MatureDJ
Master Don Juan
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http://narrative.ly/moonlighters/stripping-on-the-side/
Perhaps she figures that he is not good enough for to have sex with, but only to be a "boyfriend" of ...
To afford to live during the unpaid internships so often taken for granted as part of the undergraduate experience, I stripped.
Some nights, at around four in the morning, Jay would come over. Jay was a guy I’d met through my day job, an out-of-work musician who ran errands for my boss. He was staying on a friend’s couch. My roommate didn’t much like Jay or the fact that he came over in the middle of the night, high on coke, locked out of his friend’s house, ringing our bell with nowhere else to go. Jay and I were sleeping together, but I would not say we were “dating.” We couldn’t have dated because I had a boyfriend back home—the guy I’d been dating since high school, Rick. I let Jay in because I liked the company. I liked to smoke Jay’s cigarettes and I liked that Jay needed me, if only for a place to crash.
And a boyfriend is supposed to have something more important than "sex"? WTF? :cuss: :cuss:Jay’s not a bad guy, I’d sometimes think to myself. He lacked steady employment and had no place to live; I didn’t particularly respect his music and I’d have died if anybody at work found out for certain that we were together. But when it was just Jay and me, I felt at ease. I felt more like myself—normal, safe—without even having to realize that I’d ever felt otherwise. I sometimes wondered what Jay thought of me, whether he liked me and wanted to be my boyfriend, and then I’d remind myself that it didn’t really matter. I already had a boyfriend. Jay knows I’m in a relationship, I’d remind myself. He knows I’m practically married and that what he and I have is simply sex. We’re just using each other, I’d think.
Perhaps she figures that he is not good enough for to have sex with, but only to be a "boyfriend" of ...
My opinion of Rick: :kick:When I met Rick, I stopped going out dancing. Rick went to a Catholic school and came from what I considered a good family—the kind of family that ate dinner at the dinner table and not in the living room in front of the T.V. The kind of people who said grace. The first time Rick and I went out, he brought me carnations from the supermarket where he worked as a bag boy, and we actually went out—not just to the woods to make out, but to Burger King, where he paid for my meal. After our first date, he kissed me politely on my doorstep and I had the strange sensation of being filmed, as if I was an actress and we were both following the script of a very pleasant movie. Rick was, I thought, what I’d always been looking for: a guy who could look my mother in the eye.
I felt safe with Rick. At the same time, I was always afraid our relationship wouldn’t last. I was prettier than he deserved, I often told myself, but in other ways I feared I didn’t measure up. Around Rick’s family, I was always on my best behavior. I was always afraid they’d see me for who I really was.
Jay and I didn’t use condoms. If you’d asked me then why I wasn’t on birth control, I might’ve said that I didn’t know where to get it. I might’ve said the pill made me sick. I’d been on the pill, I might’ve explained, and when I missed one and doubled up the next day, it made me so nauseous that I would sometimes throw up. I couldn’t remember to take a pill each day, and I didn’t like condoms. That’s what I might have said. But it was more than that. In my mind, I thought I shouldn’t have been having sex. Lying and cheating was wrong, I understood—so wrong, there was no way to make it right.
My last month in New York City, I missed my period. I took a pregnancy test in Jay’s friend’s bathroom. I sat on the toilet, staring at the cruddy powder-blue tile, waiting the agonizing minute. When the test came back negative, I felt a sense of relief so enormous that the whole ordeal almost felt pleasurable.
But two weeks later, back in Ohio, I’d take another test. I’d call Jay and tell him that I was pregnant, and he’d say something like, If you decide to keep it, I’ll be there for you and I’ll support you and your decision, and I’d say, Jesus Christ, Jay, you can’t even take care of yourself.
I was so angry, so determined to not be a child, to need no one, to hold myself together. My mom drove me to the appointment and I paid for it myself.
