The One Who Got Away

The story began without anybody quite deciding that it had begun, which was fitting because the man who eventually told it had spent most of his life allowing important things to happen to him rather than deciding that they should happen.

There had been a little more bourbon poured, and the fire had settled into that deep red stage where the flames no longer leaped so much as breathed, and Joey had said something about how everybody ought to be required by law to tell one embarrassing story before midnight. Ross had objected that this was not a law he would support, Monica had said that Joey’s proposed laws were generally unconstitutional, Phoebe had asked whether embarrassment counted if you were too drunk to remember it, and Rachel had laughed. Somewhere inside all of this, almost unnoticed, a voice had said, “I have one.”

It was not a loud voice. It was not even a particularly confident voice. It was the voice of a man accustomed to waiting until everybody else had finished deciding what they wanted before he discovered that he had an opinion of his own.

He was twenty-four then, and there was a certain kind of poverty that belongs only to twenty-four-year-old men, a poverty without dignity but also without much shame, because you are young enough to believe that money is temporary and you’ll have time to replace it.

He had seventy dollars to his name. Seventy dollars was not exactly his entire fortune, because he owned a car, some clothes, a desktop that worked if you held down the power button long enough, and several hundred dollars’ worth of things that had seemed necessary at the time he bought them. But in terms of what could actually be spent, what could be converted into food, gasoline, beer, or the small necessities by which a man gets himself from one week to another, there were seventy dollars. He had looked at the number several times that afternoon, as though looking at it from different angles might cause it to become eighty. It did not. It remained seventy, stubborn and spherical, a small financial planet around which the rest of his evening revolved.

He should have stayed home.

That would have been the sensible decision. A sensible man with seventy dollars would have made ramen, watched Netflix using someone else’s account, and gone to bed. A sensible man would not have walked six miles across Denver at night because a beautiful woman had sent him a text telling him to come over. But sensible men, at twenty-four, are generally not the men who receive messages from beautiful women telling them to come over, and the distinction is important.

The young man had received such late night texts before, and each time they had produced in him the same combination of excitement and obedience. He did not think of it as obedience, of course. He thought of it as romance. He thought of it as spontaneity. He thought of it as being wanted. The difference between those things is sometimes impossible to recognize when you are young, particularly when the person doing the wanting is blonde, beautiful, attending medical school, and had the fattest ass you’d ever had the pleasure of squeezing.

She was the kind of woman who seemed to have been born already knowing what kind of life she intended to have. She was blonde in the expensive, improbable way of women who had never needed to wonder whether blonde suited them, and she had a figure that caused men to forget perfectly ordinary words while speaking to her. She was smart, too, which complicated matters. Had she been merely beautiful, perhaps he might eventually have understood the arrangement. But she was intelligent and ambitious, and she was going to become a doctor, and her parents had money, real money, the kind that did not merely pay bills but solved problems before they became bills.

Her apartment overlooked Coors Field, and the apartment itself seemed to have been constructed from the principle that no object should ever remind its owner that other people had to work for money. The furniture was clean-lined and expensive. The windows were enormous. The refrigerator contained foods that came in little glass containers. There were no camping chairs in front of the tv, no mismatched towels, no extension cords running along the wall. It was an apartment built for people whose mothers and fathers had once sat around a dining room table and discussed what their children might become.

He knew what he was to her.

He simply preferred to ignore it.

She had never introduced him to her friends. This fact had always been explained away in his mind by circumstances that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. She was busy. Medical school was demanding. Her friends were intense. She did not want people gossiping. She wanted to keep things private. They were just having fun. There was no need to put a label on it. All of these things could be true, and yet underneath them was the simple truth he could not quite make himself say aloud: she liked him in private.

She liked him after midnight. She liked him after the bar, after her friends had gone home, after the lights had dimmed and the respectable part of her life had been put away for the evening. He was the man she called when she wanted something she did not want to explain.

And he went.

He always went.

That was perhaps the most important thing about him. He went.

