SelfAbsorbed.ME : ‘It’s Your Life, We Just Write it Funnier’

Continued from Part I

Jake stood in the frame of the doorway and looked confused as Man stared at him with her arms crossed.

“Uhh,” he started. A promising beginning. “Hey. I…I know the girl who lives here.”

“I live here.”

“What?”

“Yeah. I live here. With her,” she told him, pointing at me. They both looked at me blankly for a second.

“Here? With her?”

“Yeah.”

They both just stood there looking at each other for a couple of seconds. And I stood there looking at both of them look at each other. I was pissed, though unsure what to be pissed about. But both of them seemed to have forgotten my name. Irritating.

Jake scratched the back of his head and winced slightly, as though Man had just ripped off a band-aid.

“So…How have you been?”

“I’m going to go get a drink,” I interjected. They both looked at me, again, blankly. Then Jake shook his head ever so slightly and locked eyes with me, as though viewing me for the first time. “Hey,” he grinned, though the Man-made surprise still lingered. “Yeah, let’s get a drink.”

We turned away from Man, whose crumpled mouth looked as though she’d been force-fed rancid tofu. As we headed towards the table of alcoholic beverages, he slung his arm around me and gave me a kind of sideways hug. “Nice place.”

I no longer cared about showing him the apartment. “How do you guys know each other?” I asked.

“How do you guys know each other?”

“She went to high school with Evie (my original, infinitely superior, roommate),” I told him.

“Cool.” He started concentrating on making an outrageously strong gin and tonic. Silence seemed to stretch between us as he looked at the plastic cup and I looked at his profile.

I laughed. He was so obviously avoiding the question that I didn’t know what else to do. My palms were sweaty. He looked at me. “What?” he asked.

“Well, how do you know each other?”

“Oh, uhh,” he shrugged his shoulders with an attempt at nonchalance, but it looked more like he was trying to shake a heavy burden off his back. “We both studied abroad in Buenos Aires.” He took a giant gulp of his drink. “You want me to make you one?” he asked.

“Sure,” I told him, figuring I might as well ease my nerves while I tried to uncover the mystery. “Thanks. So…you guys were friends when you were studying abroad? Is this the first time you’ve seen her since then?”

“Nah. We hung out a lot last year. You know, when we both moved here.” he passed me a cup. “But then, you know, we both had a lot going on. I haven’t seen her in a while.”

“It didn’t seem like you guys were exactly thrilled to see each other.”

He sighed. “We had kind of a falling out.”

“You broke up?”

He looked annoyed. “I guess. If you want to get all dramatic about it, yeah, we broke up. Anything else you need to interrogate me about?”

Awesome!

Just then I saw Will had entered the room. When you’re having troubles with the boy in your life, the entrance of the bro always helps to sooth the situation. “I’m going to go say ‘hi’ to Will,” I told him. “So I guess you’ve caught a break from my nasty line of questioning.” I turned away before he could say anything.

I walked over to Will and fell gratefully into his big bear hug. “Wow! Your new roommate is HOT,” he whispered fervently into my ear. I recoiled, betrayed and defeated.

“Traitor!” I hissed at him.

“Don’t tell me you have a complex about it already.” He rolled his eyes at me.

“She dated Jake,” I informed him, still hissing because Jake was no more than ten feet away. Luckily the music was loud and a couple of people were singing along to “Poker Face” at the top of their lungs.

He laughed. “No way. I can’t believe it. Ahhhh…That sucks for you. But she’s single now, right? Fair game?”

I shook my head and walked away. Both the men in my life had let me down. And Man had gotten the better of me without even trying. I looked over. Jake was still standing at the “bar” making himself yet another drink. Suddenly feeling responsible for reopening old wounds, I walked back over to him.

“Hey,” I started. “Sorry about–”

He turned to me as he picked up the drink he’d made…and passed it to Man. I hadn’t seen her tiny pixie body standing on the other side of him. She looked at me and smiled sweetly–an expression that I read as, Honey, you’re way out of your league here. I’m the Man.

Jake smiled at me. “No, it was my fault. Don’t even worry about it. It was nothing. Man and I were just, you know, catching up.”

I nodded, straining all of the muscles in my face to maintain a smile. “Yeah, of course.” And then I turned and walked away, but not before taking an entire bottle of white wine out of the refrigerator. I walked into my room and out the window onto the fire escape. Luckily, the wine bottle had a twist-off cap. Reentering the room for a corkscrew would have felt pathetic. I didn’t want to see Man and Jake conversing and I certainly didn’t want them to see me wandering around the room by myself. It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.

So I sat out on the fire escape and consumed the bottle’s contents. I’m not sure how long I’d been out there when I heard a voice say, “There you are.”

It was Evie. Being sought out by someone who wasn’t Jake suddenly made the situation feel unbearably disappointing.

“You’ve been gone for like, thirty minutes,” she told me. “Jake just came up and asked me where you were.”

Nearly in tears, I looked at her, standing on the other side of the window, clueless about the unfortunate coincidence of the evening. “He did?” I asked. “Really?”

“Yeah. He just came up to me and said he’d been looking everywhere and he couldn’t find you anywhere.” Evie was a little intoxicated. “I don’t know why he didn’t come in here. I don’t think he knew which room was yours.”

I felt hope swell in my chest. He and Man were a thing of the past! I climbed back through the window, done stewing in my personal CW drama.

Evie led the way out of my room and down the narrow hallway past Man’s room, reentering the hub of the party. I followed a few paces behind.

“Yeah,” I heard a voice say. It was coming from behind Man’s half-open door. “Yeah. Just like that. That’s good.”

It was Man’s demanding, throaty little chirp. And in that moment I exercised no restraint. I couldn’t help myself. I peeked around the door.

There was Man in her tiny floral romper, hands stretched out in front of her, butt held high in the air. And behind her, hands placed on either side of her hips, obediently pulling her into a deeper stretch, was none other than Jake. It was the dirtiest downward dog that I’d ever witnessed.

The door creaked. They both looked up. Man wiggled out of her yoga position. “Oh, hey. Jake was just helping me stretch. I’m really sore after that class I took today.”

At that moment, I felt like I was caught in a reality TV show–some screwed up version of The City or NYC Prep where the producers had just set the scene for inevitable drama. It didn’t seem real. Sure, nothing overtly sexual was going on, but I didn’t need hard-core evidence to see that this was an issue.

And that was the beginning of the end. After I’d broken up the stretch session, Jake basically confessed to me that he and Man had a very “screwed-up dynamic. It’s just a bad situation and it’s bad for us to be around each other. We just…It’s all hot and cold. Like, volatile and stuff.” I started thinking about how much hot angry sex they must have had together. There wasn’t much to say after that.

I gave Jake a half-hearted hug and watched him descend the stairs, never to be seen again. As I shut the door, it struck me as funny that what had suddenly started with a hot dog had so abruptly ended with a downward dog. Will, not knowing what was going on but sensing my darkened mood, came over and slung a chummy arm around my shoulder. “Don’t fret, kid. I always thought he was kind of a wiener anyway.” There’s a good brofriend.

“Besides, you gotta snap out of it and come look at this,” he whispered. “Whoever that girl is sitting on the couch, she has the most ridiculous thong showing right now. There’s this tiny little bow on it. Come see. Maybe you can blog about it or something.”

I guess I still looked glum because he went on to add, “Come on. You’ll have a new man in your life in no time!”

I looked across the room to see Man seamlessly fold into a backbend as others cheered her on.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I already do,” I said bitterly. Man, oh Man. This was the start of a whole new relationship: dog eat dog.

Photo Credit: americanchronicle.com