Ghosted

Do you believe this bitch? Roxy Reign’s new video dropped this morning. There she is with her so-called main squeeze, twerking in the dude’s face, then role-playing a shopping spree like they’ve been together for years. This punk calls himself Jett Luxx. After that, they cozy up in a bubble bath built for two, drinking champagne and wearing chain jewelry—and not much else. A montage of rap clichés. Total garbage.

It’s been like, what, five weeks since she ghosted me? Bitch sure moves fast.

In my head, “Love Is a Battlefield” opens my “Fuck You, Roxy Reign” playlist. A little on the nose, maybe, but I can name my breakup playlist whatever I want. Pat Benatar starts yelling about hurt, love, and chains while I fill in the dum-dums.

It’s fine by me. I’m doing my thing. Hoofing it down Broadway toward my regular coffee cart on Forty-Eighth, where Ahmed normally has my light-and-sweet waiting before I reach the curb.

Today, Ahmed looks straight through me.

“What can I get you?” he asks the woman standing behind me.

New York service. Five years buying coffee from the same man, and the second somebody behind you has exact change, you become invisible.

***

It was a Thursday night when I decided to give Roxy a chance. She appeared at my apartment door at seven with a bottle of Brut and a small tote bag filled with cooking supplies. The doorman usually stops anyone suspicious looking. Roxy has hand tattoos. Go figure.

After I popped the cork and poured us two glasses, she took control of my flat screen and switched on Pat Benatar. Then she switched over to her real favorite—New Kids on the Block—and picked “Cover Girl.”

She started on chimichurri-marinated skirt steak and an arugula salad with shaved Parmesan, everything purchased that afternoon at the Union Square Greenmarket. This was the version of Roxy nobody paid to see. I liked believing she performed it only for me.

“You know you’re the only boy I’ve ever cooked for,” she said.

I told her the steak needed another minute.

She turned back to the stove, called her sister, and spent ten minutes solving an emergency that wasn’t really one. Then she photographed the food from six angles and posted it to her Instagram Story.

“You should come with me next week.”

“Where?”

“Chicago. Two shows. We could stay an extra night.”

“I’ve got a race Sunday.”

She nodded like I had answered a different question. I opened my laptop and went back to revising a paper I was trying to publish while she finished cooking, singing, and dancing around my kitchen.

She danced over, sprayed me with lemon juice, and tried to tickle me. I caught her around the waist. We kissed, and then she pulled back as though something serious had just occurred to her.

“Tell me you’ve seen That’s My Boy,” she said.

“I haven’t,” I said, leveling with her.

“Holy shit. We have to watch it. I love Adam Sandler. More than life itself.”

“Really?”

“It’s either that or Ted.”

"Haven't seen that either."

“Jesus. We are going to be here for a while.”

I offered no complaints. You see why I like her? Then she started rolling a blunt thicker than my thumb. This was where we departed from the whole sugar-and-spice motif.

But I cannot lie. We had a great time that night. We both laughed until we had tears in our eyes. Like two kids without a care in the world. Truth is, we both had a lot of shit going on. Shitty shit. And not the good kind.

For a little bit, it didn’t matter.

***

“Disconnected” came next. Of course it did. It was supposed to be a special night—my symposium presentation, her first week home after two months on tour, and the first evening we had managed to keep for ourselves in nearly six weeks. We had reservations, champagne, live music, and almost no opportunity to speak to one another.

We were at the Roxy in Tribeca. The oysters were chilled. The martinis were dirty. A live son cubano band strummed the tres, slapped the bongos, and clacked the claves through a bright, syncopated rhythm. It should have been a perfect night.

Roxy was taking lots of photos of the sign out front, as if the place was named after her specifically. She wore a sparkling silver dress that had everyone staring and her whole entourage was in tow. Everyone had a nickname that was a letter. E, T, G, V, and D. One could get confused. I know I was. And I’d known some of these people for years.

Mind you, I had just come from presenting a paper at the International Stem Cell Symposium at the Javits Center—the biggest professional moment of my career—but I was betting nobody at the table wanted to hear about it. While they were going on about which faux-famous celebs would be making an appearance at the Jue Lan Club later that night, I was getting text after text from my colleagues.

