Page 14 of Mostly My Girlfriend
“Like…like all the layers had been peeled off my skin. Like I was naked for the first time in my life. I knew it wasn’t going to be like the first time. There would be no hiding that it happened. I just didn’t realize how easy it would be for him to go back to acting like we were still the same. I wasn’t really sure how drunk you’d been…”
“I wasn’t that drunk,” I confessed. “Not as drunk as you thought I was. I knew what I was doing, Jules. I wanted you and I thought I could have you once. It was that simple.”
“You were so cold to me the next day,” she accused me.
“I was pissed,” I said.
“At what?” Carol asked me.
I stood then, not able to sit still when just the memory of that night was enough to get me hard. I walked toward the window like maybe, if I looked hard enough, I could see the future. Our future. Instead, it was just gray Seattle sky.
What if we don’t make it out of this room together?
“When I woke up, she was already dressed and…it was over. Like she’d dismissed me first.”
“You could have said anything. You could have told me anything,” Jules said. “It didn’t have to be just that one night if that’s not what you wanted.”
“Are you hearing yourself now?” I asked her. “What about whatyouwanted? Why didn’t you tell me how you felt? Why didn’t you…”
“Go on,” Carol prompted me.
“Why didn’t you admit you wanted more from me?”
“Because that’s not how it works between us,” she hissed at me. “You know that.”
“Bullshit, Jules. You keep making it out like I’m the one in control of everything, but maybe it’s because that just makes it easier for you to hide. Easier for you to stay tucked behind those thick, heavy walls of yours. You said you were naked for the first time that morning after the wedding. But what I saw when I woke up was you fully dressed and safely behind your fences. That’s why I was pissed.”
She was shaking her head.
“Hmm,” Carol interjected. “It does seem curious to me that you both had this intense sexual experience that you were both able to walk away from. For years. But now you can’t walk away. Can I ask what suddenly changed?”
“Nothing changed,” Jules answered for me. “His relationship with his father was difficult. He wasn’t in his right mind after he passed. What happened between us three months ago was more about…comfort and grief than it was changing our relationship. I understood that when he left for Japan immediately after.”
“Do you agree, Ethan?”
I opened my mouth to object, but I couldn’t. Because the next question was—would I have fucked Jules if my father hadn’t died? And the answer was probably no. Not in a way that would have led to us changing the nature of our relationship. She was in a compartment all by herself and I’d worked hard to keep her exactly there. I wouldn’t have deviated from that if I hadn’t needed her so goddamn much.
I’d left to establish distance between us. To give us time apart so that when we came back together, it wouldn’t be awkward or strange. Looking back, I did something similar after Daniel’s wedding. Only then I’d been able to use work as an excuse.
I thought I could put the genie back in the bottle, not realizing the genie had been out all along. On the heels of that came the truth—that I couldn’t run from what I was feeling anymore.
That I didn’twantto run from it anymore.
“It’s not as simple as that,” I said, hearing the rasp in my voice, feeling a tightness in my chest that might have been worrisome if it wasn’t something that occasionally happened around Jules.
“Hmm,” Carol said again.
Right now, that was my least favorite noise.
“Julia, I wonder if there was ever a time you thought about confronting Ethan regarding your dissatisfaction with the state of your relationship?”
“I wasn’t dissatisfied. I’d accepted what we were. I was fine with everything.”
The patented Julia Whitford quick-denial sequence.
Carol caught on to it because she tilted her head in a way that screamed LIAR without her actually saying it. It worked, too, because Jules started to squirm in her chair.
“It didn’t suddenly change,” I said, answering Carol’s original question. Having had these last three months to think, to remember… “The truth was, it started to change the night of her accident.”
