The first time I slept with another woman’s boyfriend, I decided not to think about it. The second time I slept with another woman’s boyfriend, I paused to feel the guilt. The truth was, by that point, I was desperate to feel anything, anything at all.
Robert hovered over me, the two of us in his freezing apartment that smelled of burnt meat. He was in grad school, like me, so it was all okay. None of this was for forever.
He said, “You’re so beautiful,” and I said “okay,” because it was a nice thing for him to say, but it reminded me of how often people told me I looked like my father. I wondered what Robert would say if I told him that the parts of my body he was kissing had never actually belonged to me.
He said, “I’ve wanted to do this for forever,” but I’d wanted him since we were twelve. Back then, my dad was singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to my mother in the car and lacing his knuckles through hers, but I was convinced I’d never be happy until I was Robert’s girlfriend. I’d never achieved the title, but I had him here now, kissing me the way I always wanted.
He brushed my hair away from my face, and I flinched. “You okay?”
I didn’t want to tell Robert I was thinking of the last man I committed this sin with and the last woman I committed this sin against. So instead, I nodded into his chest.
Robert didn’t know about the two years I spent letting my college ex-boyfriend show up at my door with heavy drunk knocks and half-completed sentences, spreading my legs for him at night and then stalking his new girlfriend’s Facebook during the day, memorizing every detail of her face, this sweet-looking brunette who knew nothing about me, or what I was doing to her. This crime I was justifying like a child. That it was all okay because I’d loved him first.
Robert didn’t know about the mornings I woke up naked and sore and alone, waiting for my punishment to emerge. He didn’t know that I forced myself to lay there in silence until I could conjure her up. Not the unsuspecting brunette, but Sandra—the woman who had sex with my father.
“You’re shaking,” Robert frowned. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
I said, “It’s nothing, I’m fine,” even though Sandra had never been nothing.
I could tell Robert wanted to say something. He’d seen me through braces and acne and a decade of pretending to be okay, and even the rub of my breasts against his bare chest wasn’t enough to turn off the reflex of friendship.
I could feel him hard against my hip, but I waited for him to decide what we were going to do—if we were going to talk about this now, or wait for morning, for coffee, for clothes, where our friendship would be clearer.
I had never told anyone about Sandra. This name that was just a name, a word I repeated to myself sometimes until I got sick. I liked it when I threw her up. I enjoyed being able to flush her down, punishing her the only way I could. For years, whenever the mood struck me, I shoved three fingers down my throat and thought back to when I was sixteen and had never been kissed, and my mother was ordering my father to tell his children what he’d done. I’d heave and throw up Sandra and try to remember when I first learned her name. Had I overheard my mom crying about her, or had I found a Christmas gift with her name on it, or had her name fallen from my dad’s lips during one of the nights he’d drunkenly stumble into my room, sit on the edge of my bed, and tell me about all the women he was fucking on his business trips?
And then I’d vomit all over again because, for some reason, I always forgot there had been more than one woman, and the only reason I clung to Sandra was because she was the only one with a name. The only one my mother had called directly and begged to stop sleeping with her husband. And Sandra, being Sandra, cheerily said no.
Robert’s kiss hurt. It dripped with an apology he was trying to grind into me, sorry he’d chosen to be my lover instead of my friend in this moment, sorry he wasn’t going to press me to tell him what was wrong. I let him hurt me. We both knew I’d driven five hours from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia for this.
It didn’t matter that Robert would have understood. He always understood me. But I knew if I told him about Sandra, it would make everything about what we were doing, the kind of people we were, so much worse. So I pushed my tongue into Robert’s mouth as hard as I could because I wanted him to remember we were children of fathers who fucked other women, the two of us repeating history because it was in our blood, because we didn’t know what else to do.
What was real, more tangible than Robert’s teeth nipping my skin, was the Sandra I’d created in my mind. Sandra, with her blonde hair teased to defy gravity, sultry plum lipstick, and bright red fingernails. Sandra, who probably—no, definitely—drank vodka cranberries and excelled at swirling her tiny cocktail straw in a way that highlighted her breasts. Those breasts would be winking up at a man who couldn’t help himself, because it wasn’t his fault Sandra was so manipulative and alluring, and it didn’t matter that both of them had spouses and children because when you were an adult, sometimes these things just happened.