If she called, he went. If his friends wanted to go somewhere, he went. If his boss asked him to stay late, he stayed. If somebody else chose the restaurant, he ate there. If someone handed him a plan, he followed it. He did not think of himself as passive. Passive men were weak, and he was not weak. He was strong enough to work hard, strong enough to endure, strong enough to show up. He simply believed, in some deep and largely unconscious corner of himself, that other people knew what was best. There was a strange comfort in it. If someone else made the decision, then whatever happened afterward could not entirely be his fault.

So when the message came, he walked.

Six miles through the Denver night, with seventy dollars in his bank account and the absurd confidence of a man who had already spent the money in his imagination. He could see the evening ahead of him. He would arrive. She would open the door. She would smile that smile she reserved for him. They would disappear into the apartment and the city would go on below them, indifferent and illuminated. And afterward—this was the part he never admitted to anyone—perhaps she would ask him to stay. Perhaps in the morning they would get breakfast. Perhaps they would sit together somewhere with coffee and eggs while the sunlight came through the windows, and she would tell him about medical school and he would tell him about whatever he had been doing, and for an hour they would look like a normal couple. He did not need much. He did not ask for a ring. He did not ask her to abandon her life. He wanted breakfast.

It never happened.

What would happen is that she would open the door in her matching pajama set, face glistening with moisturizer, asking what took him so long. He’d push her against the wall, closing the door with the bottom of his foot, answering her question with a mouthful of tongue. He knew why she invited him. He gave her exactly what she wanted and more. A little rich girl being controlled by the blue collared boy, hand on her neck, fist gripped in blonde hair, her big tits and fat booty jiggling while getting pounded. The only evidence of their night were the red handprints left on her ass and multiple condoms in the trashcan.

She would kiss him goodbye in the morning and say she had to study. Sometimes she would say she had rounds. Sometimes there was an exam. Sometimes she simply had somewhere to be. He would put on his shoes and leave. The elevator would carry him down through the expensive building, past the quiet lobby and the polished floors, and then he would begin the six-mile walk home. There was a particular humiliation in walking home after spending the night with someone you wanted to believe loved you. It was not the walking itself. The walking was easy. It was the fact that every mile gave him more time to construct another explanation.

Then came the Friday night.

By then, he had told Ross and Joey about her, although not everything. Men are very careful with the details of women they are pretending not to care about. They had been at the bar together, the three of them in that peculiar state of intoxication in which the world becomes simultaneously profound and extremely stupid. Ross was saying something about music. Joey had become fascinated by a bowl of peanuts. The young man was drinking and watching the door, although he would have denied that he was watching the door if anyone had asked him.

Then she walked in.

She wore a tight party dress, and for a moment he forgot the conversation, the beer, the seventy dollars, and the fact that she had never once been his girlfriend. He grinned like an idiot.

“That’s my girl,” he said.

Joey turned toward him slowly.

“What?”

“That’s my girl.”

Joey looked across the room at her, then back at him. Ross followed his gaze. There was a silence in which the two men seemed to understand something that the young man himself had not yet understood.

“She’s not your girl,” Joey said.

The young man laughed.

“She is.”

“You can’t even say hello to her.”

“She knows me.”

“That is not what I said.”

He looked at her again. She was talking to two friends. She had not looked toward him. Perhaps she had seen him. Perhaps she had not. At twenty-four, he was still capable of mistaking uncertainty for possibility.

Joey nudged him.

“Prove it.”

And there it was: a decision.

Not his decision.

But it was presented to him in the form of a challenge, and because he had spent his life confusing other people’s expectations with his own desires, it felt almost exactly like freedom.

He got up.

Ross began laughing before he had even reached her.

The young man crossed the room. She saw him. Recognition passed across her face, followed by surprise, followed by something he could not read quickly enough to understand. He smiled. He reached for her, smacked the thick ass he had squeezed so many times before. He kissed her.

Then she slapped him.

The sound was enormous.

Someone at the bar stopped talking.

Someone else laughed.

She threw her drink on him, and the cold liquor ran down the front of his shirt.

