Chapter 20
Vanessa
twenty
. . .
I would like to say that I spent my time off being productive… but instead, I was a potato. I sat on the couch and watched Real Housewives of wherever for hours until my ass got numb, and then I moved to my bed and watched a few more episodes, and then I fell asleep… and when I woke up, I moved back to the couch and started all over again.
Things I did not do in my three days off:
1. Laundry
2. Dishes
3. Wash my hair
Things I did:
1. Approximately nothing
2. Eat my weight in raw cookie dough
3. Obsess over my conversation with Robby
I’m on day two of potato-ing when Elsy gets home from work, sees me, and sighs.
“Oh, honey,” she says, shaking her head. “This is not what we do.”
“Yeah, it is.” I pick out another pre-portioned glob of ready-to-bake cookie dough.
“I gave you some time, but this—it’s too much.” She takes a seat on the other couch, across from mine. “Are you ready to talk about it?”
“He’s gay,” I say bluntly.
Her eyebrows go up. “Sven?”
“What? No. Robby.”
She pauses. “Robby, as in… your college boyfriend?”
I nod.
“The one who works with you?”
Again, I nod.
“Why do we care about Robby? In this context? Aren’t you happy with Sven? He kissed you on national television!” She smiles, like I should be happy about that.
“Yeah, and then two hours later, he said he wanted to marry me,” I tell her bitterly.
Elsy freezes. “Um… what?”
“The last guy who talked about marriage dumped me on my fucking birthday, and now he tells me he planned to propose that night, but I’m just so unloveable he decided he—” I hiccup. “He’s gay. And we were together for two and a half years. What does that say about us?”
Elsy sighs. “Okay, let’s back up a second. Sven said he wants to marry you?”
I nod. “And when we talked about it the next day, he doubled down and said it again. Fuck.” Rubbing at my eyes, I blink away the tears before she can spot them. “So clearly I am an excellent judge of character.”
“Yeah, you are,” she says, ignoring my sarcasm. “What does all this have to do with Robby?”
“He cornered me a few days ago, and he came out to me.”
On the one hand, a part of me does feel gratified that he trusts me enough to share his truth with me, but a bigger piece of me is still reeling from reliving those old memories and hurts.
I thought I had moved on. I was fine. Instead, I think I was really just repressing everything, pretending everything was okay.
I never dealt with it. I’ve been avoiding romantic relationships for years, sticking instead to brief sexual encounters to scratch the itch, and obtaining my need for companionship with a lively group of friends who love me unconditionally.
Because I thought Robby did. Love me unconditionally, that is.
“Sometimes we don’t know what’s missing until we find it,” Elsy says slowly. “It’s like—when I’m composing, I can hear it in my head, but I can’t always separate each instrument with each note until I really start looking for it.”
“I don’t follow.”
“His being attracted to men has nothing to do with the time he spent with you,” she says. “Dating is like… like picking locks. You have an infinite number of keys, and you don’t know which one will be the right fit, but you keep trying. Because that’s what you have to do—you keep trying. And sometimes it’s not a perfect fit, but it works well enough that you can jimmy it open, at least for now.”
Scooping out another glob of cookie dough, I consider this.
“And then it turns out that instead of being one key for each lock, there are multiple keys. So the first worked for a while until it got sticky, so you try something new, and when you find the next… you might not be looking for it or expecting it to work, but when you try it, it just… fits. And you… maybe you don’t forget the first key, but you know this second one fits better. It doesn’t invalidate everything you had with the first key. It worked for a while, until it didn’t. This new key, though? It fits like a glove.”
She smirks at me. “Or, alternatively, like a condom, snug and tight.”
I roll my eyes.
“Nothing will change the way that he felt about you back then. I know we didn’t know each other yet, but I’ve heard the stories and I’ve seen the photos. He adored you,” Elsy continues. “He just found out something new about himself. It’s not like he purposely led you on or hid it while you were together. He found out something new. That doesn’t make him a bad person. That makes him human.”
“No, no, I know,” I tell her. “I just… We were talking about getting married. We were talking about forever. And then he decided…”
She shakes her head. “He didn’t decide to be gay. It doesn’t work like that.”
I sigh. “I know. But?—”
“He made a dick move when he broke up with you,” Elsy says. “That doesn’t make him evil. It makes him human.”
“So what do I do?” I hate how helpless I sound. How helpless I feel.
“You forgive him,” she says, like it’s that easy. “And then you don’t punish Sven, or the next one, for something that Robby did. You heal.”
“Okay…” I pause. “So, the second part of this issue is—how do I tell my maybe-not fake boyfriend that I like him, but I don’t know if I can marry him?”
Elsy blinks. “You… tell him that. With words.”
“But, like… how?”
She shakes her head. “We can’t do this right now.”
“We can’t?”
“You need to get up, put away the cookie dough, and take a shower,” she announces. “I’ll call the girls. We need a club meeting, stat.”