I tell her to stop pretending

"Stop it!" I yelled, gripping her shoulders. "Stop pretending!"

She flinched, eyes wide with shock, but then something shifted in her expression. The performance fell away, and suddenly she was present, real. Her movements became fluid, her responses genuine. She did enjoy it. She even told me she loved me while doing it, but I could tell it was better with Wiley.

When we finished, she lay beside me, her breathing returning to normal, one arm draped across my chest. Neither of us spoke for a long time. What was there to say? The evidence was irrefutable. The experiment had yielded its results, and they weren't in my favor.

It wasn’t a silence so much as the ringing after an explosion, a terrible emptiness that vibrated through the air when she finally managed: “Shit…” Her voice was quiet, raw, stripped of all pretense.

I couldn’t do anything but echo her, my own voice weaker, less certain: “Shit is right.”

She stared at the ceiling, unblinking, as though the effort of looking at me would be too much. Her hands twisted the hem of the towel she hadn’t managed to wrap fully around herself. “So,” she said, “do you want to know?”

A cruel question, but even crueller was the certainty that it wasn’t rhetorical. “I already know,” I said, my voice cracking more than I wanted it to.

“But do you want to hear me say it?” she asked again, softer this time, as if she could spare me the pain by offering me a chance to refuse it.

A single “Yes,” shuddered out of me, and in that moment I hated myself for wanting to hear her pain, for needing the messy confirmation of my own worst fears.

She looked at me, her face suddenly ancient with regret. There were lines there I’d never seen before. She spoke slowly, as if each word was a stone slotted into the foundation of a new world neither of us wanted: “I love you with all my heart. I loved making love to you with every part of my body, and I want nothing more than to make love with you and only you, Liam.”

That was the speech of the penitent, the ****, the condemned—and it was, in its way, a beautiful lie. I could feel how hard she was trying to will herself into believing it, as though if she said it enough times, it would come true.

But I couldn’t let her off so easily, or maybe I just couldn’t let myself go on pretending. “Please,” I said, my voice so small it barely qualified as a word, “just tell me who you enjoyed it more… sexually. me or him.”

She didn’t answer right away, but her whole body folded in on itself, knees to chest, chin tucked down. Then, in a voice I might have missed if the room wasn’t so impossibly silent, she whispered: “Wiley.”

That was all it took; the fragile scaffolding that had kept my ego upright gave way entirely. The sting was physical, visceral. I felt my hands clench into fists at my sides, fingernails driving crescents into my palms.

“I know it…” I said. “But I still don’t get it. He’s fat, and gross, and he smells like old cheese. He never fucking showers, or brushes his teeth, and he’s literally the least popular person either of us have ever met. And—fuck—his dick is the size of a peanut. It has to be his money. That’s the only explanation.”

Sarah avoided my gaze, eyes fixed on the diagonal lines where sunlight slashed in through the blinds. “It’s not his money,” she said, and I believed her because the truth burned in her voice, in the way she flinched every time my words landed. “It’s not even the way he looks. I swear to you, there is not a single part of his body that matters to me, not in real life.”

“Then what?” I said, gesturing stupidly at my own body, at the broad shoulders and stomach that I’d built up precisely so she would never have to look elsewhere, at the arms she once called her favorite place in the world. “How can you possibly prefer that to this?”

Sarah’s face twisted. She started to say something, then stopped herself, then blurted, “I don’t know… I really don’t. I wish I did. I wish it was something we could fix, like a puzzle that just needs the right piece. Because I want nothing more than for you to win this stupid game of yours so I can just have sex with you, and only you. Do you think I actually want to be with him?” She was crying now, not in that beautiful, cinematic way, but in the ugly, snotty way that makes your whole face collapse. “Fuck, Liam—he’s like a brother to me… Do you think I like looking myself in the mirror knowing I fucked someone I considered to be my brother…”

Sarah’s face crumpled in on itself, and she buried her face in the crook of her arm. Her whole body seemed to shake with the effort of keeping herself contained, of not becoming completely unglued. The silence that enveloped her was so absolute that the hum of the fridge in the next room grew into a kind of white-noise scream. For a moment, I nearly reached for her, nearly offered a hand or a shoulder, but the memory of her knees tucked to her chest and the echo of the word “Wiley” kept my limbs frozen at my sides.

Finally she managed to speak, voice muffled and warped from the pressure of her arm: “I don’t know what he does or how he does it. I don’t want it before or after, except, fuck, when he’s actually doing it, it’s like there’s this fucked up magnet in me, my whole body is just—screaming for it.” She yanked her head up, met my eyes, and for a second I thought she might break into hysterical laughter instead of tears. “I don’t like this, Liam,” she said, and now her voice was deathly calm, scraped clean of all performance. “In fact, I hate this, I fucking hate every fucking part of this! I wish I was dead rather than admit it that it better with him.” A long shuddering breath left her, and her words tumbled out in a rush: “I just—I wish it was you; I really do. You’re my everything. So please, just admit you lost and end this stupid competition, or win it quickly.”