Behind him Joey made a sound that was somewhere between a scream and the death of a farm animal. Ross was doubled over, helpless with laughter. The humiliation should have been complete. It should have destroyed him. Instead, because he was twenty-four and because humiliation is sometimes funny when it happens to you quickly enough, he began laughing too.

Later that night, after the bar had emptied and he had returned home smelling like spilled liquor, his phone lit up.

It was her.

‘That was so hot tonight. I need you ASAP.’

He stared at the message.

There are moments in life when a person is offered the opportunity to become someone else. Not a better person necessarily. Not a wiser one. Simply a different one. He could have looked at that message and understood the arrangement. He could have laughed. He could have deleted it. He could have gone to bed. Instead he smiled, put on his shoes, and walked back downtown.

Six miles.

The same six miles.

The city was quieter now. The bars were closing. Streetlights burned above him. Somewhere behind the dark windows of restaurants, people were cleaning tables. Somewhere else, people were waking up for work. He walked through all of it carrying seventy dollars and the increasingly irrational hope that this time would be different.

When he reached her apartment, however, another man was there.

He knew immediately.

The other man was the kind of man who looked as though he belonged in that apartment. He was clean-cut. Well dressed. Comfortable. He had not walked six miles to get there.

The young man stood in the doorway and waited.

This was the great talent of his youth: waiting.

He waited for her to explain.

He waited for the other man to leave.

He waited for her to recognize the absurdity of the situation and correct it.

He waited because waiting was what he knew how to do, and because somewhere inside himself he still believed that if he behaved well enough, patiently enough, generously enough, eventually somebody would reward him by choosing him.

But nobody chose him.

She kissed the other man.

At first he thought it might stop.

It did not.

He stood there for another moment, watching the woman he had spent the summer pretending was his become, with remarkable efficiency, someone else’s problem.

Then he left.

He walked the six miles home.

And that, in the end, was the whole story.

Not the slap.

Not the drink.

Not the blonde medical student.

Not even the other man.

The story was the walk home.

Because somewhere between her apartment and his own, he began to understand that perhaps she was not the one who got away. Perhaps he had never possessed her at all. Perhaps there had never been anything to lose except the fantasy that someday someone else would look at him and decide what he was worth.

He stopped answering her messages after that.

At first there were several.

Then fewer.

Then none.

And life continued, as it does, with an almost insulting lack of concern for the significance of individual heartbreak. The blonde became a doctor. The young man became older. Denver changed. Bars changed. Friends married. People bought houses. People had children. People accumulated furniture and insurance policies and opinions about schools. The seventy dollars disappeared into the ordinary machinery of being young and broke, and eventually he forgot what he had spent it on.

But he never entirely forgot her.

Not because she had been the great love of his life.

Because she had been the great example of it.

She was the person he had wanted, and he had wanted her so badly that he had been willing to let her decide what the wanting meant.

Around the fire, the story ended without announcing that it had ended.

The man holding the bourbon lowered his glass. For several seconds, nobody spoke. The fire cracked and sent a small shower of sparks upward. Joey stared into the flames with an expression of genuine concentration, which was unusual enough that everyone noticed it. Ross looked toward the man beside him. Rachel had stopped smiling. Monica was looking at her husband.

The storyteller looked back at Monica. She had heard the story before—not this version, but the one underneath it. Her husband’s desperate search for love until she came into his life.

“So,” Joey finally said, “you walked six miles to get slapped, dumped, and rejected.”

A pause.

“Yes.”

Joey nodded slowly.

“That is the worst Uber Eats order I’ve ever heard.”

The laughter came suddenly, breaking the tension like a match struck too close to gasoline. Even Monica laughed. The man beside her smiled, but only for a moment.

Then Joey looked at him more carefully.

“Wait.”

The man raised an eyebrow.

Joey pointed.

“That was you?”

The man shrugged.

And there it was—not a confession, not quite, just the smallest admission that the story had belonged to the man who had told it all along.

Monica reached for her bourbon. Ross smiled. Rachel stared into the fire. Phoebe looked delighted.

And Chandler, who had spent half his life letting other people decide what happened next, sat quietly beside his wife while the old fire burned in front of him and waited to see who would speak next.