I’ve tried to write this story three different times but I still haven’t gotten it right, mostly because the story is not about me. It’s about my girlfriend, the girl I have been dating. It’s sort of a warning to the guys my age about younger women. But it’s also in praise of young girls and their virtues, all the things most guys spend their life trying to feel: the firmness, the newness, the sense that you are making an impression on something so beautiful and firm and new, the feeling that life isn’t all crap. This story is also about how all those things can be bought for at least a while. To me this is a story about confusion, desire and the mall. I hate when an interview in a magazine starts that way. Like, Chelsea Clinton spills the beans on growing up in the White House, Oxford, and vibrators. Then there’s one line about vibrators and it’s probably Chelsea laughing about something the interviewer says about a cell phone being like a vibrator. But this story is about confusion, desire and the mall. I promise.

I met my girlfriend at the mall. She sold me some stainless steel bracelets for my sister’s birthday. Then she watched me try on some women’s sunglasses, mugging into the mirror like some young uncle. She laughed and scanned my suit, my tie, my shoes, and me. Neat guy must have some money, would be the subtitle of this scene.

“Is Peter around?” I said after I was done. Pete is her boss, my best friend off-and-on since junior college twenty years ago. I tried to get that across in the way I asked the question.

“Um.” He’s not Peter; to her, he’s not Peter; He’s Mr. Gold. She’s one of the six or seven distractingly appealing college girls Pete has working in his store normally. “Um.” She went about straightening the sunglasses like we were done and then she figured it out. “Oh, Mr. Gold.”

“Yeah? Sorry. Mr. Gold. He around?” Or is he out fucking around? I implied with my twinkling eyes.

“Not ’til later, probably. He just comes in, you know?” her eyes were red by still focused.

I wanted to make some joke, but that seemed fatherly.

So I just pressed up against the counter poised to say goodbye and leave. “I’m Justin. Tell him I missed him.”

She started fixing glasses, looking like she was working. “Justin. Golfing Justin? I’ve heard of you.”

She was going to make a joke, I felt. Maybe a joke about me seeming too young to be Golfing Justin. I could see her thinking and toying with a slight smile, but that would be too daughterly. So we both just nodded. Her hair was many colors of blond like I always imagined mine would be if I grew it out. Her skin fit her face like a made bed. She had a fuzzy glow like a flower or moving train I’d stared at for too long.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Oh, I should have given you a discount. I’m sure that would have been fine. That’s what he would have wanted me to?”

“Oh… Pretend like you did. But only if it seems like he wanted to.”

She smiled.

I left wishing that I had bought something else.

Wishing that she were just a twenty-one-year-old I met anywhere else instead of Pete’s store. Wishing she was fair game. Wishing that somehow a sacred bond between Pete and his wife would not disappear if their employees became somehow sexualized.

And so that should have been the last time I ever saw her. I should have just imagined us fucking a few times, her blowing me, kidded Peter about running the Blueballs Jewelry store in the local mall. Then imagined her and I fucking a few more times, maybe while fucking someone else, and she would have disappeared into the strata of girls who could have been. Like an old centerfold or a friend’s sister.

I definitely shouldn’t have done what I did next.

Peter Gold loves wine. So does his wife, Kate, who is even richer then he is. I brought two bottles, two hundred dollar’s worth, over for dinner. And that’s the problem with having rich friends or friends who get rich: even going over their house for dinner is expensive. Then when you take them out for dinner, it’s more than you would ever want to spend. They pick it up and then next time it’s your turn. Peter will try to go to a reasonable place because he knows how rich they are, but Kate will want to try someplace new, and it will and up being like $300 for us three and whoever I brought as a date. Then my date gets this idea about me, that’s not true, that $300 for dinner is reasonable, normal, the kind of thing that a girl would say “we” never do anymore. It doesn’t work when I try to explain later to the date (if things go on that long) that it is only OK because they spend, at least, like, $400 on me and my dates a month. It just seems like I am a gushing rich sucker.

As usual, Kate looked at me like there’s something on the corner of my mouth not worth mentioning. I’m that amusing to her. “No date, Justin?” She always either grills me or my date and I as Pete gets the food together.

“Nope.” She just wanted to talk about Andrea, my last short-term girlfriend. Pete ran around the kitchen getting the cheese and things together.

