Confessions of a Bad Boy(63)

Lorelei gazes at me in confusion.

“It’s Nate. That’s him,” I add, the words tumbling out of my mouth almost involuntarily.

Lorelei’s eyes widen and she glances at her phone, then back at me.

“Are you sure?” she asks, her own voice full of shock now, too.

I take the phone from her and stare the image, surprise and incomprehension giving way to a rapidly boiling anger.

“Shit…” I whisper softly at the image.

“It might not be him,” Lorelei says, almost as if she’s pleading for it not to be so. “I mean, one six-pack looks a lot like another.”

“You see that mark there?” I say, my voice going from quavering mess to heated hiss. “That’s a scar he got when he was a kid, doing a dumb bike jump off a tool shed roof with my brother. I’ve spent months sleeping against that scar. Believe me, it’s him.”

“But the voice? It doesn’t sound like—”

“It’s him. That’s the voice he uses in…” I let out a spurt of air, still struggling to find my feet in this new reality. “In bed. That’s his f*cking bed voice.”

I stare at the paused image, shaking my head as the cold chill down my spine turns into a fiery anger rising in my chest.

“Maybe it’s not so bad,” Lorelei says, taking the phone slowly from my hands like it’s a weapon she’s afraid of. “Maybe there’s more to it.”

“Are you f*cking kidding me?” I say, jumping from the couch and pacing quickly up and down the room. “How can there be more to that than that?! He’s a pig!”

“Jessie, calm down, please,” Lorelei says, perched timidly on the edge of the couch as she watches me stride from one side of the room to the other.

“No. I’m not calming down. I just found out that the guy I’m pregnant by – one of my closest friends – is also an internet-sex-pervert-guru-philosopher-*. Calming down is not a viable option. Anger is.”

I stride so vehemently I almost get dizzy, my heartbeat and my breathing quickening to match my steps. I feel full of heat and frustration, a balloon ready to burst violently.

“Jessie,” Lorelei says, sounding almost frightened, “just…try to think about it rationally. You always knew he was a player, didn’t you? That he liked to screw around, have a lot of one-night stands. This is who he was, sure. But maybe not anymore? It’s not like—”

“What was that thing you said a few weeks ago?” I say, stopping suddenly and pointing at Lorelei. “We were in the kitchen, Nate was here. You said he stopped.”

Lorelei pauses for a second and screws her face up a little as she tries to remember. “’Bad Boy’? Yeah. He did.”

“And then he came back…” I say, feeling a whole new rush of turbulence shake through me.

“Yeah,” Lorelei says, seeing where I’m going.

“He came back,” I say, in a hushed whisper, before gritting my teeth. “While he was with me…the f*cking…he was in the kitchen with us even and…”

The murky image comes into focus, pieces falling into place, and the facts are so clear, so stupidly, annoyingly clear that I feel like an idiot for missing them.

It’s too much. Too ridiculous. Fury, exasperation, and lucidity overwhelm me. I consider slamming the table over, throwing myself out of the window, and allowing myself to crumple to the floor all in the space of a split second, and in the end, all I can do is laugh. The laughter of someone giving up, despairing and hopeless.





20





Jessie




Lorelei does everything in her power to drag me along to a movie premiere that she’s been invited to cover for her gossip column, but it’s still not enough to make me go. Once I promise her for the thousandth time that I’m fine, and just need some time to myself, and a big tub of ice cream, and no, I won’t watch any more of his entries, Lorelei leaves me with the promise that she’ll call to check up on me. I nod gratefully and wait for the sound of the door shutting, then go straight to the computer.

And so began one of the worst nights of my life.

Cross-legged on the office chair, Haagen-Daaz on my lap, and lit only by the glare of the computer screen, I embark on a journey of a thousand humiliations. A stomach-churning ride through the darkest side of the man whose baby I’m pregnant with. There are hundreds of videos, each one seemingly more graphic, more explicit, than the last. A personal horror movie that lasts for hours. I try not to cry, but by the fourth my sweatpants are drenched with tears, and the tub of ice cream has melted from the heat of my misery.

I go numb as the man on the screen continues to talk in graphic terms about his sex life, struggling almost to believe it’s really Nate, but knowing somewhere deep inside that this is more Nate than the guy I felt I knew. Every word seems to push me further away from him, and every encounter he talks about makes me a little colder toward him, until I lose every sense of connection and compassion I built up with him. Years of friendship are torn away, and my feelings for him are overwritten by a steely, calm indifference, the best emotion I can muster for whoever the person on the computer screen is.

And that’s before I even get to the recent entries, the ones Nate made after we got together. I know I’m there because the comments all mention Nate’s ‘disappearance,’ and in the first video back there’s a difference, a new tone. Darker, sexier, more serious – and even more stunningly unbelievable.