The week continues and Wiley patheticness shows

On Wednesday, the phone started buzzing at 7:15 a.m.—I was in the shower, so Sarah picked it up. I could hear her voice echoing around the corner, wet with sleep: “Hello?” She paused, then repeated, defensively now, “No, really, are you okay?”

She caught me in the hallway, towel around my waist and water dripping off the ends of my hair, phone clamped against her shoulder. “It’s Wiley,” she mouthed, eyes wide and a little delighted, like she’d just found a box of kittens at the curb.

I raised my eyebrows. “What, did he break a bone in his sleep?” I tried joking but it came out flat. She scowled at me, turned her back, and retreated into the bedroom, still talking.

I listened at the threshold as she paced our room barefoot, her voice springy with sympathy one second and sharp with irritation the next. She spoke to Wiley like a cross between a triage nurse and a jilted girlfriend, telling him to breathe, then demanding he “walk it off for five minutes and see if the world actually ends.” I heard her through the thin drywall, alternately cooing and coaxing, then scolding and shushing, as if she could patch up his wounds using the power of maternal sarcasm. Five minutes passed, then ten. I sat on the edge of the tub, towel dampening under me, listening to the rise and fall of her voice as she tried to talk him down from whatever ledge he was perched on this week.

Finally, she hung up, tossed the phone onto the dresser, and exhaled in a big, performative rush, as if she’d just wrestled a wild animal back into its cage. She padded into the hallway and caught me gawping from my post, towel barely clinging, hair still leaking onto my shoulders. I was half-expecting her to rip into me, but instead she just gave me a look, one I couldn’t read at all, and started brushing past, muttering to herself about “men” and “emotional literacy” and “someone’s got to be the grown-up.”

“So?” I asked, feigning a lazy curiosity as I trailed her into the kitchen, where she was already opening and slamming cabinets with the energy of an auctioneer on cocaine. I tried to sound breezy, but it came out brittle. “What’s got that great pervert so upset?”

Sarah didn't blink, didn't even pause as she dragged a cereal box from the top shelf and eyed it with visible disappointment, as if the mere presence of generic bran flakes was somehow my fault. “Not funny, Liam.” She said this with a voice that was both flat and sharp, a kitchen knife thrown across a frozen pond. “He had a date last night. That friend of mine from work set him up with her cousin. It was a disaster before they even ordered drinks. She took one look at him, threw her coffee in his face, and left the cafe without a word. He’s pretty raw about it.”

She plucked the lone, limp carrot from the bottom drawer like it was Excalibur, then wagged it at me as if to punctuate her sentence. The gesture was so Sarah—unconsciously theatrical, designed to both amuse and rebuke me. She started scrolling through her texts again, reading off fragments as she went: “It was humiliating,” she quoted, “I’ll never leave my apartment again,” and, “Why do girls always do this to me.” I could almost hear the capital letters in Wiley’s despair.

I grunted, forcing a laugh. “I don’t know what woman wouldn’t want to run away from him,” I said, then immediately regretted it; Sarah’s face flickered, and I knew I’d scored a point in the wrong game.

She ignored me, already moving to the next step in her internal logic, the one where she had a moral obligation to clean up any mess she’d ever touched. “He’s really fragile right now. And that’s…partly our fault.” She chewed her lip, then looked at me with a guilt so practiced it bordered on professional. “Could I invite him over this weekend? Just to help him through it?”

I didn’t even try to hide the horror in my response. “No!”

Sarah let the carrot fall to the counter with a clatter and squared her shoulders. “Liam, please” she said, and I could feel the trap closing, “I think he needs a friend right now. And we are the only ones he’s got.” Her voice was measured, compassionate, and just a little bit weaponized, as if she’d crafted it to make refusal impossible. She set the carrot upright and pointed it at me. “He’s one of my best friends. I can’t just leave him like this. Not after…everything. Not when he wouldn’t have even gone on the date if I didn’t help him.”

“I am not his friend, Sarah,” I said, louder than I meant to, even though I knew it was too late to take the edge out of my voice. The words exploded out of me, echoing in the cramped kitchen off the aluminum fridge. Sarah barely flinched—she just fixed me with that flat, appraising stare she’d perfected through years of dealing with stubborn men. I could feel the pressure building in my skull, the sticky syrup of resentment threatening to spill everywhere.

She rolled her eyes, arms crossing like drawbridges pulled up in the face of siege. “Come on, Liam,” she said, way too calmly, as if she was already bored with my tantrum and was just waiting for the talking points to run out so she could get on with her day.

The back-and-forth had become a routine, each argument tracing the same familiar path through the obstacle course of our relationship. But this time, the words tasted raw, unfiltered, like swallowing gravel. I counted to three in my head, trying to **** my pulse back under legal limits, but then I saw her lips pull into a smirk and I lost it.

“Don’t ‘come on’ me, Sarah. He had sex with you! I don’t want him in our house again.” The sentence rang with a metallic finality, the kind of line you can’t ever uncross, even if you wanted to.

