Su-Lin is quiet for a moment. “We should probably tell the other people we’re dating that you and I are just friends.”
My heart aches. I hate that even more, and it’s all my fault. “I don’t want to lie about it.”
“But with us working together as close as we do, if you tell girls you’re also dating me, they’re going to think they don’t have a chance with you.”
They don’t have a chance with me. I’m pretty sure that was the point of doing this at a con, where people are mostly looking to have fun and not to fall in love and live happily ever after.
But she has a point. Also I’m pretty sure I can get away without any outright lies, using phrases like “it’s not like that,” or “I’m not in a relationship.”
Su-Lin swirls a strawberry around in chocolate, creating a twisting pattern on the surface. She does this for so long that I’m sure she must be thinking about something.
I hope it’s not that she’s ready to move on from this plan before we’ve even begun. Su-Lin’s ideas are both insane and amazing, but she does have a habit of jumping from one to another—
“What was your relationship with Candace like?” Su-Lin asks. “When you were first dating, I mean.”
I blink at this quick change of subject. I’ve told her tons about my marriage to Candace, but first dating . . .
“It was intense,” I say. “Really intense.”
She withdraws the strawberry and stares at it. “So you were in love with her, like, right away?”
I shake my head. “Actually, I’m not sure I was ever really in love with her.”
She looks up at me in surprise, and I wince. I know it makes me sound like a horrible person, but since I met Su-Lin, I’ve been fairly certain that what I felt for Candace, while intense and all-consuming, was obsession and not love at all.
I obviously can’t tell her the details of that realization.
“You must have some happy memories of her. You guys were together so long.”
I think about that for a moment.The good times have been so shrouded in pain and betrayal that it’s hard for me to remember them. “Sure. I mean, she’s the first girl I ever slept with.The first girl I everkissed.”Theoretically the first for both of us, but now I’m not sure if she was really a virgin when we first had sex.The idea that this may have been one of her many lies spoils the memory even more.
Su-Lin’s voice grows quiet, and I feel like she’s gathering information from this that I don’t even know I’m giving her.
“What was it like, then?” she asks. “You must have been really into her.”
“I was.” I sigh. It’s hard to describe what happened with Candace. Hard for me to understand, even. “I was lonely and desperate to feel like someone loved me. Which is stupid, because my mom always did, and I knew it.”
I’ve never been able to totally understand why I was so needy, especially since afterward, I had no problem swearing off relationships. Quite the opposite, actually. “Anyway, when we first started dating, there was a lot of passion, I guess. But then she would get bored or annoyed or angry, and she’d brush me off or ignore me. And then I’d get clingy and chase after her. Sometimes she’d threaten to break up with me, and I’d cry and beg her not to leave me.Then she’d come back, and we’d make up and be all over each other again. And it would start over.”
It was worse than that, but I’m too embarrassed to talk about the other stuff.The things Candace used to say to me, the many ways I disappointed her, over and over again. And no matter how much she put me down, the obsessive desperation with which I used to chase after her when she left me, leaving fifty messages, sobbing into the phone, threatening to kill myself.
I’d like to think I’ve learned something from that. I’d like to think it wouldn’t happen again. But I’m still worried that, while I can be a mostly normal best friend and a tolerable casual dating partner, once I’m in a serious relationship, all my issues are going to come bubbling to the surface again. I want to believe that I’ve grown and changed . . . but I’m still the same person, and I can’t guarantee that I won’t revert to that again.
I don’t ever want to be like that with Su-Lin.
Su-Lin’s face is serious—an expression other people might be surprised to see, but that I know well—and I wonder if, even without all that information, she’s starting to rethink whether she wants to be involved with me.
“Do you still miss her?” Su-Lin asks.
“No,” I say. “Once we broke up for good, I actually didn’t miss her at all.” After she left me, is how it really went, because I didn’t have the self-respect to do it myself, even after I found out she’d been cheating on me the whole time. “I was hurt, obviously, but when it came to not having her around, I guess maybe I felt relief.” I’d been trying so hard to hold on to her and that terrible relationship for so long, I think it was a relief to be rid of that version of myself, as much as anything.
Su-Lin is quiet for a moment, and I wonder if she’s thinking I’m a total ass for not even missing my ex-wife.
“Things were just so bad between us,” I say. “Not just at the end, but before we even got married. I still have the scars that she gave me, but I’m glad she’s out of my life.”
Su-Lin moves closer, sitting right up against me. “Me too.”
I want to kick myself. I know she brought it up, but this isn’t stuff I should be talking about on our first date—onanyfirst date.
