1
CHELSEA
Ijerk when the door opens, half-hoping that someone is coming in to put me out of my misery
Not by killing me, of course.
By taking me home.
I don’t know what I was thinking coming to this party. My brother has mellowed out as he’s gotten older, but there are still aspects of the college frat boy in his thirty-nine-year-old body, and it comes out in times like this.
When I walked in, he was hanging upside down, drinking from a keg as people chanted around him. Then, when he realized I was there, he straightened, gave me a slobbery, drunken kiss on the cheek, and told me how happy he was to see me.
And then he basically ignored my existence for the next thirty minutes or so, until he had to go out and get more drinks because we were apparently running low.
Thankfully, someone sober agreed to drive him, and they've been gone since then. Meanwhile, I was stuck at the partywith people I didn't know, all of whom seemed to be getting spontaneously drunker by the second.
Drunker and hornier, too.
Someone is having sex in the downstairs bathroom, people are making out on the couch, and I think they might be having a threesome in the pool as well.
And here’s the thing. I’m not a prude or anything. I can stand around and watch people have sex all day.
But it’s just highlights to me how much I’ve never been a part of this world–the world of the high-powered extroverts who don't have to overthink every word and aren't currently hiding out in their brother's bedroom waiting for him to come back.
I really wish I could be like them, I do. I wish I could relax at parties and not surreptitiously monitor everyone's alcohol intake, making sure no one is getting alcohol poisoning.
I wish I could just drink and let loose and make a fool of myself without dying of embarrassment the next day. I wish I could be the fun girl for a change.
But instead, I get to be the sensible girl who refuses to drink past her limits and wears sensible flip-flops to a pool party like an idiot. No stilettos that make my ass sit high and tight.
Boring.
That's what my ex, Eric, called me the day we broke up. The day I caught him having sex in our almost-marital bed with someone who was categorically not me.
At first, he went through the stages: shock, sincere-seeming apologies, then, when he realized I wasn't budging and hecouldn't gaslight me into believing that I didn't see what I saw, he suddenly turned cold and snarky.
"Well, can you blame me?" he snarled. "You think I could get by on just boring sex once every month or so? I’m so fucking sick of missionary sex every now and then. A man needs some excitement."
Even now, the words are like daggers stabbing into my heart. Equal parts rage and devastation assail me as I think of his face, the man I thought I was going to marry, staring at me in barely concealed contempt.
The irony is that I was sick of the missionary sex, too! But I was the only one who actually attempted to fix it. I was always the one suggesting we spice up our sexcapades, with toys, roleplay, heck, I would have even put on my sexiest big girl panties and paraded to the sex club in Harlem on a Saturday night if that's what he wanted.
He was always the one who turned me down.
Unless it was about having a threesome or some kind of swinging thing, he wasn’t interested.
I initiated sex more times than he did in our relationship, and though it made me feel a little insecure, I excused it because I just assumed that maybe he wasn't a very sexual person, and maybe he was just tired from work. There were so many maybes I gave myself that it makes me sick in hindsight.
And sure, maybe hewastired from working so much.
But not too tired to screw his PA, as life would have it. I don’t know how I missed the signs, considering I work in the same building as both of them. I was the head of marketing at hiscompany, the one I helped him build while we were still in college.
All three of us were friends then, and recently, the three of us were working on pitch decks for new investors, meaning we spent a lot of late nights together, putting our thoughts in a basket. Plenty of times, we have been out together at bars, shooting the shit, having a good time. I thought Eric and Claire had a close, brother-sisterly relationship.
But no.
They were just screwing each other behind my back and probably laughing at me while they did it.
