you even just think you might have made a mistake with us, I just want you to know that you can always call me. The door’s still open.”

I was pretty blown away by how forthright she was, but Erin was always like that. It was one of the things I liked most about her when we were together. I didn’t really know what to say in response. I said, “Okay, thanks.”

She said, “And if you ever just wanted to go out to dinner or something like that one night and see how it went, I would be open to that, too.”

I couldn’t tell if she was offering to fuck me. I thought she was but then I wasn’t sure if she was offering a onetime thing or if she was basically telling me she would have no problem having a full-on secret relationship with me. I thought about the last time we fucked and how good it was. It wasn’t as good as Heather, but Erin’s blowjobs were something I had to admit I missed. Then I started feeling guilty for even thinking about getting a blowjob from Erin. Less than half an hour earlier I was sitting in a jewelry store picking out Heather’s engagement ring, and here I was entertaining the idea of cheating on her with an ex-girlfriend.

I said, “Okay, I guess I’ll keep that in mind.”

She said, “Kyle, I really miss you and I think we had something that’s pretty tough to replace. I know you think you love Heather, but I really can’t imagine what you have with her is better or even the same as what we had.”

The sad thing is she was right. Erin was 100 percent correct, and instead of realizing that and taking her up on her offer, I got pissed off. In my mind she had basically insulted my relationship with Heather and I actually got mad at her for insinuating that what I had with Heather was anything less than perfect.

I said, “Erin, it was good to see you, but I think I should go before you say something that really offends me.”

She said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I just wanted you to know how I feel about this whole thing. I’ve wanted to call you but I was afraid I would have been crossing some kind of boundary I wasn’t supposed to, and then when we just ran into each other I thought I could sit down and have a normal conversation with you, but I can’t. I just can’t. I think we should be together and I think you think we should be, too. I get that you can’t see it right now, but I don’t want you to be mad at me for feeling this way. I just want you to know that this is how I feel and I don’t see it changing anytime soon.”

I should have forgotten about Heather, taken Erin back to her apartment, fucked the shit out of her, pledged my undying love to her, asked her to marry me even though I couldn’t afford a ring, which she wouldn’t have cared about anyway, and had a perfectly happy life. Instead I said, “It was nice seeing you. I think I should go.”

And I left Erin sitting there by herself at Java City. I didn’t turn around to see if she was still watching me walk away or to see if she was crying. I knew she was still sitting there, drinking her coffee, wondering how long it would take me to come to my senses, which pissed me off even more.

The fact that someone could outright question the relationship I had with Heather only made me want to be with her more. It wasn’t necessarily to prove Erin wrong or anything like that. It was more to have something that I thought no one else understood. Whether it was Erin or Brett or even my parents every once in a while telling me that Heather and I seemed like a strange match, they all made me want to hold on to Heather and never let go.

Ironically, that conversation with Erin where she told me she’d always be waiting for me was the final straw in pushing me to decide that, no matter what, I was going to propose to Heather before junior year was over.

A bunch of us
were like sitting around trying to plan a party we were going to be throwing in a few weeks with SAE when Andrea came into the kitchen like seriously bawling her fucking eyes out. We were all like,
What the fuck is going on?

So I was like, “Andrea, are you like okay?”

She was like, “No.”

I was like, “What’s wrong?”

She was like, “Oh my God,” and she sat down at the table with us and just like buried her head in her arms and kept sobbing. She seriously wouldn’t tell us what was wrong. We were all like thinking that her mom died or something. And it turned out that it was even worse than that.

After she cried for like a solid minute without talking to any of us she kind of pulled it together a little bit and was like, “Okay, you guys, tonight is seriously like the worst night of my life and I really need some support.”

I was like, “Of course, you know we’re here for you.”

She was like, “I just got back from eating dinner with Ron and he like dumped me.” Then she started crying really bad again. We were all like asking her questions and trying to get the details but she cried for like another minute straight without responding to us. Then she kind of pulled herself together again and she was like, “I thought he was going to propose to me next week because it’s going to be my birthday but instead tonight he told me that he’s getting back together with Dianna.” Then she started really crying even worse than before.

Dianna was Ron’s freshman-and sophomore-year girlfriend. They were like totally an item and everything and pretty much no one thought anything could break them up. Ron was kind of a goofy guy and Dianna was like a little dumb. She was an Alpha Chi and it was always weird to me that Andrea would go out with a guy who had dated an Alpha Chi. But I guess the deal was Ron walked in on Dianna making out with some other guy at a party and he got all crazy and dumped her and they would like avoid each other at parties and everything after that.

Gina was like, “Did he tell you why he’s like getting back together with her or anything?”

Andrea was like, “He said she called him and they had like this long conversation about how they never stopped loving each other and he told me that there was always just like something missing in our relationship that he felt like he had with her.”

Then she started crying again and all I could think about was like how much I wanted to beat the shit out of that chick Dianna. I mean I guess she was a senior, too, and she probably needed to find a guy like ASAP so she could at least be engaged by the time she graduated, but seriously? Andrea had like been there to help Ron pick up the pieces and everything after he broke up with Dianna. Like that should have counted for something. And even besides that it was like Ron and Andrea were a way cuter and better couple than Ron and Dianna. I had only met Dianna a few times but I seriously hated her for this. I mean she basically completely fucked Andrea. And it didn’t seem like it was something that Ron would have done on his own. Dianna had to have like instigated the whole thing. What a fucking bitch.

We only had a month or so left in the first semester. The senior guys were already starting to propose to girls in pretty much every sorority. The only guys who were still single were that way for a reason. There was some chance that Andrea would be able to find a guy who had a girlfriend but wasn’t that happy with her. But usually something like that took at least a few months of groundwork to get him to dump his girlfriend and then close to a year of dating before he would actually propose. If she was really desperate, Andrea could try for like a junior boyfriend or something, but she probably wouldn’t get the proposal until after she graduated, when the guy was a senior. It was a serious fucking nightmare and after I thought about it for a few minutes I like completely understood why she was crying so much. She had wasted two years with Ron that she could have been using to find another guy and lock him in to proposing. Her life was like basically over.

We were all thinking the same thing. I saw Harlow like put her hand in her pocket to hide her engagement ring, which was a nice thing to do I thought. Like the last thing Andrea probably wanted to see was a giant engagement ring reflecting back in her eyes after she just lost the best chance she had to get one.

Andrea stopped crying for a second and was like, “Okay, you’re all my sisters and as sisters we all stick together. I’m going to ask all of you to come to me first if you hear of any guys dumping their girlfriends or if you hear of any guys getting cheated on or even if you hear of any guys who are looking to cheat or are even just like generally unhappy with the girl they’re with. Okay?”

Everyone was like, “Okay,” but we were all really like,
That is so desperate and I hope it doesn’t happen to me.
Seriously, I bet we all would have reacted pretty much the same exact way.

I called Kyle that night and told him what happened. He was like, “Yeah, that sucks, but you have to look at it from—what’s the guy’s name?”

I was like, “Ron.”

He was like, “Ron—look at it from Ron’s point of view. If he didn’t really love Andrea like he loved the other chick, then he’s going to be much happier in the long run and ultimately so is Andrea. If the guy didn’t really love her then that relationship would have suffered and eventually ended anyway.”

I was like, “Yeah, but he could have proposed to her first and maybe even married her. Like he totally ruined the rest of her senior year.”

Kyle was like, “I see.”

I knew he wasn’t on my side because he was a guy, but that night I went over to his house and sucked his dick like the best I’ve ever sucked it because I didn’t want him thinking that he could dump me to get back together with that skank he dated when we were broken up instead of proposing to me.