Birds were chirping outside the windows of the sprawling Ritz-Carlton suite I’d unexpectedly spent the night in, and daylight was starting to seep in around the shades we’d pulled down for a reason. That’s weird, I thought through my champagne-soaked brain as I stumbled out of the bedroom in search of some postcoital water. It looks like it’s morning.
My phone—once I managed to locate it among the wreckage of the night before, strewn clothes and empty wine bottles as far as the eye could see—revealed two crucial pieces of information: (1) My soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend still hadn’t texted me, and (2) the old friend I’d just cheated on him with had quite literally fucked me till the sun came up. The birds weren’t confused—it was indeed 6 a.m. I had work in three hours. And yet, there I was, 200 miles away, somewhere between still drunk and violently hungover, positively vibrating with an energy I hadn’t felt in months.
A day or two earlier, my boyfriend of nearly a year had started showing signs of the classic slow fade. First there was no goodnight text. Then there were no texts at all. Having been around the breakup block a time or two, I knew what came next. In fact, at this advanced stage of my career in getting dumped, I can see a split coming from miles away. I know a man is going to end things with me days, sometimes weeks, before he realizes it himself. Why don’t I take advantage of these psychic powers and beat him to the punch? Because I’m not particularly interested in making these men’s lives any easier. If a guy wants to break up with me, he’s going to have to man up and do it himself.
So while I was patiently waiting for my boyfriend to end our relationship, I did what any girl would do: I hopped on a train to pay a visit to Richard*, the on-again, off-again, romantically ambiguous, illicit-on-just-about-every-level fling with whom I’d been tempted to cheat for pretty much the entirety of my relationship. Of all the guys any boyfriend of a girl like me might have reason to worry about, Richard was the only one who actually should’ve been cause for concern—the one I secretly never stopped texting (and sexting); the reason I changed my passcode. The one I’d deliriously tried to kiss outside a bar when we met for “just friends” drinks a few months ago. The one I never breathed a word of to my boyfriend. The one I just couldn’t quite let go.
To my credit, it’s not exactly like Richard was trying to make things easy on me. Because this man was a man, his attraction to me had escalated exponentially the second I got a boyfriend. For the past three years, I’d been nothing more than a sidepiece—the half-his-age dalliance he’d sometimes ignore for months on end whenever he decided to get back on the straight and narrow and play the role of devoted boyfriend to his long-term partner. But as soon as I, too, was partnered and the playing field leveled, I couldn’t get this man off of me. Or out of my iMessages. Or off my mind. Suddenly I was flooded with invitations to come visit him in his city, hours away from mine. He’d pay for my train ticket. All I had to do was show up and cheat on my boyfriend.
Still, I never technically crossed the line (unless you count phone sex—which, okay, you probably do), but I was tempted at every turn. So when Richard’s name lit up my phone around hour 18 of the silent treatment from my boyfriend, I knew I was going to do what I was going to do, and I wouldn’t have to give it a second thought.
“How are you?” he wrote.
“I’m feeling a little unhinged.”
“Just come to Boston,” he said after I’d explained my music-to-his-ears predicament. “Maybe I can help take your mind off things.” By this stage of our affair, I was fluent in Richard. Translation: Maybe I can fuck you so hard, you forget his name and your own.
He didn’t have to ask twice. Within an hour, I was en route to Penn Station, Amtrak ticket in hand, buzzing with chaotic energy.
“What time should we leave for the event tonight?” my friend texted me. Shit. In my chaos haze, I’d completely forgotten I’d asked her to be my plus-one at a press thing I was invited to that night.
“Something came up—I actually can’t make it!” I told her, offering zero explanation. I wasn’t going to tell her where I was going, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell her who I was going there to see. He’s the kind of guy people who care about you think you should have absolutely nothing to do with—and they’re probably right. “You can still go though! Just tell them you’re me, I literally don’t care.”
And I didn’t. Granted, I did care more about being a shitty friend than a shitty girlfriend, which I suppose was rather telling. But I was living inside one of those rare and precious moments when your life feels like a capsule episode. As far as I was concerned, all other timelines, narratives, and streams of consciousness outside my own had frozen in time. This break from reality, this little vacation I was taking from my own life, was the only thing that felt real.