Sarah’s face flickered with something hard and unreadable, and for a second I thought I’d finally scored a point. But then she shook her head—one slow, imperious sweep, like a judge delivering a life sentence—and said, “Don’t remind me.” Her voice was cold, as if she the thought of it was not appealing. “But that only happened because you made it happen. Stop blaming him for a situation you created.”

That hit like a shovel to the solar plexus. I stared at her, trying to form a reply that wouldn’t sound like a confession. I could feel everything inside me knotting, winding tighter and tighter, until it felt like my whole body was made of piano wire. My hands were shaking, and I didn’t trust myself to open my mouth, so I just screamed her name—“Sarah!”—like it was a curse or a warning, or both at the same time.

She softened, just a little—not enough to be a surrender, but enough to show she still remembered who I was. She stepped closer, her hand reaching for my shoulder, gentle but somehow inescapable. “Can we just have him over for one night?” she whispered. “I’ll make it up to you. We’ll do whatever you want this weekend. Anything. Just… let me help my friend, okay?”

I caved, obviously. I always do. Even as I glared at the floor, pretending to weigh my options, I knew how this would end. She had already won, and I’d already lost, and the only thing left was to negotiate the terms of my own surrender. The promise of “making it up to me” was a weapon she knew how to wield better than anyone, and if you think that bargaining chip doesn’t work, you’ve clearly never been a twenty-four-year-old man in a relationship with a woman who knows exactly how to play you. I spent the rest of the argument pretending to hold out, but in my head, I was already replaying the possibilities, lining them up like dominoes.

The next morning, the promise was still working on my subconscious, humming like a **** in the bloodstream. I spent forty minutes in the shower, cycling through every possible scenario where “making it up to me” ended with Sarah in lingerie and me with nothing to do on Sunday except eat, sleep, and maybe have sex again. By the time I was out and dressed, I was practically vibrating.

Sarah spent the next two days in full-blown cruise-director mode, marshalling every possible resource for the Wiley recovery project. She was texting on three different platforms, cross-referencing old contacts from college and even talking to her mother about “the best ways to rehabilitate a broken spirit,” a phrase I heard exactly once before putting headphones on and refusing to take them off the rest of the evening. She baked muffins, bought a new scented candle, and did a full psychological inventory of every mutual friend we had, trying to determine who might be around to cheer up Wiley (and, by extension, herself).

For my part, I kept a certain strategic distance, because that’s what I did best. I went through the motions at work—my new supervisor set me to sorting mail by hand, which was like some Kafkaesque punishment for not eating my vegetables as a child—and at home, I feigned exhaustion as I waited for however Sarah planned to make it up for me.

Sarah would pop her head into the room every half hour and give me a progress update on Operation Cheer-Up Wiley, as if we were planning a wedding and she needed me to care about the seating chart.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, she arranged a blind date for Wiley with one of her coworkers. I found this out when I came home Thursday night to a sticky note on the fridge that read, [WILEY—SATURDAY—BLIND DATE. DON’T FORGET!!!] and beneath it, a little cartoon of a pig holding a rose. It was Sarah’s way of making sure I felt included—like Wiley’s tragic romantic life was somehow a problem for both of us to solve, and not just her own little project.

The next day, Sarah insisted we take a half day at work. She wanted to finish the “make it up to me” project before Wiley arrived. She never actually clarified what “making it up to me” entailed, which only made my brain spiral through every possible scenario, each one more lurid than the last.

I spent the next fifteen minutes listening to the thunder of the shower and the high-pitched, off-key singing of Sarah’s playlist echoing through the bathroom door. She’d been cycling through the same three breakup anthems for a week. Taylor Swift, then Rihanna, then some obscure Scandinavian pop singer whose only talent was weaponizing middle-school level passive aggression into catchy hooks. It was both a warning and a promise.

When Sarah emerged, it was like a curtain dropping for the big reveal: she was wearing the black lace lingerie she’d bought three weeks earlier. The bra hugged her in all the ways bras never seemed to hug anyone in real life, and the matching panties rode high on her hips, a little black bow perched above the smooth, golden line of her stomach. She had a towel wrapped around her head, but it somehow made her look more dangerous, like a femme fatale from a European spy movie.

She caught me staring and grinned, then sauntered over, tugged the towel from her hair, and shook it out so that dark, damp waves spilled over her shoulders. “Don’t just stand there gawping,” she said, her voice low and predatory. “Follow me to our bedroom.”

Her body left a little trail of perfume behind her, like breadcrumbs, and I followed it with all the self-control of a cartoon wolf.

When we got to bed, things escalated quickly. We have been planning or first time for months. And now we both gave into our desires quick. We were just two people who knew exactly what they wanted and couldn’t get there fast enough. I can’t remember who moved first; all I know is that one second I was putting my phone on the nightstand, and the next I had Sarah’s tongue in my mouth and her hands up my shirt. She tasted like the strawberry gum she chewed to calm her nerves, and her skin was hot under my fingertips, as if she’d been plugged into a wall socket. There was no slow build, no gentle undressing—just mutual, frantic need.

