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It’safter1:00AMby the time I get in, but I’m not about to lie in the dark, sober, with only my thoughts. I go to the kitchen, pour myself a glass of wine, and scroll through just about everything available on Netflix before settling on the Ted Bundy movie with Zac Efron. I figured it would be emotionally safe, and now I’m not sure if I was right. I expected it to be more violent crime and less love story. Maybe it says something about me that I see a love story.
I get a text from Alex: Just wanted to see if you were okay. For a second, I think he is talking about the thing with Jake and wonder how he knows about it, and then I remember the other thing—the break-in. That night feels like it was an eternity ago. I’m momentarily baffled when I realize that this has all transpired over the course of just over 24 hours, and it has undoubtedly been the longest 24 hours of my life.
I remember that we are supposed to be on shaky terms at best, but for whatever reason, I can barely remember why or if it even matters at all anymore. The numbness I feel inside doesn't seem to care. Instead of ignoring the message, or sending a generic response, I instead send him back:Yep. Nothing a little bit of wine and true crime can’t fixand a picture of my tv behind the wine glass in my hand. Instead of texting back, he knocks on my door.
“Hey, nice door,” he says when I open it.
“Thanks, I just got it,” I tell him.
“Can I come in? I was kind of hoping that was an invitation to watch Bundy.”
“Pfft, why not?” I say, leaving the door open. I head back towards the couch and call out, “Help yourself to whatever. Wine. There’s beer in the fridge, too.”
I hear him open a beer, and then he comes over and sits down on the other side of the couch. It’s small, so we are close enough that we could easily be touching, but we aren’t. I can’t quite read him right now, but what I’m picking up on seems to be remorse. I wonder for which part, exactly.
After a while, he says, “Sometimes I watch shit like this, and I feel like I narrowly avoided becoming this guy. You know? Like I could have been Ted Bundy.”
I turn to him, eyes wide, and laugh hard. It feels completely foreign, given the circumstances and the person I’m sitting with right now. I wouldn’t have thought this entire scenario would have been possible a day ago, but here we are, and it feels normal. I breathe that in for a second.
“No way. But I get what you mean. Like, who do we think we are, having childhood trauma in spades, and just going on to live normal lives?”
“Are we normal, though?” he asks.
I shrug, “Not me. I never saidIwas normal. I just said I live a normal life. I mean, before you got here, I was watching this and rooting for Ted and his girlfriend to work it out. That can’t be normal.”
He laughs hard at this. “No way. You were not.”
“No seriously. I was like,‘Please, don’t kill any more of these girls. Just go home. Put this behind you.’”
“You’re just a sucker for a redemption arc. You know that’s not how this story ends.”
“Yeah, I guess…or maybe it’s because I’m also just barely not Ted,” I say. I finish my glass of wine and go to the kitchen to pour another one.
“Are we still friends, Ruby?” he asks when I sit back down.
“I don’t know,” I reply. “It feels like we are right now.”
“Because…I would take it back, you know. I would take back all of that stuff I said if it meant that we could still be friends. Or maybe I would have told you sooner, I don’t know. I just don’t really feel like I’m a good person, you know. And you are a good person, and I didn’t want to make you leave, too.”
“You are a good person, too,” I tell him.
We watch the last bit of the movie in silence, his hand resting innocently on my feet. My tiny apartment had been a source of so much comfort to me over the past two years, but after what had happened, it felt cold and foreign—as if its essential nature had changed when I was forced to change the locks. Getting ready for work here this afternoon had felt wrong. Coming home to this place after work tonight had felt ominous. However, sitting here with Alex somehow makes it feel like everything is almost normal and maybe it could be that place again. I had missed my friend.
So maybe that’s why I did it—why when he said goodnight and started to stand up, I grabbed his shirt and pulled him into me, kissing him hard. I think I’d half-expected him to back off. I thought that maybe he’d pull away and break out the old inventory of all the reasons why we couldn’t do this, and then maybe we could be friends, because we’d be even at that point, but he didn’t, and neither did I. His mouth was warm and as his lips engulfed mine and his teeth nipped at my lower lip, I remember the first time we had kissed. I’d been sitting on my kitchen countertop when I grabbed him that time, and I’d thought that I’d never felt so connected to anyone before. I remember thinking that everything was about to change, and then it did, because he’d just turned around and left. I also thought about how I’d wondered what else he could do with his tongue, and realized now, as he starts to remove my shirt and then my pants and his mouth made its way down my chest, spending some extra time on my nipple, and then on down my stomach that I was about to find out.
It was as good as I had anticipated. My hands grip the couch tightly, my back arched, and I gasped as his tongue began to circle my clit. I couldn’t stop myself from bucking against him. “You taste so good, Ruby,” he says, “I’ve wanted to know what you tasted like for so long.”
It isn’t long before I’m cumming and his mouth is quickly replaced by his long, hard cock. I always knew it would be big, but I’m still caught off guard, and I can see on his face that this pleases him.
“Oh, fuck…” I moan, still out of breath from my last orgasm.
He takes his hands and moves my legs; one swings up over the back of the couch, and he holds the other one out to the side. He drives into me with long, hard thrusts, making sure I take it all in, and I let go of myself, and push up against him, begging for more and getting exactly what I wanted as my body starts to shake and I cry out as the waves of my second orgasm hit me. His thrusts get shorter and faster, and not long after, he’s collapsing on top of me. I’m left staring at the ceiling, wondering where the hell that came from and what I’m supposed to do now.
“I’ve never came that hard before,” he says eventually, before kissing me and casually strolling into the bathroom.
Afterward, we’re lying in my bed. Alex is snoring softly next to me—I had forgotten that he snores sometimes—and I’m staring at the ceiling, thinking about Jake. Shit. I’m sitting here thinking about how I still love Jake and how much I miss his scent and his depth and all the things that he’s made me feel and given me to look forward to. As much as I’d thought I’d been in love with Alex and for all that he has been to me, it’s just never been like that with him.
I realize, then, that none of what happened tonight was about any kind of feelings I had for Alex. This was about me, and my need to self-destruct. It was about my shadow self and her fear of being rejected, like we had been our whole lives by all the people that were supposed to care for us. And so, I’d done it again. I’d been so afraid of being left broken by Jake that I’d decided to effectively decimate the relationship on my own terms instead. What we’d had was real and deep and completely out of my control. I could barely handle it on the best of days. I couldn’t bear the thought that there might be even worse days. I couldn’t fathom that I would bring him an even worse day. Now, I am pretty sure I’m about to lose both of them for good.
