MR. NICE GUY

Lauren is typing. She is serious, brow furrowed, in old sweats but freshly showered. Her desk is neat and tidy, just like the rest of the apartment.

I have known Lauren since 2015. Whenever she gets serious about doing something, she needs to clean up her space, get a shower, comb her hair, pull it up in a pony tail and then she gets down to work.

A couple of weeks ago, Lauren had a girls night with her gal pals. They were reminiscing about old flames and lost loves, and suddenly, my name started popping up. A lot. They made fun of me, my habits and she even shared some rather intimate details that were...hmmm...well not for sharing! The following morning Lauren decided to pour our unforgettable love story on paper, sorry, in a Word Document. She wanted to do it so that she "could get a perspective". She needed a closure. Or so she claimed that night.

I wouldn’t know all that if I weren’t that guy. The one who got away, as I liked to think of myself. Pete the (love) Feat. Pete the (male) Treat (hehe!). Pete the Cheat.

„Waiiiiit!“, I yelled.

„What do you mean the cheat? Is that what I was like?“, I ask incredulously.

She has just left me in the laundry room in a hotel with that unbearable woman that had been chasing me like crazy while we were traveling in Utah. We were with a group of tourists and there was a woman Lauren knew from her university days. Lauren wanted to see Capitol Reef. I wanted to see Lauren happy. That woman wanted to see me...well, naked and happy but with her. And for some reason, she wanted to see Lauren cry. Stupid sorority stuff, things that have happened ages ago. Some women are really mean.

Her frown deepens. She stops typing.

„Get back into the script! This is my story!“

Her tone makes me flinch.

„Don’t I have a say in that? This is my story too! Get me out of this laundry room! It's humid and I hate it!“

I feel she is annoyed. She truly believes in her own version of the story. I try again.

„Why Pete the Cheat? I loved you! I would have never….“

She deletes the action she has just described (the one manufactured by her vivid imagination, you know, when you don't know where your boyfriend is and you imagine him with all kinds of women doing all kinds of unspeakable things with them and one woman keeps texting her about it?)

She starts again. Suddenly, I am in a bar, music blasting, people yelling and dancing, sweaty and smelling of alcohol. She is moving to our first meeting. She continues typing, adding a manipulative, calculating element to my nature.

„Hey, Lauren! This is not how I was! I had no hidden agenda! There was no manipulation!“

She adds stronger adjectives and expands the sentence into a paragraph.

„Sorry, Pete, but this is how I think it should be and I have the last word here“, she clears her throat, her eyes shooting spears.

„When you want the world to know your version, feel free to write it!“, she adds.

How can I write it? I am a character in her story! If I were a witness, I would never make a credible one for sure!

This is not the girl I had fallen in love with the moment I heard her deep, hearty laugh. This was a woman on the hunt and she wanted blood. MY blood!

She types a whole page describing our first date, the way I remember it too. That’s more like it!

Out of the blue, she deletes it and starts typing a different dialogue. No flirtatious tone, no easy banter except for my tearful story of my previous relationship. I am sat on a bar stool in the corner, teary-eyed, baring my soul about my ex. The woman had turned down my proposal after ten years of living together.

„Hey, I shared that story with you just before you left! Why put it here? Where is that chemistry, that palpable heat between us?“

I am truly hurt.

„And why that tone? I was never angry during out first date! And who actually opens up about their past during the first date? Only a self-sabotaging prick would do it!“

Lauren is still typing.

„Well, you just had a tragic backstory. So you did self-sabotage our future relationship.”

She is unnervingly calm. She is rereading what she has written and I am praying that she will write it the way it happened.

“Why do you have to make me a jerk, Lauren? We loved each other!”

She is quiet and then continues typing. Suddenly, my blood boils.

“No, I won’t let you make me a bad guy! When did I “slip into your colleague’s snatch”? And what kind of language is this?! THAT HAS NEVER HAPPENED!”

I am panting. If story characters have a human heart, mine is on the verge of bursting.

“It raises the stakes.”

“It raises my blood pressure!”

She stops and stares into a wall. I know her. I know what she is doing. She is trying to build a dramatic story around the thin edges of reality.

My version: Oh, let the world know! We had a real meet-cute. I noticed her immediately in the overcrowded bar. Her laughter could be heard over the loud music. She wasn’t drunk, just herself. We flirted, danced, sang off-key to the same songs, made up lyrics for those we had never heard before.

Later, it turned out we were headed in the same direction and shared a cab. We didn’t even kiss. I had to chase one of her girlfriends from work to get her phone number. I called the next day. By the end of the week, we were living together, breathing the same air and each other. Feeling each other’s presence even when one of us wasn’t physically there.

And now I find out I fell “into her colleague’s snatch”!!!! Who uses that word anymore?!

Suddenly, I am sitting on the couch.