“What happened to Andrea?”

“ON-drea.” I stressed the “ON” because ON-Drea hates being called AN-drea. Kate and I shared a few giggles over that. Pete walked up to the kitchen table and leaned over Kate’s shoulder and poured her some of my wine. Feeling I awkward I looked around and noticed a new table near the new drapes on the new rug. “What a pain in the ass to have a name everyone always says wrong and always feeling the need to correct people. Even people that she will never see again,” I said, making it clear that they would never see ON-drea again.

“So you guys are done? Over?” said Kate demanding more.

“She’s still in my cell phone, but just so I know if it’s her calling and don’t answer it. I’m looking though, aggressively looking. I think I know exactly what I want now.”

As I spoke, Kate said, “Yes, and?”

“I want a beautiful, intelligent and independent woman. Someone who reads and does all the good stuff. The only thing I’m really specific about is that I want to date an orphan. Someone who has no family obligations whatsoever. No flying or driving anywhere for holidays. No crowded airports, just figuring out if we want to go to the eight o’clock or ten o’clock movie on Christmas Eve.”

“That’s pathetic,” Kate said and laughed like she was thinking about something else.

“Stacy like those bracelets?” said Peter from the kitchen a bit loudly over her laugh.

Pete walked over with his glass of wine and sat down next to Kate. We tasted the wine. I pretended I know how to taste without inhaling it through my nose and swallowed quickly. “It’s great, Justin,” they both said. Tasted like a ten-dollar bottle to me. “I bet she did.” I said. “Don’t know yet. I sent them in the mail.”

“She likes the thin, thin ones, right?” Kate said.

Kate is the buyer for the store, Blue Sun Jewelry.

Peter runs it more or less. It’s something for them to do. Something to talk about, really, so that don’t have to talk about inheriting and investing which are their real talents. Those talents are the kind of thing that once people know about you; they can’t talk about anything else. They try to, but the conversation always drifts back to thoughts on how to magically attract money.

“So the girl told you that I came in?” I said.

“No, I saw your credit card slip,” Peter said, a little quickly. “Who helped you?”

“A young woman. A pretty young woman.” That was no help and I knew it. Kate looked at me with a head twist and Pete just shook his head. It’s a sore point between them that the girls that work at their store are all hot. The logic is that’s just what you do when you are running a trendy jewelry store. You put good-looking girls in there so guys like coming in to buy presents, and so girls and their moms feel like the jewelry puts them in good company.

“Rochelle or Denny? Denny is black.”

“Rochelle, then. She’s nice, knows her stuff.”

Kate poured herself a second glass of wine. “ON-drea isn’t coming,” she said.

“Yeah. I know,” Peter said.

“You should have told me. I would have invited an adult woman to join us.” I looked at Pete and could tell that Kate was looking at me. He smiled and I saw her sip at her wine feeling that she was shaking her head at me. An awkward silence made me realize there are secrets in a marriage that no else can ever know or would want to. Then she kissed Pete and put his hand on her lap.

I got drunk that night, which I never do except when I’m at Kate and Pete’s. We all did. Then we had coffee and some cheesecake with red-on-the-inside farmer’s market strawberries, and took turns getting up to piss. Kate went first.

“I wish I had your job,” I told Peter.

“Work not going well?”

“No, great. But there’s nothing like your employees at my job.” Pete likes to pretend he doesn’t notice the girls for Kate’s sake. He’s a dog about every other girl, but the store’s employees are off-limits.

“Yeah, no interns in advertising,” said Pete.

“Jesus, Pete. If I could fuck her once then I could die reasonably happy.”

“AN-drea?” Pete said, aggressively wrong.

“Rochelle.”

He shook his head at me. Stop, the first shake said.

Kate is coming right back, the second one said. But the third said, “If I can’t touch, you better not.” He was drunk too. And he felt bad about being harsh to me. And all the sexual frustration of the shop must have been killing him. “Well? She liked you too,” Pete said.

I wasn’t sure if I had heard what I thought. So I looked at his face. He meant it and hated saying it. A door had opened right there. A door pushed open by my stupid cock.

“Who?” Kate said. “Who likes Justin?”

“ON-drea,” Peter said.

She shook her head. “You think I don’t know you’re talking about that clerk? Did she flirt with you, Justin?”