Robert’s fingers tugged at the button of my jeans and he said, “I want to make you feel good.” He kissed my nose, and I thought about telling him that was impossible. My nose belonged to my father. My mother had once belonged to my father. Robert belonged to a girl named Kaitlyn.
Robert kissed his way down my abdomen, lingering on my hip bone, the same spot I used to put a sticker in the summer to chart the progress of my tan. I wondered if Robert remembered this. If he was thinking about the times we’d lain together on our grassy suburban lawns, every third house exactly alike.
Had he ever considered what would happen if word of our affair got back to our hometown? A place that only had one response to immorality? There was a reason our adulterous fathers didn’t live there anymore. Had he ever considered that as the town’s golden boy and Homecoming King, his fall from grace would be far worse than mine?
His fingers skated between my legs. “How’s that?” he asked. I shrugged. He frowned.
In the morning, I will be the one frowning. I’ll watch Robert assemble a fake bed for me on the couch and roll around to mess up the blanket and put an indent in the pillow. He’ll say, “I don’t want my roommate to get the wrong idea,” and I’ll bite the inside of my cheek and say something about breakfast. But in that moment, I will wonder if my father ever treated Sandra like this or if part of Sandra’s charm was that she didn’t let men walk all over her.
Robert suctioned his face between my thighs, his tongue running up and down, and then in and out, and I folded my hands over my stomach, staring at the bookcase beside his bed. I found the spine of Macbeth, which we read together in junior year English. I spied Infinite Jest next to it, which he read last summer. The first summer he spent kissing me. His third summer dating Kaitlyn.
On top of the bookcase, four framed photos smiled down at us. Robert and his dad, Robert and his mom, Robert and his sister, everyone with their own frame. In my apartment, my family was displayed in the same way. Mother, father, brother. Easier to pretend we’d always been broken than to remember our separate shards had ever made a whole.
I stared up at the fourth photo: Robert and Kaitlyn.
Robert thrust his fingers inside me, and I cried out.
Kaitlyn was framed in silver and gleaming in the low light. She smiled at me, the kind of girl who didn’t need makeup to be beautiful. I imagined she had a wonderful laugh; the kind of laugh guys would fight for. But of course, I didn’t know this because Robert had never let me meet her. Although one year, I helped him pick out an ugly pair of opal earrings to give her for Christmas.
I squeezed my eyes shut, my breathing picking up, not because of Robert’s eager licks, but because the longer I stared at Kaitlyn, the more clearly I saw my mother sitting in the study with the lights off. I pulled Robert up, pretending I was overwhelmed with the need to kiss him. The choked sobs of my mother were growing louder, and I needed to know I could control something.
I could see all pathetic sixteen years of myself, pausing at the study door with a backpack heavy with homework. Through a crack, I saw my mother in her yellowed bathrobe, with the phone pressed tight against her head, like if she allowed even a sliver of space between her skull and the phone, she’d crumble completely.
I inched closer to her weeping. It was three in the afternoon. Sunny. I leaned against the doorframe like I leaned against my locker, crossing my arms over my budding chest while my mother’s cries wormed their way inside me. I wondered what had happened this time. Another condemning receipt, another gift with Sandra’s name on it? Or had Sandra’s voice been in the background when my father called from his business trip? Maybe, before he left, my father had promised things would be different and my mom had allowed herself to believe him. They were still wearing their wedding rings, after all.
I imagined bursting into the room and screaming at my mother that maybe Sandra was right. Maybe the key to keeping my father was in Sandra’s plum lipstick and low-cut dress and not in tears or appeals of logic. Maybe if my mom got out of her yellowed bathrobe and put on some heels, maybe if she talked in a low voice and buried how she really felt with an enticing smile, maybe my father would come back to us. Maybe he’d leave Sandra.
