Mr. Unavailable #126: Fireworks, Part 2

See The Imprinter, Business or Pleasure?, Spellbound, No Picnic in the Park, Squatter Love, Who Falls First?, Trouble, Purgatory, Pre-Disintegration, Sanity Takes a Turn, In Heat and Fireworks, Part 1 for the background on this one.

“Talk? He wants to talk? Is he breaking up with me…?” I thought. I had to sit down on my sofa. My mind raced but then stopped racing as soon as I remembered there was nothing to break up.

“In the car back there, when you asked if there were other girls, uh, I realized maybe we’re not thinking the same thing.”

“Well, dating other people is fine. This isn’t a relationship or anything.”

He was silent.

“Or are you sleeping with other women?”

He just looked at me.

“How many women are you sleeping with?”

“I don’t have to tell you that,” he said.

“Well, that’s the end of the unprotected sex then,” I said.

“Yeah, that was stupid,” he said.

“It’s fine,” I said, shooing him away. “This is not the first time this has happened. Go, go, go sleep with lots of women. I understand. You’re in New York. It’s a candy store. Go on.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“I feel sick,” I said. I let him stand there uncomfortably for two or three minutes. I really did feel sick. I also wanted him to suffer a little bit while I considered my options.

“Part of me wants you to stay and part of me wants you to go.”

“Which is stronger?” he asked.

I let another two silent minutes go by.

“I don’t know. I suppose the side that wants you to stay.”

It was kind of pathetic, but I didn’t want to be alone. And, generally, I have noticed that the person who causes our misery is the one person we want to comfort us, which helps explain why people break up and get back together all the time.

He sat down again. "I knew I shouldn't have touched you," he said. "I told myself, 'Don't touch her, she's someone who should really be taken care of.'"

Two more silent minutes went by.

“Please, just tell me how many. I need to know. I need to know so I can go get tested.”

“I haven’t slept with anyone since my ex,” he said. “Just a date. No one will sleep with me.”

He sounded sufficiently demoralized. Between that and remembering his fervor at our first encounter, I was inclined to believe him. But still…

I let there be more silence. I was milking it. My one joy was seeing him squirm. So I let him squirm.

"Are you still going to rent my apartment?" he asked.

"Of course. I know how to separate the two."

"You're not going to go crazy and set fire to it or anything, are you?"

What is it with men assuming every woman scorned goes nuts. I know hell hath no fury and all, but really? My revenge schemes have no room for jail time.

“The thing I hate most is disappointing women,” he said. “I grew up surrounded by women, so I was always disappointing them.”

I nodded and sat with my arms around my knees picturing little #126, who, through no fault of his own, of course, was inadvertently disappointing all the women around him.

Then I started imagining these other dates he’d been going on. “When you go on dates with these women and they ask you to take them for frozen yogurt, do you buy them frozen yogurt?”

He put his head down. “Oh,” he said, “I thought I should maybe buy it for you but then it seemed like you were used to paying because you went there all the time.”

That was lame.

Sitting with my arms around my knees, I was actually creating a barrier between me and his lameness. There was more silence, which, for him, equaled more squirming. And, for me, more satisfaction.

“Are you going to be sleeping with these women in my bed?” It had only just occurred to me and the thought of it was too much. I covered my face with my arms and sank back onto the sofa. He put his hands on my leg and pulled me to him, putting his arms around me. Tears seeped through my hands and onto his shirt. It was real, but I was also going for effect.

“Are you crying, baby?” he asked.

I leaned away from him and looked at him. “Just promise me you’ll put a rubber sheet down before you sleep with any of them. Or don’t even tell them you have a real bed. Just lead them to the pee-stained twin mattress.”

He laughed.

“Seriously,” I said, “just promise me you’ll put a rubber sheet down. Tell them that’s your thing. I don’t want a contaminated bed.”

And then he did the only thing he probably knew to do with crying girls—he went straight to sex.

I should probably mention that each time #126 and I had sex, it got incrementally weirder. I discovered that he liked me to make simple requests of him—you know, “Fuck me” and things like that. On this particular evening, he asked me to make such a request and then added an addendum, “Louder…Say it louder.”

I thought of my old, gay neighbor on the other side of the wall and only quietly acquiesced. But, apparently, that wasn’t good enough.

“Louder, bitch!” he yelled. And then he slapped me on the ass.

I was shocked, yes, but mostly I was amused. I’d heard that people introduced name-calling into their sex lives, but I’d never actually experienced it. I also sensed that this was the last time we’d be together, so I chuckled to myself and faked a finale—a quiet one, for my neighbor’s sake.

In the night, he was having problems sleeping. I asked him what was wrong and then he admitted he was allergic to cats. “Yeah, I know, a vet who’s allergic to cats. Don’t tell anyone,” he said.

The next morning, things were semi-weird. On the pros side, he told me I was “beautiful in the morning” and said I should call in sick and go over to his apartment with him to nap. On the cons side, he wasn’t up for morning sex and napping with him meant "on the pee-stained mattress." But the finishing touch was when he said, “I slept horribly, I couldn’t breathe. I can’t stay over here again.”

Signs of Hope: There was one sign of hope (from Part 1): He traveled all the way up to the Upper East Side on the 4th of July—missing the fireworks—to see me.

Red Flags: Everything he said at the diner (also from Part 1), everything he said on my sofa and most of what he said in my bed.

Turning Point: When he wanted to talk. In my experience, that’s never a good sign.

Diagnosis: For him: He’s even more unavailable than I had assumed.
For me: I had assumed too much. To me, he’d been the bumbling veterinarian upon whom I was graciously bestowing my sexual presence. In reality, he was a prowling man-whore looking to get laid any way he could. In my false reality, I was special. In the real one, I was not.