“Nope.”

“She’s very serious. Rochelle is a serious girl,” Pete said, heading to the bathroom. “Justin, on the other hand, is a child toucher.”

I sipped coffee and realized that he was, in a way, outing me, letting Kate know I was interested just to distance himself from me.

Kate said, “I have a friend for you, Justin. She’s a professor, or was. She’s an out-of-work writer now.” She had the tone of a therapist who knows her client is nuts. She could have been talking about medication I should be on. I went to the bathroom.

Why do I love Kate and Pete? Probably because they love me and make me feel like there’s some appeal about me that even I’m missing. They think my life is absorbing and a dietary supplement to the consistency of their own. They don’t have the bullshit view that since I’m over forty and unmarried I’m a derelict. Plus they have matches on their guest toilet, just for me I think. Nothing makes it more comfortable to eat to excess at a friend’s house.

As I washing my hands, I could hear the bad part of the evening begin. From their new surround-sound speaker system large orchestral drums were beating like a perfect heart. Then violins danced around the beat in a very loopy manner: classical music that sounds like fairyland music. I stepped out of the bathroom and through the kitchen and down the hallway, and saw them cuddling on the new couch. They would sit like that until they almost fell asleep or I left. I walked to the kitchen and grabbed a big glass of water thinking about the eventual hangover. I overfilled the glass and nearly dropped it into the sink when I heard a sound like the beginning of a shock treatment on the tile counter. It was a cell phone vibrating. I set the glass down and looked at the phone.

The phone said, “STORE- Rochelle.” I pray for moments like this, the coincidences that don’t seem like coincidences because I want them so earnestly. Like when I was in junior high and a kid who was bullying me suddenly got kicked out of school or the country, never to be seen again. Or a when a girl I can’t help but fantasize about but can’t approach suddenly calls a nearby cell phone while I am drunk. And when I know it’s her because I see her name and I’m alone, with nothing to stop me from picking it up except for the reality that the phone belongs to my best friend who is the girl’s boss. If I didn’t answer the phone, I would have to come back in another reincarnation on this miserable Earth just to do it. That’s how badly I wanted to be naked with her, to see her look at me with lust, our bodily fluids making the same mess.

“Hello?” I said.

“Mr. Gold?” Rochelle said.

“Um? Rochelle.” I muttered something here, unable to get it right immediately. “This is Golfing Justin, Pete’s friend. I met you at the store.”

“Yeah? I remember?” Definitely dubious. “Is Mr. Gold there?”

“I just saw your name and I really wanted to talk to you. But, I’ll get Pete if you want.”

“Um?” Everything was a question. I could hear her sit down or change how she was sitting.

“So let’s go out. Dinner, a movie, maybe an Oscar-contender if you like.”

She sounded like she had never been asked such a direct question in her entire life. “Um?”

“It will be nice. I won’t wear women’s sunglasses.”

There were miles between us, with me in her boss’ perfect house in a gated community and her in her apartment with inherited furniture and the tastes of everyone who had raised her and her roommates. But she agreed, sounding like a mix between a surprised award winner who didn’t know who to thank and a smart little spelling bee winner. I gave her my cell-phone number and then she told me she was glad I had answered. She was surprised but in a good way. “A very good way,” she said, warming up for sure.

“So you called Pete, do you have a message for him?” I said.

“Oh. Yeah. Yeah?”

“OK. Please do me a favor. Call right back and leave a message.”

“Umm,” I could hear her getting what I meant. Finally.

“OK.”

She wore black on our first date. She wore a skirt and a much classier shirt then the one at she was in at the mall. The shirt flitted around her waist, revealing a dark, tan, flat stomach. She smelled like teardrops or saline solution, something clear and clean. As when she got into my truck she was smiling like she was impressed. Impressed that I had an SUV. Impressed a minute later that I was a Vice President of something at a well-known Advertising company.

“Mr. Gold asked me about you,” she said as we pulled up to the valet at the restaurant. The valet tried to open my car door but it was locked. She stepped out of the car. I fumbled a bit and made my way around the back of the car to meet her just as it rolled away to the parking lot. I took her hand and led her into the restaurant. She wanted me to ask about Pete, but in the fumbling I had enough pause to realize I shouldn’t play into that. I shouldn’t be nervous, like a kid. She’d expect that. If there was something I needed to know she’d tell me. I know Pete and I knew Pete was suspicious of me.

