I'm Glad About You(41)

“Too late for that, I’ve had a hard-on all day!”

“Okay, I did cheat on him.”

“Thank goodness.”

“Well, yeah, I was like twenty-three years old and my boyfriend wouldn’t have sex with me. What was I supposed to do? Besides, he was in med school in Ohio and I was in Seattle, so I just, I just—had an affair with this musician.”

“Oh, ‘musician.’ You mean ‘loser’?”

“I needed to have sex; I didn’t care who I was having it with by that point!”

“You were twenty-three?” asked one of the day players, a pretty blonde who looked like she weighed about eight pounds.

“Don’t distract her; I sense that we’re getting to the good part,” Bradley advised. “So you slept with this loser—”

“I slept with this incredible musician who was also Irish”—this brought cheers—“who had a fantastic cute accent and he was great in bed. And he was also sleeping with about eight other people, which was a bit of a shock—”

“You were using protection, right?” asked the teeny blonde.

“Yes, of course, he was a musician, so I knew he wasn’t some great innocent—”

“Like your boyfriend.”

“Yes, exactly, but nevertheless I did think in the moment he was not sleeping around—”

“Did he tell you he loved you?”

“Yes, he did—”

“In an Irish accent?”

“Oh yes.”

“What was his name?”

“Brendan.”

“Oh, God, Brendan.”

“Yes, Brendan the cheater. So he was out there cheating away—”

“While you were cheating on your boyfriend—”

“Because he wouldn’t sleep with me, yes, and I found out about the cheating, of Brendan the cheater, in a kind of horrible way, a mutual friend, someone I barely knew came over the house and said you know I have to tell you this thing I bumped into Brendan at a bar last night and he was with this other girl, and they were making out and then he went home with her.”

“Who is this person, the one who was ratting out Brendan?” Bradley asked.

“His name was George.”

“Did he want to sleep with you?”

“As it turns out, yes, he did.”

“Of course he did.”

“But I didn’t find out that until later. Because when I went to talk to Brendan about this story he went on and on about how much he cared for me.”

“In an Irish accent.”

“Yes. So we ended up back in bed, and I decided he had just slipped up, until a couple weeks later when I was over at his apartment, and I went to the kitchen to get a glass of water and one of his roommates called me Kathleen. So then Brendan and I got into a screaming fight and I went home and Kyle was there.”

“Who’s Kyle?”

“Oh, sorry, he’s my boyfriend, the one who wouldn’t sleep with me.”

“He was at your apartment? While you were out cheating on him? I thought he was in med school.”

“He came to surprise me, it was a surprise visit.”

“He came and surprised you while you were out cheating on him.”

Alison was starting to feel tainted by it all. She hadn’t meant for it to go this far, certainly, when she started to tell the story. She just wanted to be cool and hip and urban, a New Yorker, a New York actress, someone who ran through lovers willy-nilly and didn’t think twice about it. But these people were strangers, and they were laughing.

“How could she be cheating on him if he wasn’t sleeping with her?” This from that skinny blonde, a girl whose name she didn’t even know.

“Oh, come on, there was no question she was cheating.” That from another one of those day players, a boy with black hair and black eyes, a dead ringer for Brendan himself, truth be told. Someone else she had never really known, not really.

“I was cheating; I was,” she admitted.

“You’re too hard on yourself.” This from Bradley, in the corner, who was watching her so diligently she knew he was still thinking about having sex with her.

“But I was! I was cheating, and Kyle—Kyle caught me! And then I was so angry, that Brendan had been cheating on me—”

“Even though you were doing the same thing to Kyle—”

“Yes, even though I was doing the same thing I was angry at Brendan and Kyle too because honestly I thought I’m sick of dealing with this whole no sex thing, that was just crazy, and so I told him I had been having sex with a lot of people.”

“What?” Bradley sat up, alert and gleeful even, at this turn of events.

“Yes, I told him I was doing all sorts of— Well, I told him I was—” She stopped, suddenly and completely ashamed of herself, for having cheated, for having lied to Kyle, and now, more than anything, for telling the story to a bunch of nobodies. These people were nobody to her. Nobody.

“You can’t stop now!” Bradley shouted, happy.

“I don’t think I’m drunk enough for this part.”

“Someone give her more champagne!”

“There isn’t any more,” said Alec, pensively turning the bottle over and looking for stray droplets.