“Are you listening?” Roxy asked.

“Of course.”

“What did I just say?”

I looked at the people around the table for help. E studied his drink. T suddenly found the ceiling fascinating.

“That’s what I thought,” she said.

Five minutes later, I asked whether she had heard what I said about the summit.

“Of course.”

“What did I just say?”

She smiled without looking up from her phone. “See? We’re perfect for each other.”

Between Roxy filming reels and Boomerangs of our food and me answering nonstop emails, our lives had become a Venn diagram with no middle.

Roxy scooted closer in the booth, put one arm around me and one hand on my leg, and gave me a peck that smeared pink gloss across my lips. She took a white napkin and dabbed them afterward.

“How did your thing go?” she asked.

“The Summit,” I said.

“Yeah, your paper—the science thing. I like that my man’s a whole-ass scientist.”

As I started to speak, E tapped Roxy’s shoulder. “Yo, yo. You won’t believe this, Jett Luxx is at the Jue Lan Club tonight."

“We have to lock in that collab.”

“Hollywood, baby! Here we come. There are levels to this game, babe. Levels.”

“And we be levelin’ up, right E?”

And just like that, she was gone. She had finally asked how the summit went, and I had managed exactly two words: The summit.

My martini warmed beside me while congratulatory emails accumulated on my phone. I answered every one of them. The last thing in the world I wanted was to follow her to Jue Lan Club and stalk someone who spelled Lux with two x’s.

So I didn’t.

***

Next up on the playlist is “Heartbreaker.” You know the drill. But this isn’t plain vanilla heartbreaker shit. I’ll tell you, this bitch has some nerve. She did her heartbreaking with panache. Chef’s kiss, babe. Seriously.

I was in a faculty meeting down the hall from my office near Washington Square Park when Roxy FaceTimed me at ten-thirty in the morning. She was picking up cigarettes and Red Bulls at the CVS by her apartment.

“Babe. I need $300. Can you Cash App me?”

“What for?”

“I need to help Val with something and I don’t have it.”

“It’s not even for you?”

“It is babe. I’m doing something for Val.”

“I’m dating you babe, not Val.”

“If you don’t want to, it’s fine. I only ever ask for the minimum, and I can’t even get that.”

“You know that every day there is some kind of emergency. Some kind of drama with your family. Don’t you ever get sick of it?”

“Don’t you ever get sick of being so square?”

“I just sent you the money. Let me get back to my meeting. Talk later. Love ya, babe. Bye.”

I hung up the FaceTime, came back from the hallway, and rejoined the meeting. And later that day, I threw my back out. Bad. I guess I’d been putting in too many miles on the bike training for my crit races in Central Park. All I was doing was reaching for a book and my foot slipped, and I heard a loud pop. Not good.

If you’ve ever thrown out your back and had lightning running down your leg, you know what I’m talking about. I ended up in the emergency room at Tisch. It was bad enough that they gave me a room and did an MRI. I was bitching enough that they put a morphine drip in my IV.

I was tits up on my back, staring at the ceiling with a herniated disc and enough opioids to make you not care if someone lopped off your damn head. Then my phone lit up with another FaceTime.

“Babe. Can I borrow your car?”

“You want to borrow my Mercedes. You have one too.”

“Yeah, but yours is nicer and I have a thing tonight. Upper East Side. I want to pull up in yours. It’s a vibe. A flex, babe.”

“Are you serious?”

“You only like me when I’m cooking for you and making you laugh,” she said.

“I like you when your emergencies don’t become my emergencies.”

“You think loving somebody is letting them visit when nothing else is on your schedule.”

“And you think loving somebody means they clean up every mess you make.”

“At least I make room for you in my mess.”

“That’s not the same as making room for me in your life. You know where the keys are. Knock yourself out. Just bring it back in one piece.”

Three hours later, I was in extreme pain. Fighting back tears. I had texted Roxy what was going on with me, but she was texting back one-word answers because she was too engrossed in her media event and whatever afterparty followed.

“Ba-be. Don’t be upset… don’t… Something terrible happ-pened.”