My hands wanted to dominate her body, and oh boy did she let them. They ‘help her’ out of her clothes, bra unclasped with one hand, shorts slithered off in a single movement, black lace panties kicked to the floor with surgical precision. She looked up at me, eyes wild and cheekbones flushed pink, and for a second I thought she might actually devour me. I was so wrecked by the moment that I barely noticed my own clothes coming off, piece by piece, until I was standing there naked and gasping.

The bed was an afterthought; we crashed into it backwards, knocking the pillows onto the floor and tangling the sheets before we were even horizontal. Sarah pulled me on top of her and dug her fingers into my shoulders, dragging me down until there was nothing but skin and heat and the thump of our chests against each other. I could feel the outline of her body pressed against mine, every nerve ending screaming for contact.

I remember the way she looked up at me—both daring and terrified, a perfect split-second of vulnerability sandwiched between two layers of bravado. Her hand found mine and she squeezed, so hard it almost hurt. I knew this was the moment, the finish line of a marathon we’d both trained for, and I was so delirious with relief and lust that it never even crossed my mind that something could go wrong.

Except of course it did, because of course it would.

My cock, which had been a participant in this journey for the last ten minutes, was at full alert and ready for duty. Sarah reached down, gave it a quick, appraising look, then guided me against her with a little gasp. I lined myself up, and the world shrank to a pinpoint. All the pressure, all the months of frustration and build-up, funneled into a single, glorious second—

And then the doorbell rang.

At first, I thought I’d imagined it, some auditory hallucination brought on by lack of oxygen or too much blood in the wrong places. But then it rang again, louder this time, insistent. I froze, hovering above Sarah, my dick still poised at the gates of her pussy, the gates of pleasure. For a moment neither of us moved; we just stared at each other, caught between disbelief and the slow horror of recognition.

“Don’t answer it,” I said, my voice gravelly and ****. “It’s probably just a package.”

She hesitated, breathless, as her hands kept me pressed away, stopping my cock from fully penetrating her tight pussy, then the bell rang again—this time followed by a familiar, nasal whine from the other side of the door: “Sarah? You in there?”

I didn’t even need to hear his name. It was Wiley, and he was two hours early.

Sarah leapt off the bed and skidded across the hardwood floor, grabbing the nearest sundress from the hamper. She yanked it over her shoulders, barely bothering to zip it up. The straps of her lingerie were still visible, black against her golden skin, and when she turned to dig for her shoes I caught a full view of the lace peeking out beneath the hem. She paused in the mirror, wiped the lipstick from her mouth, and then disappeared down the hallway in a blur of bare feet and perfume.

I was left alone, naked from the waist down and with a blue ball ache so potent I could taste it. The bed smelled like her, and I tried to will myself back to the moment, but it was gone. I heard the front door swing open, then Sarah’s voice—polite, chipper, a little too loud: “Hey, Wiley! You’re early!”

I heard a pause. “Am I interrupting something?” Wiley’s voice was as tinny and pathetic as ever. I peek out the bedroom door, and from the red glow in his face I could tell he most have noticed the strip of her lingerie peeking out from under her dress.

“No, no, it’s fine—come in!” Sarah said, as she pulled up the straps of her blue dress to try to cover more of the lingerie.

Wiley nervously walks in “Yeah sorry for being early, I just finished doing this for Liam work and I had nowhere else to go.” I angry hid back inside the bedroom and closed the door before he could see my naked body.

“No problem your welcome here anytime.” Sarah replied, and there was the sound of two glasses clinking—a ritual she’d performed a hundred times before, always when someone needed to feel at home.

I stayed in the bedroom, staring at the ceiling. I thought about finishing what we’d started, but somehow the moment was gone and all I could do was seethe.

Eventually, Sarah popped her head back into the doorway. She was smiling, but her cheeks were red. “You, okay?” she whispered.

I gave her a look that said everything. “The man who fuck you, not only interrupted us but now is in our living room, so do you really think I am ok?” I mouthed.

She shrugged, mouthing back: “He needs us.”

I lay on the bed, listening to them talk. I picked up exactly nothing from their conversation, except that Wiley was still obsessed with Star Wars, that he now had a theory about why the Disney sequels sucked, and that Sarah was willing to laugh at every one of his jokes, even the ones she’d heard since fourth grade. It was like a bizarre radio play from hell, and I had front row seats.

The blind date was set for Saturday. Sarah spent the next twenty-four hours prepping Wiley like a prize fighter. She made him try on shirts, coached him to tell fewer jokes, and even subjected him to a twenty-minute lesson on “what women really want” (which I could have told him in two words: not you). I kept expecting Wiley to blow it off or disappear back to his lair, but instead he hung around the apartment for most of Friday, shadowing Sarah like a puppy with abandonment issues.