I was expecting it, but my stomach still drops. I look down at the ground in front of me. Yeah, I knew in my gut he’d been pulling away from me. I even briefly wondered if it had something to do with the new girl at his work he kept talking about. The girl with the lap-dancer name, but of course, I convinced myself that he was not that type of guy. He was faithful. He was in love with me.

“The slut at work?”

He flushes a deep red. “There is no need to get judgmental.”

“Is it?” I demand, my anger boiling over.

“As a matter of fact, yes. Her name is Candy and she’s not a slut. She’s a great gal. She has a really lovely personality. She’s always helping everyone.”

My eyes widen. What is this fool doing now? He’ll be telling me she’s great in bed next.

“The first time we had sex,” he confesses enthusiastically. “She went down on me an…fuck, Dawn, she blew my mind. It was so much hotter than anything we ever had together.”

I feel as though I am going to throw up. I press my lips together determined not to show myself up. Anyway, vomit is murder to get out of cream carpets. He notices the horror in my face and resolves to rub it in, for reasons that I can’t quite figure out.

“I guess it’s because she’s hotter than you,” he continues, getting into it now, apparently reveling in the power he has over me, the power to devastate me. “She’s at least fifty pounds lighter than you…”

I can’t help wincing as those words come out of his mouth. I can’t believe he would say that to me. He knows how self-conscious I am about the way I look, and yet he can’t resist twisting the knife deep into the most painful of my insecurities. This is starting to feel like revenge. He doesn’t love me. He hates me. An image of this woman pops into my head. She’s slim and tiny and cute, and next to her I am a great heaving mound of flesh. And he wants to have sex with her…with the lights on. For more than five minutes.

I wonder how long he’s been sitting on all of this, how many times he’d wanted nothing more than to tear me apart this way. I should just kick him out. And yet, I don’t. Not yet, anyway.

“What about our tickets for tomorrow night?” They cost an arm and a leg.

“Uh, I thought since you probably won’t want to go on your own anyway, I’ll just take Candy.”

I shake my head in wonder. What a bag of shit he turned out to be. I paid for half of those tickets. My brain shifts gear. I never knew him. Now I need to know if I should get tested for anything. “How long has your affair been going on?”

“A month or so,” he replies, and looks at me so brazenly, I wonder if he is even a little bit ashamed. Knowing he cares so little, that he’s so happy to rub all this in my face, sends a flare of fury through my system. I’m not going to let him walk all over me like this. To be honest this man has been nothing but a burden for the last two years. I’ve done everything I could for him. I put his interest before mine, and now he’s standing in front of me telling me he’s betrayed me, and instead of being apologetic, he actually sounds victorious and proud of himself.

I know for damn sure that if he was cheating on me he wouldn’t have used protection if he could avoid it. That’s just the kind of guy he is. I guess I had always seen it, but now that it’s laid out in front of me, so inescapably and utterly ugly, I have no choice but to accept that and try to protect myself as best I can.

“Did you use protection?”

He swallows hard. “No, but she’s clean-”

“You’re such a fucking piece of shit,” I shout, rounding on him. Any sadness and hurt in my heart is replaced with burning fury. “Clean? How clean can she be if she didn’t use a condom with you?”

“You’re just jealous,” he says smugly, and I think I see the hint of a smile on his face and it makes me so angry I actually want to scratch his lying eyes out.

“What is there to be jealous about?” I fire back, my voice lifting in volume. I don’t want this to become a yelling match, but if he’s going to keep being such a prick…

He frowns, as though caught off guard, and I decide to go in for the kill just the same way he did for me when he told me how much slimmer this new girlfriend of his happens to be.

“You’re a cheater,” I begin, lifting my fingers and ticking off all his flaws one by one. “You’re so cheap you used to make me cringe. You’re rude to waiters. You snore worse than a pig. This new girl is welcome to you. Though maybe I should call her up first and let her know what she’s getting herself into? Oh, and I nearly forgot. You’re garbage in bed.” There’s a twist of triumph to my voice as I finish up all the ways that he’s failed me over the last two years, all the ways he’s been a shitty boyfriend to me.

His jaw drops.

I know I’ve hit a nerve, and it feels good for a moment, but I’m not a cruel person at heart and any kind of joy I might have gotten from seeing him so upset soon becomes a sour taste in my mouth, and I find myself staring at him with more sadness than anything else. I should tear the shit out of him, and God knows that he deserves it, but for whatever reason it’s just not fun right now.

I’m too hurt by his betrayal to really find any kind of consolation in the way he looks right now. I wish I could be a little more callous and cold and really go at him, chip away at his ego the way he’s done with mine for more than a year now, but I can’t. I’m just exhausted, and what I want more than anything in the world is for him to get the hell out of my apartment so I never have to see him again.

“If I was garbage in bed it was because I had a lump of whale meat in bed with me. Who can get turned on by that?” he yells.

“I hope I never see you again,” I say slowly, and I really mean it too.

He opens his mouth to speak, but I’ve had enough. “You should leave.” I point to the door, leaving no room for discussion.

“With pleasure,” he sneers. Turning for the door, he walks out, and slams it so hard the walls rattle.

I close my eyes to quell the next wave of anger that overtakes me. I just want to run out there and scream at him for being such an asshole. The kind of idiot who seriously believes that slamming someone’s door at this time of the night was a good way to make a statement.

What a fucking jerk.