Your best friend Emily tells you: I know someone perfect for you. Fine, you say. One date. But if it goes badly, she owes you dinner with a bottle of wine. You meet at the movies, awkward, avoiding eye contact for too long, secretly looking at each other’s lips. A chick flick that he picks, and laughs the whole way through while you sit smile-less, sipping a Diet Coke, not sure if he is laughing with the movie or at it, and watching the couple in front of you trying desperately to invent new ways to sit even closer despite the plastic strip between them. You wonder if he notices too and you try to sit as still as possible to make sure you don’t give him the wrong idea. You watch the movie but can’t concentrate at all on the words and resent how easy this seems to be for him. Afterward, you say goodbye not too quickly but without a kiss and wonder if he will call you.

Then it is coffee at Cosi, no longer trendy but right for the stage you are at. Forced talk made easier by comments on the menu and other clientele. You get a shot of Kahlua in something chocolate while he sucks on a fruit smoothie. You have four, he one. You talk loud and fast and sure about unimportant ideas—your new philosophy of a teaspoon of bleach in every wash, and how it doesn’t matter how old a band is as long as you get into their music when you are ready. He taps your foot under the table. When you stand, he puts his arm around your waist to steady you. People turn to watch you sway and you smile in what you believe to be a gracious way. The next morning you resolve to never return to that particular locale. You wake up with the memory of his hand guiding you, but realize he did not take your drunken innuendos, or you. You call Emily. You tell her he is kind of a dick. She calls you a liar.

You have dinner later that week. He tells you about the middle-aged woman in his office who he is sure steals his lunch every Tuesday. He goes off on a tangent about why Tuesdays, what happens on Tuesdays that make it so hard for her to bring her own lunch? You laugh, hard, and then try to stop because you remember you don’t look very good laughing. You can’t believe you finally found a funny guy. You smile at each other a little longer than normal, but somehow it doesn’t feel too long at all. One night, after a few awkward phone calls, he comes to your apartment and you order in, figuring it will be easier if you don’t portray yourself as a domestic goddess now and have to deconstruct the myth later. You have a few glasses of wine and all of a sudden it is too late and unsafe for him to go. When he kisses you, it feels soft and cool at the same time, the way the first rain in spring feels, inviting you to open your arms and enjoy. Your face flushes when you think what your rough lips feel like against that coolness to him.

He picks you up. He puts you on your bed. He takes a minute just to look at you, to take you in. You feel like you are in a movie. You feel beautiful. When he touches you, lightly running his fingers up your legs, you get goose bumps. You didn’t know that was possible. You desperately try to recall Top 10 tips you read in Cosmo years ago, when you graduated from college and thought you would be having fabulous sex with suave men all the time. You remember nothing. He starts to lick you down there (you were never good at describing sex to your friends) and you realize you don’t care what he thinks as long as he doesn’t stop. He actually makes you come, although not in the sweet, slow way you think means true love, but in the fast, intense sweatiness sex always becomes.

He spoons you afterward, but the second he falls asleep, he turns his back to you and you wonder if he has a problem with intimacy. You wear an old t-shirt and Minnie Mouse underwear, he those long boxer briefs in white and a chain necklace he says his mom gave him. You later find out it is from an ex-girlfriend. You wake up the next morning and like the way his breath feels on your skin, so even as if he were dreaming of swimming lazy laps at the Y. You lay awake for a while and finally decide, okay, okay. You will try this for a while. He makes you breakfast—toast and grapefruit, no eggs—the runny mess nauseates you. And then suddenly it exists. An entirely new thing created from a small series of touches and words spoken across a low table and dimmed light. Us, an entity separate from you and from him that you can actually refer to in conversation and no one will call you out on it.

When he leaves in the afternoon you kiss at the door and he says, let’s hang out tomorrow. You say okay. He stayed till the afternoon, you can imagine telling Emily, if you were the type of girl to call up her friends to tell them stuff like that. You wonder if he will actually call. You tell yourself you won’t care if he doesn’t, knowing that it is a lie even as you write it in your journal. You spend the day trying to recall the strange taste in his mouth in the morning.

When he calls, you feel gratified, full of esteem, but try not to sound surprised on the phone. You agree to see him later in the week and realize you will have to cancel your weekly date with Emily. She will understand.

You start to miss him when you aren’t together; pick up beets when you are at the grocery store because he thinks it’s funny to hit you with them and then say, are you going to tell your friends I beat you? You remember things from your day to tell him. You find yourself telling Emily more than one time about the day he brought you roses for no reason. He sends you e-mails with smiley faces and baby words. You think this is sweet instead of juvenile as you used to before it was directed at you. You forget how your life felt without him. You start wondering how long you have to wait before you can say I love you and can’t believe it when he says it first. You think this might be it.

A year, or two years, or five years, later, you look up at dinner one day and think, what happened? Did you really think he understood you because he listened to a revelation about how your mom forced you to eat quiche when you were three and you threw up on her? Because he understood why you actually hate hot cider in the winter and all the unnecessary excitement everyone else has for it? The first time he cried in front of you, you thought you had never been closer to anyone. But now, when you see that same disgustingly bright orange coffee mug Emily gave you as a gag gift in the sink and know he will use it when he gets up without washing it, you wonder if it wasn’t just the surprise of seeing tears slide down a face as impassive as his. You think of all the things he still hides from you, and you resent them.

You miss your friends and hate the way their lives have gone on without you. You hate the way they never call because everything with you is always the same. You stop saying I love you every time he leaves the house and think how big your apartment used to feel without him. You’re not sure where your interests start and his end and you think of the photography class you never took because he wanted to see his parents for the weekend and all the hours spent watching baseball on Sunday afternoons. You used to spend that time to write. You wonder when things were ever good.

You pick fights about the temperature of the apartment, about who kicked who between the hours of three and four in the morning, about why it is so difficult to close the toilet-seat cover, hating yourself even as you say it for the predictability of it all. You have lengthy discussions about where you see yourself in five years and whether you want the same things any more. You end them with sex. The only time you have sex any more is after you argue. Not mechanical, but far from tender. Like spitting after you brush your teeth—you feel better for having done it, but wish it was not necessary. Sometimes you hit each other hard, not in a sexy way. More because it is the only time you can get away with it. You catch yourself rolling your eyes when he tells his favorite anecdote about how his one-time drug dealing career got him backstage at a Phish concert at your office Christmas party and then laughs at it genuinely. You know it is over.

He comes home one day. It could be March. It could be November. You cry and say this isn’t working anymore. He says, I know, and you only realize in that instant how much you wanted him to fight for you. He takes his Duke sweatshirt, his Pink Floyd CDs, his Buddhist Thought book, and you give him the coffee mug he never washed. He leaves. You cannot believe it is over. You call Emily. You get drunk and call him late at night. You scream and then cry. You regret it in the morning.

Months later, you agree to meet for coffee and realize it was a mistake as soon as he tells you he has been seeing someone else. You want to ask to go back to his place so you can seduce him and ruin his new relationship while also making him miss you. You try to think of a valid reason to go, but are too scared of his rejection. You lie instead and say work is going really well. You don’t tell him you have been fired. You stiffen when he hugs you goodbye. You feel lonely all the time, and start doing things for yourself. You repaint the walls of your bedroom and take a drawing class. You call Emily endlessly. You stop thinking about him so much. When he calls to catch up, you don’t have to think about how many times to let it ring before you pick up. The whole time, you think how boring he is and wonder how you ever thought he was the one. You begin to remember him fondly, like a dead pet.