There it was. It had been there all along but she let herself feel it for the first time: He was That Guy and would probably always be That Guy, despite his professed momentary dabbling in good behavior.
The words were few and flippant – a small joke, casually delivered. But within the context of his life, they held weight like gravity. In them, Reese saw Hunter’s whole past rolled out behind him, a string of young and beautiful girls that just kept staying young and beautiful because they went away within the week.
Darling, you are not the first nor the last…
They had met not long ago and quickly went from strangers to barely-strangers telling each other things like “I’m falling in love with you” before they knew how many siblings each had and what the other’s favorite color was. Reese felt safe because he made her feel safe.
She dated long enough to know when to hold herself back and when to let the tide rush forward. Boys were runners. If you liked them too actively, they would surely leave. Reese had learned to sit on the bleachers, kissing and screwing and waiting for the moment a boy realized she was amazing. Unfortunately, while the first two happened quite frequently, Reese had learned that the third was the dating equivalent of a lunar eclipse.
But Hunter pursued with an incomparable enthusiasm that convinced Reese he could not live without her. And so, in turn, she reciprocated. She believed what he said because he said it; boys, while often elusive assholes, were rarely outright liars. They weren’t ones for expository conversations about how a girl made them feel because, frankly, no matter what, they’d end up getting laid anyway, with or without professions of love. And so, they continued this way, sharing a mutual affection without the usual bullshit that came dating: the posturing, the games, the faux prioritization to maintain the appearance of your sense of self.
When the joke was delivered, whatever strange foundation they had managed to build over the last month shattered like brittle clay. Reese was slammed with the reality that all of this might not be real – the vacation planning months in advance, the “no one’s ever made me feel this way,” the imagining his last name affixed to her first. Reese saw them in two year’s time: Hunter bored with what once he thought made Reese special as Reese’s wrinkles began to crease more deeply, grasping for what they once had that winter some time ago. He would take her best years and leave her to take someone else’s. He would be off to find some young girl who thought he was handsome and charming and all of the things Reese thought when she first saw him. It flashed before her, all of this, and she was engulfed by a heart-wrenching anxiety and extreme premature jealousy. The other girls, the affairs, the lies were all just on the crest of the next hill. Maybe in a month, maybe in a year, who knew how long. But it all surely lay in wait.
She sat in bed staring at the words over and over again and feeling her ribs tightening around her vital organs, preparing for the worst. It didn’t matter that all he wanted in the world was her right in that moment, because all she could think about was the inevitability that he would one day not want her.
Reese felt raw, three layers of her skin hastily removed. She rewound the events of the last week: the words she had said, the secrets she had shared, the constant outpouring of honesty she had allowed to surface. She felt herself backing into an emotional corner, prepared to run from him like everyone else. “The same,” she thought, “The same.” They were all the same, these boys, and Reese knew she should run away from each and every one, even Hunter.
Her response, a half-hearted attempt to cover up her concern with joking disdain, illicited a phone call, immediately. She saw his number on her phone and didn’t want to pick up because she didn’t know what her mouth would say. She waited until the last ring and answered, laughing because it was the only thing she could do so that she didn’t sound crazy or jealous or any of those terrible feminine traits Reese rarely exhibited but often abhorred.
“You’re so fired,” she giggled while groaning, lying on her bed and staring out the window at cold trees, her eyes unblinking. Inside, she felt like nothing.
She knew the types of girls he had been with; he didn’t need to tell her. They were beautiful, lithe and young, revered for all the wrong reasons. They traveled around the world in the expensive cars of men and drank from flute of never ending champagne. And while Reese didn’t want to be these girls, she felt irrationally inferior. She laughed because all she wanted to do was cry. Reese wanted to ask him if he was a cheater or even harbored remote loyal tendencies, but she knew these answers, too.
She didn’t know if this deflection circus she was running was actually working. He laughed and she laughed and when they hung up, Reese wrung her hands and still felt awful. This giving of her heart thing was a dangerous extracurricular activity and she wondered if she had shown too many cards too soon. In the past she had found that people were charmed by her niceness and honesty, Hunter included, but a fleshy patch soon turned into an open wound when not properly taken care of. Tonight was the first stinging warning.
Life was full of weighing risks and gauging outcomes, both of which were stupid with respect to love – fickle, awful thing that it was. But Reese didn’t want to look back at this and feel stupid. She didn’t want to look back and say, “You knew this was going to happen. You saw what he was and you felt it and you turned away from it.” Reese didn’t want to regret her willful ignorance; she wanted to embrace her ability to hope. And so she sat and waited for the terrible feelings to disappear enough so that she could bury them deep, hopefully not returning to find them ever again as proof there was validity in her premature sadness.
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