I hate the couch. She puts me there while I bare my soul how my father made fun of my flyfishing while he was still an active surfer in his 70s. Even the local papers wrote about him and then other outlets picked up the story. Unfortunately, my father says in an interview, my only son is not into these manly things. He likes flyfishing.

The couch is for patients and Lauren is not a shrink but she has me lying down, confessing how hurt I felt. She knows I hate the couch. That’s why she puts me there. At least this story in her narrative is true to some extent.

“I realized how emotionally damaged he was upon hearing about his ex and his father. I felt like crying…”, she went on.

I feel like crying. Lauren gets up to get some water from the fridge. She resumes typing.

The ambience resets. The last time we had sex.

“OK, let’s do this – he said in a matter-of-fact tone”, she goes on. “He left the bed and went to the bathroom.”

I don’t want to be in the bathroom. I know my OCD kicks in there but now I may get some insight into her own feelings.

“The shower went on for good fifteen minutes. He was scrubbing himself like crazy, I knew it. As if I was filthy and he needed to peel me off his skin. I knew that was something that his ex-fiancée had made him do it but even after a year, I just couldn’t stand it. I did feel filthy but not in a good way. I felt like garbage.. How could I possibly raise a kid with him? My belly gets tight.”

I am back in the bedroom. Lauren is in the back yard, walking around in my big shirt and weeding here and there.

I am packing my backpack. Not my proudest moment. By the time she comes back into the house, I am gone.

“I texted him to see where he was. I paced back and forth, almost throwing up from anxiety, and a little bit from being a bit pregnant. Five weeks. I couldn’t breathe. He was gone. Just like that.”

I am speechless. She was pregnant? What?????

"Is this just another figment of your imagination to make your story spicy?", I ask nervously.

She is calm. "Don't sweat it. I had a miscarriage right after you left."

She has placed me in another setting. I’m apparently at the train station, staring out at Meaningful Nothing. I hate Meaningful Nothing. It usually precedes a revelation I didn’t consent to.

“I would like it noted,” I say, “that it was not my intention to leave you like that.”

She ignores me and types faster.

“Lauren”, I ask pleadingly, "you left. And you never said anything about the baby!"

There’s a pause. I suspect she is weighing me like a questionable egg. Or milk gone off.

“What if,” she says carefully, “you made a different choice?”

“I stand by my choice.”

“It makes you a villain. You wanna be a bad guy?”

"What if you had made a different choice? You could have sent me the sonogram!"

She sist there for a long time. "Pete, you were so distant back then that I just wanted to be as far away from you as possible. Also", she adds apologetically, " I thought my nausea was due to your behavior."

I am pondering what she has said and then decide to bare my soul. It’s not as she was ever going to see me again in person.

“I had to leave. I did have a ticket for Atlanta but yes, I know, we were supposed to go together. I just had to leave. I knew I couldn’t give you what you needed. God, I couldn’t even face you, let alone give you a decent closure!”

I am ashamed of myself. The truth is, I got really scared of that level of intimacy. Happens to everyone. Lauren doesn't beat around the bush and strings you along, she dives in, deep, and wants you to go deeper with her. Direct and raw, vulnerable and honest.

She is thinking hard, deletes the last three paragraphs.

"Pete, darling, even no official closure IS a closure!"

I am back in the bedroom.

Suddenly I’m saying things I would never say. Grand, sweeping declarations. Metaphors involving walking on red-hot fire for her. Not being able to live without her. But, oh, she realizes she can never be happy traveling with me without the ring on her finger – so prosaic! – and she decides to leave and never tell me about the baby. I choke on it.

“Stop,” I say. “That really hurts!”

“It sounds better this way. And you are not so bad in this draft!”

“It sounds like you’re trying to look like a badass and I was a wimp”, I say offended.

She stops typing.

"But you were a wimp! Licking Daddy issues and old wounds from a psychotic ex!"

For a moment, the world holds. No train. No bedroom. No sonogram. No scrubbing myself to death in the bathroom. Just me, half-finished, buzzing with all the versions I’ve almost been.

Lauren is thoughtful.

“How about a compromise?”

Relief hits me in the knees so hard I almost stumble. Thank God I have no physical presence!

“OK”, I reply cautiously.

Lauren nibbles at her lower lip.

“I will remove the colleague and your cheating…”

“ALLEGED CHEATING!!!!”

She looks at the page hiding a half-smile.

“OK, alleged, if you say so!”

I nod in agreement.

“But the scrubbing and distancing are staying!”

I think about it for a moment.

“How about”, I begin carefully, “we go back to that bedroom and start packing for Atlanta?”

She nods and adds quickly.

“But I am putting that nester chasing you all along right in between us!”

I completely forgot about that woman! After all, I may have been a bit of a cheat….

I sigh.

“Compromise. OK, just make sure you emphasize she was chasing after me!”, I say in haste.

“After all, I am just a nice guy!”