A train ride later, I was sipping rosé in the hotel lobby bar—largely empty late on a Wednesday night—across from Richard and his signature rye Manhattan.
“So,” he said with a charm I’m afraid can only be described as rakish, “tell me about the boy.” As if the “boy” in question were my high school prom date and not a father of four who had a solid half-decade on the paramour sitting across from me. That was Richard’s appeal. He had a knack for coming off smooth—sly, even—but never arrogant. With a word, a glance, he could make me feel at once confident, alluring, and womanly, and also young and innocent, someone to be taken care of—in more ways than one.
Back in his hotel room—a wildly spacious suite we’d lucked into thanks to a last-minute cancellation—it was too late for room service, so Richard DoorDashed pizza and exceptionally salty fries that inexplicably came with an entire bag of mini ketchup packets. In the meantime, we got high and downed every bottle of wine the minibar had to offer. Tell me, is there anything more decadent, more intimate, more debauched than drinking to excess and dining on fast food with a lover in a luxury hotel? Than laughing about too salty fries and too much ketchup with your legs stretched across his lap like best friends, like soul mates, like What if we’re meant for each other? We’re both the same kind of bad. Together we could be so good.
Just existing with this person who seemed to see the multitudes I’d spent the last year trying to condense into one Perfect Girlfriend, not as shards of a broken personality but as a kaleidoscope of identity, was such a pure, ethereal intimacy I didn’t want to end—not even for actual physical intimacy. Sex itself would have somehow felt like a downgrade, a distraction from whatever psychic wavelength we were sharing.
Then again, after a year of monogamy, a girl could use a good dicking down.
Straddling him on the couch, running my fingers through his catastrophically gorgeous head of dark, wavy hair, I was stunned at the way my body seemed to remember his, the way every stroke, twitch, and pulse of his cock inside me felt familiar.
“Fuck, I missed you,” I breathed into his ear as if by instinct.
“Good girl,” he said, guiding me by the hips up and down on his cock. “That’s Daddy’s pussy, right?”
And it was, I realized, more his than it had ever been my boyfriend’s.
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Good girl. Take Daddy’s cock.”
And I did—on the couch and in the bed and on the bathroom sink and in the shower. No flat surface went undefiled. We were reckless, we were depraved, we were up to no good. Two sides of the same vice-ridden coin, we were doing what we did best—being bad together—and it felt even better than I remembered.
Hours of debauchery later, when I finally emerged out of our sex den back into the living room where daylight was threatening to break through the shades, I knew two things: (1) My relationship was officially over. Toast. Dead. Do not resuscitate, and (2) it wasn’t just that I wanted to fuck that one guy from my past who I’ll probably always be a little bit in love with (everybody has one and if you don’t, you’re lying). It was that I didn’t want to be a girlfriend. I didn’t even want to be Richard’s girlfriend—not that the position was open.
But I didn’t just want to be single; I wanted to be selfish. I wanted to have space in my life to put my needs and desires first—to randomly decide to fuck off and get railed into the early morning hours by the object of my quasi-unrequited romantic obsession and answer to absolutely no one.
Selfishness—particularly of the brazen, unapologetic variety—is not generally thought to be a good look for a woman. The idea of sacrifice is so thoroughly baked into society’s narrative of womanhood. We’re meant to be doting wives and mothers, selfless care- and/or pleasure-givers. And that simply wasn’t a life, however noble, I wanted to live. Selfishness may not be a good look, but I can’t help it if it fits me like a glove.
I wandered back into the bedroom feeling dazed but no longer confused. For the first time in a long time, I knew exactly what I wanted.
“You’ve got anywhere you need to be?” Richard drawled lazily from the bed.
“I have to go get broken up with, remember?”
“Seems like that can wait,” he said, grabbing my hand and pulling me back into bed.
I was, as they say, back on my bullshit. And damn, did it feel good.
*Name has been changed.
