The One Who Got Away

“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 spoke directly into the fire, occasionally taking sips of his bourbon.

“I was 24 and broke. Seventy dollars in my bank account. No cash in my wallet. A month’s full of expenses ahead. I was constantly calculating paychecks, handling the logistics of when I could buy weed and beer.

“Shitty salaried job with no opportunities for overtime or bonuses.

“I should have stayed home.

“That would have been the sensible decision. A sensible under-employed 24 year old would have made ramen, applied for better paying jobs, 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 I wasn’t sensible, I was horny.

“I had received her late night texts before, and each time they had produced the same combination of excitement and obedience. I didn’t think of it as obedience, of course. I thought of it as romance, as spontaneity, as hot lust. Mostly I thought of it as being wanted, even though the wanting only took place late at night when she was drunk.”

The blonde man pauses to take a sip of bourbon. He looks back into the fire. His words get looser more vulgar with the alcohol and the memory of young sex.

“It’s hard to recognize the difference between someone wanting you and, someone using you, particularly when the someone is blonde, beautiful, attending medical school, and had the fattest ass you’d ever had the pleasure of spanking.

“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 and had a figure that caused men to forget perfectly ordinary words while speaking to her—big tan-lined tits and an ass that jiggled while she walked to the bathroom after sex. She was smart, too, which complicated matters. Had she been merely beautiful, perhaps I 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.

“Her apartment overlooked Coors Field, and the apartment itself seemed to have been constructed with the sole purpose to get rent money from Mommy and Daddy. The furniture was clean and expensive. The windows were enormous. The refrigerator contained fresh organic produce. 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 young people to have fun before they started their real lives.

“Honestly I knew what I was to her. I simply preferred to ignore it. She had never introduced me to her friends. She only texted after midnight. She liked me 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. I was the man she called when she wanted something she did not want to explain.

“And I went. I always went.

“So when the message came, I walked.

“Six miles through the Denver night, with seventy dollars in my bank account and the absurd confidence of a man who knew he was going to get laid.

“I could see the evening ahead of me. He would arrive. She would open the door wearing skimpy lace lingerie. She would smile that smile she reserved for me. We would disappear into the apartment and the city would go on below us, indifferent to the load moaning and bed frame pounding against the wall. And afterward perhaps she would ask me to stay. Perhaps in the morning we would get breakfast—sit together downtown with coffee and eggs while the sunlight came through the windows, and she would tell me about medical school and I would tell her about my shitty job, and for an hour we would look like a normal couple. I didn’t need much. I didn’t want a Facebook announcement of our relationship. I wanted breakfast.

“It never happened.

“What would happen is that she would open the door in an oversized Broncos t-shirt jersey and no pants, no makeup, face glistening with moisturizer, asking what took me so long.

“I’d push her against the wall, closing the door with the bottom of my foot, answering her question with a mouthful of tongue. Her moisturizer would smear on my face as she pressed herself against me.

“I knew why she invited me.

“I gave her exactly what she wanted and more. She became little rich girl being controlled by the blue collared boy with his hand on her throat and his fist gripped in her blonde hair.

“I still remember the sound her big tits and fat booty made while I pounded her. Clapping for my performance. Her moans screaming for an encore—begging for it. I didn’t disappoint. I had to make an impression. I was under the assumption that if i fucked her thoroughly enough, she would want me in the daytime. I fucked her and ate her out after until she was kicking me to stop. Pussy. Ass. I devoured her. A lapping dog looking for approval.

“The only evidence of our night were the red handprints left on her ass and multiple condoms in the trashcan.

“She at least allowed me to spend the night.

“In the morning she would kiss me goodbye and say she had to study. Sometimes she would say she had rounds. I would dress and leave. The elevator would carry me down through the expensive building, past the quiet lobby and the polished floors, and then I 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.

“Then came the Friday night.

