I take a deep breath as I walk towards Ethan’s dorm, knowing that it’s going to be a huge mess, knowing that the next ten minutes, or fifteen, or thirty—maybe even the next hour—are just going to flat-out suck.
It’s been a few days since I found out about what he’s been doing, and it’s like poking a bruise. I just keep looking him up online, finding more shit that he’s done and more bitches he’s fucked around with. A few of them have even been girls from classes I’ve had over the past few years, and I never heard a damn thing about it.
I swipe my card to unlock the building’s door and decide that in spite of how agitated I feel, I’m going to take the elevator instead of the stairs. I’m glad to see that there’s no one getting on the elevator with me; that would just make psyching myself up for everything I have to do that much harder.
I get off the elevator when it reaches Ethan’s floor and remind myself, yet again, that I’m doing the right thing; that there is no way in the entire world that I can just let this slide, and that no matter how he tries to deny it, I know the truth.
At least there’s only so long that this can go on, I remind myself. Ethan has a class in about an hour and a half, and it’s their last session before finals, so no matter what, our conversation isn’t going to last much longer than an hour.
I get to his dorm room and for just a second, any semblance of courage completely deserts me. More than anything in the world, I want to turn around, walk back down the hallway, and go to my own room, where I at least can be alone with the horror and humiliation of what I now know about my so-called relationship. There’s a tiny part of me that believes if I don’t have the confrontation with Ethan, I can almost pretend like I never found out in the first place.
But I know it’s a lie. I might be one of the last people on campus to know—at least, amongst the people who would care—but I know what I know, and I can’t just pretend like I didn’t find out about Ethan. So, I take a deep breath, and knock on his door.
“Coming!”
When the door opens to reveal the man I’ve spent the last three and a half years madly in love with, it’s almost too much for me to take—yet again. Ethan looks like he always does: lean and lanky, in black jeans and a black tee shirt. It’s practically his uniform, and I’ve only seen him in another color maybe a dozen times in the years we’ve dated—and those were all only because he was specifically forbidden from wearing all black. He’s got stubble along his jaw, and his big, dark brown eyes look like they’re about to bore into me until he realizes that it’s me, and then he’s all smiles.
“Hey, babe! Sorry, I’ve been working on my final project,” Ethan says. “What’s up?”
“We need to talk,” I say, ignoring the charm in his voice.
How can he even pretend like there’s nothing wrong? Just the night before, he’d uploaded a new video to UPorn, and according to the description, it had been taken during a time when he’d told me that he had a group project to work on for one of his classes.
“What’s wrong, babe?”
I push down the instinct to just start screaming at him, but it’s hard. “We need to talk,” I say again. “Are your roommates here?”
“No. Nate’s down at the dining hall and Chester is looking something up in the library,” Ethan replies. He gives me a little smirking grin. “Need a little pre-finals stress relief?”
Bile quickly rises in my throat. It takes everything I have to keep myself from vomiting right there.
“Just let me into the room,” I say, already exhausted.
After finding out what Ethan had been doing behind my back—apparently, for more than a year, according to the date stamps on his videos—I can’t even remember all of our dates, our nights together, all of the special memories we’d shared, without feeling like they’d all been tainted. He could have given me an STD; in some of the videos, he wasn’t even wearing a fucking condom! He could have knocked someone up.
Apparently, none of that was all that important to him, though, and now everything about the man I loved had been totally ruined. I couldn’t even deal with his attempts at being charming; it just felt revolting.
“Is something wrong, babe?” Ethan lets me into his dorm but it’s starting to occur to him to wonder why I’ve even dropped by, and why I’m not responding to his leering and smirking in my usual way.
How is it possible that, in less than a week, he can go from being this charming, sort-of-sweet-underneath-it-all asshole, to just a regular old asshole? I ask myself.
I let the door close and lock behind me, taking my phone out of my pocket. Before I even went to class that morning, I made sure I had everything saved on my phone; everything I needed as evidence. I open the screenshots and give myself a second to decide if I really want to do this.
“Tell me about this,” I say, holding up the first one: Ethan’s Tinder profile. “And this,” I add, flipping to the next picture: a screengrab of one of his amateur porn videos, showing his face. I keep flipping through them and Ethan goes from looking like a cocky, horny lover to a sulking, spoiled child.
