Chapter 10
I’d always been restless: A toddler climbing furniture until it tipped over. A teenager sneaking through the window to a forbidden party. This restlessness never felt like an excess of energy. It felt like being in the wrong place trying to get somewhere else but never getting there fast enough.
In movies, in novels, I’d always identified with the antiheroine—the one fleeing home on horseback, the brilliant artist in her attic reviled by the townspeople, the woman fucking someone’s husband.
All these women were white with an intrinsic redeemability the moral universe of these worlds never noted.
But never mind that, I found ways to force myself into their figures out of need.
I was hardly aware, at thirteen, fourteen, how desperately attached I was to these women haunting society’s dark stairwells, circling in the shadows like a snake ready to double in size and eat you whole.
Jay had his own moments of restlessness: a glance at a girl’s ass at a party, a pupil expanding when a beautiful woman appeared on TV.
This was normal, to want beyond the borders of your relationship, but to never articulate this want, to whip your desire into submission, shove it into your sock drawer only to find it panting, weak from denial, years later.
I understood the imperative of caging this animal want—I might die a spiritual death, but I could be sacrificed. Who was to say what would happen if it got loose, loping crooked-legged, yellow-eyed through the world, sizing people up then eating them whole?
In March of our senior year, Milan and I went to a cowboy-themed party off campus. I dug out my boots with bedazzled flames curling up the calves. Jay’s dad had flown out for spring break, so he was spending the week with him.
The party was inside a packed bar—sticky wood, green pool table, poor lighting. Milan had gone to the bathroom. I was leaning against the wall waiting for her, gazing into my too-strong blue drink, when I felt a figure beside me.
“Hey, cowgirl.”
Standing there was a guy in a cowboy hat, two glossy black braids roping down his chest, an Indigenous cowboy fever dream. I’d seen him around campus, always too nervous to speak, always with Jay, anyway.
“Hey, cowboy,” I choked.
He laughed at my nerves. A slightly crooked front tooth, a wet mouth. Oh God. I blurted that I had a boyfriend and tumbled into the bathroom.
He was waiting for me when I came out, seductively slouched against the wall. He invited me and Milan to sit with him and his friend. Nothing untoward, he said with a drawl.
We crushed into a booth, talking until the bar closed. He didn’t ask for my number at the end of the night (“You’re taken, I respect that”), just said he’d see me around.
That night I tossed and turned, burning up in bed, my dehydrated mind drowning in dreams of shiny braids and butterscotch skin.
I ended up having a medium-grade fever and lay with a cold washcloth over my face.
It wasn’t just about sex. It was the what-if of it all.
What if I’d given him my number? What if we’d kept talking?
What if he was supposed to be significant in my life but I was too busy running from the possibility to ever know it?
This feeling of endless paths electrified me.
It was this charge I was courting, its power to crack open the world.
That party turned out to be the last one I’d go to for two years.
The pandemic rippled through the country, reaching us that week, which might have explained my fever.
Campus all but shut down. Jay and I would walk for graduation, but shortly afterward we fled to our separate coasts, where we stayed stuck for months.
I’d tried to set the memory of the cowboy aside, but it kept surfacing along with this feeling like I had somewhere to be, and I was running out of time to get there.
Nearly four years after the stay-at-home orders were lifted, during one of Jay’s trips to DC, we went to Politics and Prose.
The two of us reading shoulder to shoulder on the floor, I lowered my novel, stealing glimpses of his face.
By then I’d been circling the object of opening our relationship for years, trying to figure out how to pick it up.
I hated myself, knowing I was about to shatter his calm expression.
“Can I say something?”
He looked up, wearing clunky black reading glasses that always made me feel protective of him. “You can always say something.”
In my periphery, people shuffled between bookshelves. I knew you weren’t supposed to raise issues like this in public, but I’d waited too long. He was headed to the airport tomorrow morning.
“What do you think about open relationships?”
He paused. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, is that something you’re open to?”
He stared at me like I had asked him to commit a crime.
“No,” he said. The tiny balloon of hope in me deflated. “Why are you asking me that?”
“I don’t know. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about.”
Grimacing, he rubbed the folded skin of his forehead. “Just—what are you saying?”
My gaze returned to the shoppers drifting between the shelves, pausing to pick up a book. The sight of them turning this beloved object in their hands gave me comfort.
“I’m saying I think I want to try an open relationship.”
Jay hugged his knees. His head dropped forward like it had fallen off suddenly. I placed a hand on his back, his lungs expanding, contracting, beneath my fingers. “Jaylin.”
He raised his head, eyes red and worn beneath his crooked glasses. “Why would you want that?”
I tried to say what I’d practiced. “I’ve been thinking about other people and I feel like pretending I’m not is being dishonest to you and myself.
I know you have desires outside of me as well.
Why limit ourselves? We can always go back if it doesn’t work.
But I’ll regret not trying.” I added, “None of this means I don’t love you. None of it.”
Slowly, he lifted his gaze, and I saw him seeing me: I was a stranger then, a wicked woman souring something sweet between us. His eyes found the floor. I was secretly relieved; I hated watching their pretty dark amber cloud with rage.
We spent the evening at our Airbnb moving silently around each other. I asked him if he wanted me to leave. He told me to stay.
That night, when he thought I was asleep, he cried.
I held him from behind, my chest flush against his heaving back.
He felt limp in my arms. A hook curved into my heart, reeling me to the absolute edge of my guilt, a dark drop-off I’d never seen before.
Jay in pain was one wretched thing. Jay in pain because of me was beyond my emotional reach.
I couldn’t grasp it, could only be obliterated by it.
And yet, I couldn’t be brought to feel regret.
I understood the thing clawing at me, had I not let it loose, would’ve ripped through me and found its way to him eventually.
I’d been trying to protect him. But that night I learned there was nothing I could’ve done to protect him if protection meant betraying myself.
I also learned this: When there aren’t enough choices, you will always make the wrong one.