She ordered an appetizer, which made me nervous. Then she ordered wine. Then she ordered desert and espresso. I was trying not to talk much, not to seem nervous about the bill, trying to make the sweat on my forehead disappear. She told me all about school and how being a fashion designer isn’t a career goal for her, it’s just what she has to do. I told her that I admired her for knowing that. I do.

I didn’t ask about her family because I was afraid I’d have more in common with her parents than her. She was really sweet without anything bad to say about anyone. But not much to say at all in general, so I had to talk a lot.

I told her the only story that I have that everyone I meet seems to like and also makes me look cute and vulnerable. The gist of it is that I was eleven and had a girlfriend that I used to watch ChiPs with because she loved Erik Estrada. Her family asked for dinner to grill me. They were all talking about sushi, which I had never heard at the time and, of course, I wanted to fit in. So when the Dad asked me if I liked sushi I said a firm yes. When I got to this part the bill came. It shook me a bit but I kept on to the punch line. So the Dad asked me what kind I liked. “Just the regular kind,” I said. She giggled and adjusted herself and looked at the check. Here we go, I thought. She picked up the check. I was confused. “I’ll get it,” I said.

“No,” she said. “I’ll get this.”

I protested but it got embarrassing. I felt every guy in the restaurant was watching me trying to fight off this beautiful girl from paying the bill. I was in ecstasy.

So she paid. I nodded like I knew what to expect of life. And she smiled. When the valet put us back in the car, she leaned over to me and kissed me cheek. “I bet you live alone,” she said.

It was in the dark of the next morning when she said goodbye. “Dinner tonight,” I said.

“I’ll cook,” she said. “Around seven?”

“Great.” She dressed. The light of sunrise was turning my bedroom into a darkroom. Her clothes drifted back round her body bringing back her secrets. She kissed me on the cheek. “Seven,” she said. And then she tried letting herself out. I listened to her struggle for a minute and then got up to help her.

I wasn’t sure if we planned for her to cook at my house at seven. By lunch, I was pretty certain we had planned to eat at my house as if though it had been said explicitly. At about one in the afternoon, Pete called. I wished I could tell him anything but I couldn’t.

“Looking for some quick golf this afternoon?” he said.

“I’m looking busy today. Thursday OK for you?”

“Sure. OK.” He was tapping something in the background, maybe a pencil. “So how are you?”

“Just busy, but good.” I felt like an asshole for being so distant while dating Rochelle, somehow carving my life out of his.

“OK, I’ll let you go,” he said.

“Pete, one more thing. When you and Kate first started dating, who paid?” Back then Kate was already rich; Pete was only potentially rich.

“Me. I always pay when we go out, always.” The tapping increased. “Why?”

“I was just wondering what it is like to date a rich woman. For a campaign.” I sometimes tell people, even my closest friends and family, that I work on the creative side of campaigns, like the creative people would involve me. No one even understands what I do at my job, setting up meetings and pitches for clients.

They assume that I must come up with the ideas because that’s what they would like to do.

“Yeah. I always pay but it all evens out in the end.”

I nodded and we said goodbye. I couldn’t work. I looked down the hallway and saw Jenson Bills. I made eye contact and got up to start walking toward him. Jenson is an Accountant Executive on the creative side, a copywriter. He’s about ten years younger than me. The best copywriter I’ve ever met. He had coined three major campaign slogans in the last year. He gets hired just to put campaigns in the “right voice”. And he constantly comes up with the best put-downs for the bitchy women we work with.

“Jenson. Want to smoke?” He turned and held out his hand. I slapped it.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“Sure.” I half-ran back to my office where I keep some cigarettes for stressful times. I met Jenson again on the balcony where smokers go.

“So, how you doing?” I asked.

“Oh, the same. That pig Janice keeps taking my shit and making it sound like a pregnant cow wrote it. Man, sometimes I wish I could have a really creative job.”

I spit out smoke and nodded.

“You could probably do my BS but I could never do al the serious shit you do.”

“Think I could do your job?” I asked.

“Sure, maybe, man. You have good ideas. You do. It’s just you don’t have that editor in your brain to throw out the bad ideas.”