I unzipped Robert’s pants, and I took him in my mouth.
The truth was I’d left my mother to cry alone while I covered for my father. I didn’t tell her about his drunken confessions. I buried his trail of clues whenever I could. When he called, I made sure to pick up first, quietly demanding he leave his hotel room and only passing the phone to my mother or brother when I was positive there were no sounds of another woman in the background. When he tearily asked if I loved him, if he was a good father, I assured him he was, and that I did. Because of course I did, even if he wasn’t. I was sixteen and trying to figure out what it meant to be a woman, trying to figure out how to earn a man’s love, unsure if love was even something that could be kept at all.
Robert rolled us so he was on top of me, pressing our lower bodies together as if to clarify what was about to happen next. I was ready for it. I wanted it. I didn’t want to think about our brokenness or cruelty. I didn’t want to think about what it said about me that I was doing this again, choosing to hurt a new set of people, sleeping with another woman’s boyfriend for the second time in my life, condemning myself to more mornings with Sandra and my own bile escaping around my fingers.
Instead, I buried my hands in Robert’s hair and focused on the feel of his lips grazing my neck and pushed away the image of my mother and the fact that if she knew what I was doing in Philly right now, the look she would give me would snap me in half.
She would call me my father’s daughter.
And then suddenly, Robert’s lips were gone, and he was staring down at me like I’d wounded him.
“What did you say?”
Kaitlyn. I’d said Kaitlyn.
I hadn’t meant to. And yet, his girlfriend’s name was here now, hovering between us. I thought about backtracking. Apologizing. Ignoring it. But I was too distracted by the guilt, the brilliant electricity zapping through my body, more pure and good and righteous than anything I’d felt in a while. Better than anything I deserved to feel.
I stared at my friend. His jaw was flexed, veins protruding in his neck. I hadn’t meant to betray him, condemn us in this way, but now that I had, I knew I couldn’t take it back. He needed to feel her presence, too.
So I said her name again, less confident but louder, so he wouldn’t misunderstand, so he couldn’t claim he hadn’t heard, because a part of me would forever be stuck at sixteen, and because if I’d known Sandra had whispered my mother’s name, forced my father to remember her, remember me, even for an instant, I might have hated her a little less.
Robert sighed. “I know. But that’s my problem to deal with. I don’t want you to worry about that. Okay? You’ve done nothing wrong.”
His hands cupped my face like he cared about me. Like I was precious to him. Like he truly believed I was innocent. As if I wasn’t a player in all this. As if broken trust and betrayed relationships were as natural as the orbit of the planets. As if we weren’t two sentient human beings with consciences and morals that could stop this before it went any further.
I was happy when my voice broke, when the whisper came out strangled, because I was staring into the eyes of my friend, and this was the third man I’d loved who had let me down.
“Haven’t I?”
“I think the world of you,” he insisted.
“But you’re—how can we?”
“I don’t know.”
I waited for more, but Robert simply dragged his thumb across my cheek like that was it. And I realized that maybe it was. Maybe that was the whole truth.
Robert leaned in to kiss me and I let him. I didn’t call him the names he deserved. I moved my lips against his because maybe the world was crueler than I imagined. Maybe a man could cheat without a real reason.
And maybe, when Robert reached for a condom from the little box on his bookshelf, I let him because my nose was my father’s nose, my blood his soiled blood. Maybe I was desperate for any bullshit reason that wouldn’t make me a horrible person. Maybe I’d wanted to be Sandra all along.
Or maybe, when Robert sank into me and I stared up at his girlfriend’s photo, I was trying to understand my father. Maybe I needed to feel the guilt of this sin. Maybe, this time, I needed to make it mine.
Hayley Notter’s work has been featured in West Trade Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Blood Tree Literature, Sunflowers at Midnight, Marathon Literary Review, You Might Need to Hear This, IDK Magazine, and on WUMW Milwaukee Public Radio. She is a graduate of Chatham University’s MFA program and lives in Chicago with her cats, Comma and Dash. Find her on Instagram at commadashwrite or at www.hayleynotter.com.
