NAT
I lie in the king-size bed in Marc’s bedroom, post coitus, listening to him take a shower, and stare through his floor-to-ceiling windows at the city glowing pink with the sunrise.
How did I let myself fall back into this second ring of hell?
It’s a weird mind trick we women play on ourselves: How we are secretly convinced that a man must love us if he wants to sleep with us. We whip up dubiously plausible scenarios in our heads where the guy is just as tormented over the thought of being separated from us as we are from him. He must love me—how could he want to have sex with me so hungrily if he weren’t totally in love with me?
Now, of course, deep down we all know the answer: Uh, dork, because he’s a dude and dudes want to have sex. And since said dude is married, he has to work harder for sex than the single dudes. That doesn’t mean he loves you. If he loved you, he would have said it by now.
In Marc’s case, instead of those three words, he plied me with compliments, good food, and lots of booze, just like men have done for thousands of years. Plus he gave me a check. Which technically makes me a …
I really should not be left alone with my thoughts. All I need is five minutes to myself, and the familiar gut-wrenching guilt rages back full force.
I hear Marc turn off the shower, and I debate what to do next. Should I call Lyft, or get him to drive me home? Should I put on last night’s dress and feel like Mata Hari as I make my way home, or steal a pair of his jeans, a belt, and a crisp white button-up shirt to go with my heels? (Okay, I’m not borrowing jeans. Fuck it, the Walk of Shame is an antiquated, not to mention ridiculous, notion: Yes, world, I had sex last night. For all we know, the president can say the same thing. For all we know, your mother can say the same thing. Bazinga!)
Should I stay in bed until tonight, bat my eyelashes, and talk Marc into a bed day one more time before I break up with him finally, once and for all?
Marc walks out of his bathroom wearing a fluffy white Pratesi robe that I gave him for his last birthday. As usual, he’s adorable, which is just making me a little sad. “What would you like to do today?” he asks me cheerfully.
“Do you love me?” I blurt out as I sit up in bed.
Marc looks surprised only for a moment, “Um … sure,” he says awkwardly to me as he sits on the bed.
Huh. He sure coughed up that word like it was a hairball.
Oh, shit. He’s lying. I don’t know how I know, but I can tell. He doesn’t love me—he’s fond of me. There’s a difference.
Marc leans in to give me a light kiss. “Do you love me?” he asks, and somehow when the words come out of his mouth, they sound dirty.
“Yeah. I do,” I tell him.
I don’t know if he hears the sadness in my words. Because I love him so much, I ache. This isn’t lust anymore, and it’s not fun anymore. It’s love, and it’s toxic, and it hurts all the time. I tilt my head a bit and make sure to make eye contact when I tell him calmly, “You know what? I gotta go.”
As I bolt off the bed, Marc turns to me, confused. “You’re leaving? Why? I just told you I love you. What more do you want from me?”
I turn to him, naked, emotionally and physically, and tell him the truth. “I want you to be someone you’re not. I want to have a baby with you. I want to wear the white dress and go to Hawaii with you. I want to meet your mum.”
The words don’t come out angrily: Unlike so many times before, I am neither picking a fight nor avoiding one. I’m just not hiding the real me anymore.
Marc sits there on the bed, looking just as pained to hear the words as I am to say them.
I retrieve my clothes from the floor. Marc is silent as I dress.
Once my second heel is strapped on I say, “I guess I should call Uber or something.”
Marc forces himself to move. “Don’t be silly. I’ll drive you home.”
“No, I think…” My sentence peters out. We stare at each other again in silence. “I think I should be by myself,” I finally say.
Slowly, I walk out of his bedroom and head to the front door. Alone.
Finally, clearly after some debate on his part, Marc emerges from his bedroom. “I have to go to London,” he says in a rushed tone. “Come with me.”
Of course he didn’t tell me that last night when we were making out like teenagers. “For how long?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer. Just smiles apologetically at me.
Shit.
I nod slowly. “Wow. That long.”
“I took a new job,” he tells me. “Producing a British version of a new game show, which we hope to bring to America in a season or two. Part of the reason I took you out last night was to offer you the job as the show’s head writer.”
I can feel my eyes widen. “You took me out on an insanely romantic date because of work?”
“No. I took you out because I miss you and want to be with you. The job was just a good excuse to see you.”
“Except you never offered me the job.”
“I got sidetracked.”
“‘Sidetracked’? Is that supposed to be cute, Marc? Am I supposed to be flattered that you see me as fuckable before you see me as employable?”
“Of course not,” Marc says, coming up to me and gently taking my hands. “I’m not offering you the job because of us. You’re really good at what you do. And this is an incredible opportunity.”
I shake my head in disbelief. “So … when I was telling you all about my new business, and my new life, you thought … what?”
“Come on, Nat. You’re a writer, not a bartender.”
I pull away from him, stunned. Too much is happening. I feel like my brain is about to explode. “Now I really need to be alone.”
“I’m offering you weekends in Paris,” he rushes to tell me. “Theater in the West End. A pub crawl in Dublin. Hiking on a cliff in Ireland. A romantic gondola ride in Venice.”
“Are you offering me a baby?” I blurt out before my brain has a chance to stop me.
That gives him pause. Marc has to think about his answer. “I don’t know. Maybe?”
I walk over to my purse and pull out the envelope he gave me last night. The one with eight weeks’ pay.
“Sweetheart, don’t…”
“When your ‘maybe’ changes into a real answer, give me a call,” I tell him as I scribble something down on the envelope and leave it on the side table by his door. Then I turn to him. “You have no idea how lucky you were.”
Then I silently open his front door and walk out of his life.
I only wrote three words on the envelope: Don’t follow me.
He didn’t.