He was exactly right. “I can’t edit myself,” I said. “It’s impossible. It’s like asking me to be the tree and the lumberjack. Every one of us are expected to hack ourselves up to sell crap to make sure no one thinks too much.” I wondered if I was just repeating something I’d heard someone else say.

He exhaled. “A lumberjack and a tree, that’s good, man. I like that. See, you are you’re smart and creative. You just write like you were taught to write. That turns clients off, makes them think they could do it.”

That sounded so bad and I didn’t know why. I changed the subject. I knew he’d want to hear about Rochelle. “You would not believe the piece of ass I went home with last night.” I blew out some smoke.

“Yeah?”

“Twenty-one years old.” He lit up. It made him so happy to hear it about it. Guys like Jenson love to hear about you getting laid and I’ll never totally figure out why. Must be some kind of smiling jealousy, a “he can do it, so could I” thing.

Rochelle cooked for me at my house that night, excited by my every bite. She had bought me dinner and was already cooking for me. I felt like she was auditioning to be my wife or my sugardaddy. “I’m taking you out this weekend. You are not even bringing your purse with you,” I said.

“If you like what I cook, I’ll cook every night.” And she did for a while.

Two weeks later. Her pipe was brown with a bowl in front filled with a green mush of flowery pot. It looked so clichéd and silly it seemed like it had been edited into my life. She sipped the smoke, looking at me. I looked around at people in the park too far away to even make us out. They were on benches or in swings talking and ignoring life. She let out the smoke and her pupils filled with emotion. The way she looked at me, she hadn’t loved me before, or she now loved me very much. Her eyes were giving her up. Now she was ready to listen and I was ready to talk.

“I hate malls, I told her.

“Me too,” she laughed. “I always hate wherever I work.”

“Yeah me too. But the mall is really an evil place to me. I feel like the busier the mall is the more likely.

I am to find a giant queen bee at the center of it, below the food court living off the life force of all the different slaves and visitors to her hive.” I told her how I felt about commercialism and a life devoted to going out to malls, or other shopping areas, or sitting at home and watching a mall on TV. “The world is a mall and that there are actual malls just confuses people into thinking that it is not.”

She liked that. She said, “The more you realize the world is all bullshit, the easier it is to get along in it.” She told he me about her life and how all her friends in school were in their early thirties, the kind of girls that got caught up in speed and crank and partied through their twenties. But they were smart and resumed life right where they left it off. They worked their asses off in school, replacing their failures with A’s, studying only the essential stuff, and manipulating teacher’s assistants like over-involved parents manipulate grade school teachers. She learned a lot from them. She liked people her age, she said, but she hated hanging out in large groups and that was impossible to explain to the cool girls her age. “They like flocks. I like the shepherd.”

She was talking about me. She looked at me like she knew that was the sexiest thing in the world to say to me. It was like her words were her hand rubbing my crotch or her teeth since I could feel my zipper.

This was so much better than being alone. This may the best thing I have ever done on a Saturday. Better than sitting with guys watching sports. Better than whole

Saturdays spent in the local topless bar talking to the same tired stripper between twenty-dollar lap dances. Definitely better than spending an afternoon with relatives, anyone’s relatives.

We got back to my place and the phone was ringing. It was Pete. It had been almost two weeks since we talked last. Kate thought I was in rehab, he said.

“Rehab for what?”

“She wanted me to ask you that,” he said.

I laughed. The laugh came out so forced that it would have been better to be silent. I was laughing at him and how my life was just before Rochelle. “Tell her golf withdrawals,” I said, trying to become my old self. I walked out of the room leaving Roch plopped on the couch. I didn’t want her to hear me; I sounded a hundred years old.

“So Kate’s friend, the writer, is really cute. And desperate,” he said, engaging the same fix-up procedure that we knew well.

“Desperate for a job and a husband, probably.”

“That too. Kate’s really on this; can you help me out?”

“Well, no one’s hiring now, Pete. I wish I could help.”

“You could take her out. Or come to dinner over here with her.” He was hitting the metal part of the pen.

It felt like he was about to ask how long it had been since my last confession. It just made me want to lie to him. “E-mail me the number, OK?”

“Sure. Golf tomorrow?” He must have been tapping his pencil against the phone, it sounded like a jackhammer.

