“What?”
“I mean, it’s kind of dumb, you know? And I got other shit going on.”
“What other shit do you have going on, Milan?”
She didn’t say anything.
“What? Some stupid guy?”
Her eyes raked over my face. “Oh, ’cause you don’t do stupid shit over stupid guys?”
“What’s that mean?”
She cackled like a witch in a children’s movie. “You think your little experiment isn’t gonna blow up in your face?” She sucked her teeth. “How many dudes are you messing with anyway? Two, three? Poor Jay.”
Heat rose in me like steam blowing up from grates in the street, shrouding everything. I saw myself shoving her off the fire escape and slinking away, how easy it would be, what with her shaped like a stick.Instead I posed my own mean questions. “What happened to law school, Milan? Oh, wait, Travie happened. What about med school? Oops, I forget, was it Damien or Cash?”
Her mouth was a tight line. I had to look away from her hurt expression.
“You know what your problem is? You think you’re better than everybody. Don’t act like you didn’t call me crying the first time Jay fucked someone else.”
I dragged my eyes over her gelled-down edges, the frizzy braids I was supposed to help her take out tonight. Her lipstick had dried and settled into the crevices like crayon.
She stood, hopping down from the fire escape without looking at me. When she was gone, I went and kicked over the garbage cans in the alleyway, sending food wrappers, soupy Styrofoam containers flying. After a beat, I silently collected the trash and straightened the bins. Taking the inside of my wrist, I wiped her lipstick from my mouth.
Chapter 25
Lying in bed that night, I thumbed through my camera roll. I had thousands of photos with Jay: At a roller-skating rink, toppling over each other, laughing. In the fluorescent aisles of CVS, Jay studying the back of an orange DayQuil bottle with allergy-irritated eyes. Us: a blur of limbs, an accidental shot taken in some gray airport-like place.
I came across pictures taken the month we opened the relationship. There was no evidence of the moment Milan had thrown in my face, but there the moment was, staring at me.
It was March. I couldn’t recall whether I was headed from or going to the restaurant, I just remembered I was outside when Jay called me, voice fraying.
“I know this is what you wanted, but I just… I don’t know.”
He kept the details of the woman to himself, revealing only where they’d met: Starbucks. Jay wasn’t even a coffee drinker but, throat sore, he’d stopped for tea.
“I’m sorry,” he kept saying.
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Then why does it feel like it?”
We learned that parts of it felt less wrong with time while others stayed wrong-feeling. That jealousy still bounded on this side of the fence, turning up hungry. Despite articles about everyone being polyamorous, others found it disgusting, abject, would rather you cheat. These people understood a man stepping out as long as he knew where home was. Men were human, after all.
“Why?” Milan asked when I dissolved into tears over the phone. “Why are you putting yourself through this?”
I could’ve said I was chasing a feeling like everyone else, a grand one, the difference between standing at the tip of a pool and the edge of the ocean. That slow then suddenly blistering moment when you’re speaking to someone, expecting boredom, but instead are jolted awake. We’re told to fear this from anyone except the person we’re with, to flinch at feelings that rise from the wrong place. But, for me, it was the same jolt that advanced art-making. To turn away from that kismet glimmer, to not walk through that swirling purple-blue portal summoning you, felt spiritually irresponsible. This bright threshold didn’t call out to everyone. But it called out to me.
What painless option was there in love anyway?
As I stared at pictures of me and Jay, I knew there was no way out from under the hurt of loving hard, no matter how many people you did it with.
Chapter 26
The Bachelor was having an existential crisis. One of his top contenders was racist, and now he was questioning everything.
“So what if she posted something five years ago?” My mom sprayed water on a ribbon of hair, carefully wrapping it around a roller.