“What’s going on?” I said. She was sobbing uncontrollably and hyperventilating.

“I swerved. The driver was in my lane. I hit the divider. My leg is hurt babe. I’m bleeding from my head.”

I could hear a clunking sound. It sounded like metal on cement.

“Just relax. Breathe. Are you driving?”

She drove the car all the way back to my garage, where it had to be towed to a dealership that immediately declared it totaled. No one ever understood how she managed to drive the car back that night.

We got together a few times after that. But I’d already begun feeling like I was taken for granted. And she was on some kind of downward spiral that I knew nothing about.

It just stopped being fun. It started to be scary.

***

“Let’s Try It Again” came next. You can care for someone without loving them. Happens every day. You can also love someone without knowing how to care for them. That one’s worse.

I hadn’t seen Roxy since before Memorial Day and here it was almost Labor Day. She didn’t say sorry. Neither did I. She just texted and told me she’d like me to come to some family thing that was going down in Jersey. And I said yes.

We were at a summer barbecue in Bayonne. We headed down to a corner bar where ample green tea shots were handed out to everyone in the place. It was someone’s birthday. Someone else was having a baby. Enough gossip was being dished and there was enough long held envy and grudges in the room to fill a book. I ignored it all.

Teams were called. It was a Smart Shoot Basketball Arcade tournament.

Roxy and I teamed up. There were four other teams of two.

We were both super competitive. We laughed and played off one another and took the win. Several more rounds of shots followed.

We ended up back at my place and screwed each other’s brains out. Then conversed sweetly about nothing while smoking cigarettes and weed on my balcony overlooking the Empire State Building and the cityscape around it.

It was almost a perfect night.

But we never reconciled.

Deep down, I think we both knew it was our last night together.

***

“Please Don’t Go Girl” is the next song on the playlist.

After the barbecue we made plans to get together at my place the following Friday to make dinner and watch Netflix. A low-key night. I actually thought this was going to happen. But she didn’t show. She texted me just before to say that she had a recording session with Jett Luxx.

I knew she’d be preoccupied so purposely left her on read and never texted her again. That was my statement. My declaration of freedom.

And that was it for me and Roxy.

Her texts kept coming Friday night and into Saturday morning. What happened? Was I angry? Were we broken up? Could she make it up to me?

I wish I could have answered her. But I never did.

By Sunday, the messages stopped.

That Saturday morning was the crit race. And I attacked that thing like a bat out of hell. But that’s another story.

Roxy put out a song about me. It was creepy. There were tombstones and black clothing and all kinds of horror elements. She was crying in some of the scenes. In others she was showing flashbacks that mirrored some things from our relationship.

It was sincere. I guess.

She even had a broken bicycle prop and some other nods to me personally. Which was funny, because she never had announced our relationship publicly. She had asked me once if I minded or if I wanted her to. I had to be honest with her. It was just as bad for my career if she did that as it was for hers.

So that’s how it ended. I just ghosted the bitch.

And not two months later, her ass is all up in Jett Luxx’s face all over the internet.

***

The final song on the playlist was “I’ll Be Loving You (Forever).” It was playing softly from Roxy’s phone as she walked down Fifth Avenue toward Washington Square Park, wiping her face with her sleeve.

She let herself into my apartment with the key she had never returned. A cardboard box waited beside the door, filled with the clothes, chargers, rolling papers, and assorted pieces of her life that my sister had found scattered throughout mine.

Roxy carried a light-and-sweet coffee and a printed copy of my symposium paper. The pages were bent at the corners, streaked with pink highlighter, and crowded with question marks. On the title page, she had written:

“Whole-ass scientist.”

She had read the whole damn thing.

She left the coffee beside the paper, where it would sit until it went cold.

“I loved you, asshole,” she said. “I just wasn’t any good at it.”

I wanted to tell her the steak had been perfect. I wanted to tell her about the summit, the race, the hundred stupid things I never got to say when saying them still mattered. Mostly, I wanted to tell her that I had loved her too. Not well. Not generously. But that it was real.

She picked up the box and walked toward the door. Then she stopped and looked back at the empty apartment.

“Bye, babe.”

She left.

For once, I did not follow.