“I may have to work. I’ll call you if I can do it.”

“OK, take care,” he said but didn’t hang up. A part of me was hoping I’d never talk to him again.

“Pete?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Justin, I miss playing golf. I’m getting fat.” Tap. Tap. Tap.

“We’ll play, Pete. Have to run now.”

Rochelle looked at me. She stood up and rubbed up against me like a cat and I followed her to bed.

At work the next day Rochelle called and left a message while I was at lunch. She had finals and had to study. She’d call me late, like after 1 a.m. It was my first night entirely alone in a month. I wanted to die rather than face it.

I tried to go to the gym but once I got there the treadmills were all taken and I just walked out. TV drove me crazy; I flipped through every channel hitting only ads. So, I called Pete on cell. He didn’t answer. I called him at home, same result. The image of him seeing my number on caller ID and not picking it up either time made me cringe.

I went to a coffee shop with some work and put the phone on the table and watched it from the side like a girl I was stalking, no eye contact but never looking away. No luck.

I had to face it: My girlfriend was probably fucking multiple guys and Pete and I weren’t friends anymore.We weren’t friends anymore and my life was fucked up because of it. Never again would I dine with the rich and eat appetizers. I wouldn’t ever have a friend that close again. The friends you meet after you are you’re twenty-five don’t stick; they can’t know you the way someone does when you have all the time in the world. They are like Executive Assistants; the more you are drawn to them, the sooner they are gone. I would never have a friend like Pete or Kate again and knowing that just made me want to call them and be desperate and clingy, the tact of someone who is truly trying to end a relationship for good. Why couldn’t the phone ring? Why couldn’t they call? Why did I have such a meek view of my life that it couldn’t seem anything but miserable without them, even with Rochelle? Or maybe they were at the movies or on an airplane for all I knew. I decided to hope for the best and get a refill of coffee and a magazine, Rolling Stone’s one hundred Best Albums of the Year Issue. I should go buy some CDs. Fuck it, I thought, I could afford all 100. I should buy Pete and Kate a CD and drop it by their house. Maybe some modern fairy music.

Still I ended up at home trying to call Rochelle on her cell phone at twelve, an hour before she said she’d call at one. No pick up. I didn’t leave a message, feeling that would be playing all my cards. I waited an hour and tried again. No pick up; didn’t leave a message. Now it was too late to go by Pete’s. So I called her again. Again no message. Then I called again. Nothing.

Then I drank some Nyquil and called four more times before I fell asleep. I woke up at five a.m. and checked my phone. No calls. I called her again a few times. Took another small dose of Nyquil and fell asleep with the phone inches from my hand.

At eight a.m. the phone ring. It sounded like Rochelle, “Where are you?”

“What?” It was Kate. “Are you drunk, Justin?”

“No, I just took some Nyquil.”

“Are you sick?”

I didn’t know what to say.

Kate didn’t wait for me to respond, “Pete needs to talk to you about Rochelle.”

“Why?”

“We know you are dating her, don’t be shitty about this. I’m disappointed. I don’t know how to say that without sounding old, but I am. You need to call Pete. He has something important to talk to you about.”

“Why didn’t he just call me?”

“He’s that mad.”

What the fuck was he that mad for? Was he seeing her too? I was sure he was fucking her and would have been entirely sure if Kate hadn’t called for him. “Is she with you?” I asked.

“Who, Justin?”

“Rochelle?”

“NO. Don’t be insane. Just call Pete. That girl is a little bitch, Justin. You could have done so much better. She’s a lying little slut.” Kate hated being so mad and saying such foul things, I could hear that.

But she meant it.

I just agreed with her and got off the phone. Then I called Rochelle again. Now her voice mail was picking up right away. I wished I knew where she lived or somewhere I could drive to and trap her so all these stupid questions would be over. If I didn’t have any more questions I could at least relax, probably into a long, deep depression. I called work and told them I was too sick to come in.

When she walked up to my door that morning around eleven, she couldn’t have been expecting me. I should have been at work. Hearing a car shifting from reverse to forward, I looked out the window and saw Rochelle walking up to the door. Her shirt was so low cut it was like her breasts were being scooped out of them.

And still they giggled loose like she wasn’t wearing a bra. She knocked. I turned off the TV and wanted to be dressed for work but I wasn’t. Wasn’t even wearing a shirt. She opened the door without knocking and walked in calling my name.