“This is your fault, you know,” he says once I’ve shown him all of the pictures.
“What?” I thought nothing that Ethan could say could possibly surprise me, but I can’t believe he’s going for this tactic.
“You wouldn’t do any of these things with me, so I had to find someone else who would.”
“Without telling me? Without even seeing if I might be okay with it? Without using a condom half the time? You could have given me some kind of fucking crotch rot, Ethan!” I stuff my phone back into my purse before the anger can get a hold of me strongly enough to make me throw it.
“Don’t be such a prude,” Ethan says, rolling his eyes. “Come on, Nora. We both know we love each other. This isn’t even the kind of thing that should worry you.”
“It worries the hell out of me that you’ve kept it from me for...I don’t know—like a year or better?”
“How did you even find out about it?” he hissed.
I shake my head. “That’s not important. What’s important is that you’ve been cheating on me all this time, and you’re too much of a goddamn coward to even admit what a piece of shit you are,” I say.
I hear my voice rising. I know I’m almost screaming, but I can’t stop myself.
“What are you going to do, Nora? You gonna dump me?” Ethan rolls his eyes again. “Come on. If you weren’t such a prude, this wouldn’t have ever happened. But it’s out of my system now. If you’re jealous, maybe I can show you what I’ve learned, and then we can put this all behind us.”
My jaw drops. I can’t even believe Ethan is uttering the fucking words that are spilling from his mouth right now.
“It is not prudish for me to expect you to be honest with me, for me to expect you to break up with me if you apparently need a bunch of strange women slobbering on your cock to be happy and satisfied. It’s not prudish for me to expect you to have the common decency to not cheat.”
“We have our whole lives ahead of us,” Ethan says. “Give it time, and you’ll forgive me for this.”
“I never will,” I tell him. “I didn’t come here for you to explain this. There’s no explanation that could ever be good enough. I came here to tell you that I know what you’ve been doing, and we’re over.”
“We can’t be over,” Ethan says. “We’re going to New York together. We’re going to be engaged in like, a few weeks—as soon as the ring I designed for you is done.”
“No,” I say through gritted teeth. “Not happening. Hope you can get your deposit back, because I will never wear that fucking ring in my life. I am never going to touch you again. I’m never even going to speak your fucking name again.”
For the first time, Ethan looks truly panicked. He stares at me, and I watch his mouth open and close, open again, and then he’s just staring at me like that.
I turn to leave his room. I’ve had all I can stomach of this conversation—Ethan blaming me for his cheating, insisting that I’ll forgive him, that everything will be fine between us, when there’s not even an ‘us’ anymore. If I stay much longer, I’ll just start screaming, making a huge scene out of it, and I don’t want to have a dozen people watching me leave the dorm building in tears.
“Wait! Nora, come on!” Ethan grabs my arm and I turn on my heel. Now, I’m not even sad anymore, just flat-out angry, and I reach for his wrist and dig my fingernails into his skin until he lets out a stupid, shrieking yelp, and starts to loosen his grasp. I bend his hand backwards as far as I can, and shove him away from me, and then I’m out the door, hurrying down the hall.
I hear a few people’s doors opening and closing; obviously some folks overheard some part of what happened between me and Ethan, and they’re curious. But my blood is roaring in my ears, and all I can think of is getting back to the privacy of my room before anyone can really notice me. I hate the idea of anyone seeing me crying over Ethan, or figuring out that’s why I’m crying. I manage to keep the tears in my eyes as I ride the elevator to the ground floor, and I make myself slow down a bit on the way to my own dorm building.
One of the sophomore BFA students, Jamie, says hi to me as I’m walking past her, and I give her the best smile I can manage, say something about the finals for Drexel being brutal, and just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
In three weeks, you’ll have graduated, you’ll be off campus, and you can forget you ever even met Ethan. The first two would just be a matter of fact; I know better than to believe the third thing will really happen, though. But I have to at least pretend to believe there will be a day when I barely even remember my now ex-boyfriend’s face, when I’m not walking around like I have a jagged, cold diamond in my chest instead of a heart.
I have to believe that I can recover. It’s just really hard to imagine right now.