“By then, I 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. We had been at the bar together, so stoned that we only drank beer to coat our cotton mouths. Ross was saying something about Porter Robinson being the Mozart of EDM. Joey had become fascinated by a bowl of peanuts, picking up the ones shaped like dicks and tossing them at Ross. I was drinking and watching the door—just people watching, not looking for anyone in particular.

“Then she walked in.

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

“‘That’s my girl,’ I said.

“Joey turned toward me slowly.

‘What?’

‘That’s my girl.’

“Joey looked across the room at her, then back at me. Ross followed his gaze. There was a silence in which the two men seemed to understand the reality that I was denying.

‘She’s not your girl,’ Joey said.

“I laughed. ‘She is.’

‘You can’t even say hello to her.’

‘She knows me.’

‘That is not what I said.’

“I looked at her again. She was talking to two friends. She had not looked toward me. Perhaps she had seen me. Perhaps she had not.

“Joey nudged me. ‘Prove it.’

“And there it was: a decision.

“Not my decision.

“I got up.

“Joey said, ‘Have her bring her two friends over here to and introduce them to us.’

“Ross began laughing before I had even reached her.

“I crossed the room. She saw me. Recognition passed across her face, followed by surprise, followed by something I could not read quickly enough to understand.

“I smiled.

“I reached her and smacked her thick ass I had squeezed so many times before. I greeted her with a kiss.

“Then she slapped me.

“The sound was enormous.

“Someone at the bar stopped talking. Someone else laughed. She threw her drink on me, and the cold liquor and ice ran down the front of my shirt.

“Behind me 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 me. Instead, because I was too stoned to be humiliated, I started laughing too.

“Later that night, after the bar had emptied and I had returned home smelling like liquor, my phone lit up.

“It was her.

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

“I stared at the message.

“There are moments in life when a person is offered the perfect opportunity to acknowledge that they learned a lesson. I could have looked at that message and understood the arrangement. I could have laughed. I could have deleted it. I could have gone to bed. Instead I smiled, put on my shoes, and walked back downtown, ready to get laid.

“Six miles.

“The same six miles.

“The city was quieter now. The bars were closed. Streetlights burned above me. Somewhere behind the dark windows of restaurants, people were stacking chairs on tables. Somewhere else, people were waking up for work. I walked through all of it confident that this time would be different.

“When I reached her apartment, however, another man was there.

“I 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.

“I should have left: instead I sat on the couch and waited. This was the great talent of mine: waiting. I waited for her to explain. I waited for the douche bag to leave. I waited for her to recognize the absurdity of the situation and correct it. She had invited me over. I came. Now it was her turn to come.

“I waited because waiting was what I knew how to do, and because somewhere inside myself I still believed that if I behaved well enough, obediently enough, generously enough, eventually somebody would reward me by choosing me.

“But nobody chose me.

“She kissed the other guy. At first I thought it had to stop—I was sitting right there. It did not. Clothes started hitting the floor. She was actually wearing a matching lace bra and thong set. She put effort in for him: when she dropped to her knees and looked up, I realized she had never done that for me.

“I stood there for another moment, watching the woman I had spent the summer pretending was mine become someone else’s problem.

“Then I left.

“I walked the six miles home.”

Chandler coughed roughly then wet his dry throat with the remainder of his bourbon.

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. The blonde became a doctor. The Chandler became older. He met someone else. He left Denver. Started a family.

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.

Chandler lowered his empty 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.

Chandler 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.

She reached out and took his hand.

Ross broke the silence, “Joey, what the hell are you thinking about?”

Joey blinked out of his daze and looked up from the fire, “Sorry. Just thinking about all the women I treated the same way Chandler got treated. Called up, banged then ushered out the door.”

The big man leaned back and finished his glass. He thought these would be fun stories. He liked hearing about Chandler getting rough with the little rich girl with the fat ass, but now he’s remembering all the women he’s sent on their own six mile walks. He hoped the next one would get his dick moving.