Daddy's Sweet Obsession

Immediately, I got down from the car and hurried to my boyfriend's office. We hadn't seen each other for 8 months and had nothing together as far as I could recall.  The door to his office was open, and I thought nothing of it. I pushed it and I walked in and I... stopped.  Jake was in his chair, shirtless, his head back, and Camille... Camille was on her f*cking knees in front of him, her red short dress up, her blonde hair in his hands, her mouth on... my brain just stopped working.  There was a thing that happened when you saw something your mind genuinely refused to process and i tried to load what i just saw and just couldn't. I stood there, and I looked and some part of me kept waiting for it to make sense, because that was Camille. The friend of mine had begged Jake to offer a job in his office, which he reluctantly did after so much pleading.  I couldn't process everything. I just saw Jake, my boyfriend of four years and my childhood friend of nineteen years.  Jake's eyes opened.  He saw me and something moved across his face, guilt, obviously, but underneath it something else, something I wasn't ready to admit.  Something broke inside me. Just then, my eyes met with hers. Camille tried to sit upright. Not the smeared lipstick, not the way the lamp was on, like they hadn't even thought about hiding, it was that look. That pleasure. I envied them at that moment.  'Mara...' He was already sitting up, hands moving, doing that thing he always did when he was about to explain something that obviously was a lie.  'Don't.' I heard myself say it from very far away.  Camille opened her mouth. 'We didn't... it just...'  'I said don't.'  I looked at Camille for a second. I took in the face I had known since we were seven years old, the face I had trusted completely to get a job for, without question for six years, and I felt something in my chest go very stiff.  "Did I just get cheated on?" I laughed. I had hurried over here as soon as I got back to have s*x with my boyfriend, and he was already with another lady.  I turned around and walked out.  ✦ ✦ ✦  The office quietness swallowed me right back up. That was the insane part. Nobody looked at me and saw anything except Jake Calloway's girlfriend in a nice dress, moving through the room. I kept moving.  I didn't run. I expected him to chase after me. I really wanted him to. My heels hit the marble floor, one step then another, past people whose names I knew, past people who nodded at me, through the lobby where the guard held the door and said goodbye, ma'am, and I said Thank you because, apparently, some part of my autopilot was still functioning.  I was already outside.  It was October. New York did that thing where the wind cut right through you like it knew.  I stood on the sidewalk and I waited. I didn't decide to wait, I just... stopped moving. I stood there in front of the building that had his family's name on it and I waited because some stupid leftover piece of me still thought he might come. Might push through those doors in thirty seconds and say my name, and I'd have something to work with, something to scream at, something.  He didn't come.  Of course, he didn't come.  I realized I was still holding the present I got for him. I looked at it for a moment like I didn't know how it had gotten there, then I set it down on the pavement next to the entrance. Like that mattered.  My hands were shaking a little. I noticed it the same way I noticed everything right then—from a distance, clinical, like I was watching myself from across the street.  I stopped a cab. I got in. I gave Dana's address.  The driver asked if I was okay, and I said yes and stared out the window at the city going by, all that light, all those people living their lives in lit-up windows, and I thought about Jake's face, that bastard.  I thought: okay. I was just cheated on, nothing more.  I thought: okay, then.  I didn't know yet what that meant. But something in me was already moving, already turning over, already getting very, very quiet in a way that had nothing to do with grief.  I'd figure it out at Dana's.