“Have you been crying?” she said.

This fucking girl. “I’ve been up all night waiting for you, calling you. Do you have your phone?”

“Oh shit.” She reached into her purse and pulled it out. “It’s dead. I left it in the car while I was studying. I just got back from my final. I was studying all night.”

I wanted so badly for her excuse to make sense. And it did, then. She walked up to me and kissed me, taking in my morning breath, and then she knelt down and continued kissing.

An hour later, in bed, she pulled away the sheet. “I need to go to work,” she said.

“Why does Pete need to talk to me about you?”

She kicked the sheet out around her, “He called you about me?”

“His wife did.”

“I need to talk to her.”

“You do?”

She didn’t want to tell me, she said. She had been holding out since we met but Pete she had to tell me now. “Me and a few other girls get the same bullshit from him. He says sick things all the time, tells us all the shit he imagines. One time he walked me to my car and he pushed up on me with his boner.” It didn’t sound like Pete. It sounded like how I was in his position.

“So why do you need to go to work, now?” I asked.

“To quit. I just needed money for this last semester.

I’m done with that place. Someone is going to sue him.

He’s lucky it’s not me.”

She had to go. She smoked a joint she had in her purse and left. She couldn’t quit over the phone, she said. She wanted to walk in and get her last check and kiss that place goodbye. She wanted to tell Pete to fuck off and I guess I wanted her to do that too. Poor fucking Kate. She always thought that she married someone who was her equal, I don’t think any woman ever has.

I called her an hour later and she didn’t answer her phone, again. I walked to the refrigerator looked for something to drink and slammed it overwhelmed with th frustration. I didn’t want to be alone and there was no one to call. My best friend hated me and was actively trying to fuck my girlfriend. I couldn’t call any of my friends at work because I was supposed to be so sick that I couldn’t come in. I got online and chatted in a chat room for a while searching for the fabled horny housewife. Instead I just began writing insults towards the whole chat room, lame shit about how they’ve never been with a girl who wasn’t related to them or paid by the hour. Time began to pass again.

Then Pete called. “I’m on my way to your house.”

“OK.”

“We need to talk about Rochelle.”

“Right.”

I ran through the house trying to straighten everything up, trying to make sure there wasn’t any pot or girl’s clothing anywhere. But within a few minutes, he showed up at the door, my friend in old man’s clothes. He looked at me and shook his head with his whole being.

“She’s stealing money from me, Justin. She has been since I hired her.”

“Rochelle?”

“Yes. And when my manager caught her last night she lied at first. Then she smiled and said that you would pay me back everything.”

I stepped back and sat down in some decorative chair in my hallway that had never been sat in before. Pete came through my front door and stood over me.

“How much?”

“At least six thousand.” He tapped his fingers against his waist. “But I’m not taking it from you. I’m going to the cops. I just needed you to know what that little bitch said.”

I spit to the floor, I couldn’t stand that disgusting Nyquil taste in my mouth. I walked to living room where my pants were on the floor. I picked them up and dissected my checkbook. He watched me, “It won’t be cashed, Justin.”

I handed it to him but he wouldn’t touch it.

“It won’t be cashed.”

“Then I’ll get you cash. I’m sorry but I’m paying you.”

“I’m going to the cops.”

“Take the check,” I said and forced it into his arms almost pushing him, almost punching him through his smug fucking face. I turned and walked to the couch and I sat down. When I looked up, he was gone and my front door was still open.

I went into work that afternoon, answered calls and email and looked sick for everyone. They loved me when I was miserable. Then I drove home, but I couldn’t get out of my car. I just sat in my car looking at the empty, dark house that I would live in forever. I saw myself alone eating take-out food for eternity. I turned my cell phone off and put it my glove compartment and hoped I’d never use it again. I sat with the engine off and listened to the radio and watching the day get darker.

Hours passed and then I saw Rochelle pull up in her shitty little economy car. She parked and then walked up to the dark house and rang my doorbell. Looking around like a snake, she waited a minute and then twirled back toward her car. She was about to step back into it when she saw me. She smiled and made herself into everything I wanted. She walked towards me.

“Hey,” she said opening my car door. “You want to go get something to eat? My treat?”

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