weeks after Thanksgiving—and you were still with her. That length of time with someone does not equal a casual hookup.”
“What would you call it?”
“An affair, maybe?”
“Affair? Fuck!”
“What’s wrong with affair?”
“Affair is so bourgeois,” he said, and immediately recognized bourgeois as one of his father’s words. Why be bourgeois, Matthew, when you can be bohemian? How many times had he heard variations on that theme? And now he was parroting his father to Romy! What the hell was wrong with him tonight?
“Well, how ‘bourgeois’ is it to answer a guy’s phone for him?” Romy asked. “Casual hookups don’t answer your phone.”
“Yeah, well, she was on top, it was easier for her to reach it,” he said, goaded by who-knew-what into yet more assholery.
Her eyes went wide. “You spoke to me in the middle of having sex with her? You—you—”
“Bastard? Is that the word you’re looking for? Because that’s bourgeois.” Her eyes were still wide, and her naïveté provoked him into wanting to shock her further. Shock her...show her who she was dealing with here. “It’s just sex, Romy, and nonexclusive at that. Hookup fits better than affair, trust me on this. And since Camilla hasn’t called me since that night, whatever she was, she’s not it anymore.”
“Not exclusive?” Pause. “You mean exclusive as in—”
“Monogamous.”
“You were hooking up with other women simultaneously?”
“Not at exactly the same time, if you know what I mean.”
“Well, that’s...something. I guess.”
“Although I have in the past. There’s nothing quite like a threesome.”
“Oh,” she said faintly, “I see. But...but not with Camilla. But doesn’t that mean—?”
“Camilla, of course, was hooking up with other men—she’s not at all bourgeois.”
“I see.”
“Good,” he said. “Now you know.”
“I just thought...”
“What? That I was an innocent, clean-cut boy?”
“I thought...at least you used to be... I was sure you were...monogamous.”
“Still am, on request. You want monogamy, you got it. That tends to get the cardinal rule broken a little faster, though, and that’s always the end,” he said, threading his voice with amusement.
“Cardinal rule? How do I not know about a cardinal rule after ten years?”
“You don’t know because you don’t break it, Romy. You don’t say it.”
“Say what, Matthew?”
“That you love me.”
Romy had this thing she did when she was trying to make sense of something that did not compute: a raised-eyebrow blink in slow motion, which he called her blink of insanity. She did it now. “A woman tells you she loves you, your instant reaction is to dump her?”
“I don’t like the word dump. It’s more what I’d call a withdrawal of interest.”
“Now, you see, I think a woman might still regard that as being dumped.”
“Then she’d be wrong, because dumping implies there was a relationship. And, like I said, I haven’t had one of those since I was—”
“Seventeen? She must have been some girl, the one you were with at seventeen, to be so hard to replace.”
“Oh, yes, Gail was some girl, all right,” Matt said, and although his voice was steady, the old sick rage he thought he was done with welled up in him.
Romy saw it, too. Or sensed it. He could tell. Ah shit. He braced for follow-on questions, holding his breath as she did the open-shut mouth routine...
But she must have decided that was one story too many, because with a slight shake of her head, she changed tack. “So when you are monogamous,” she said, “they fall in love...when? Are we talking days? Weeks? Months?”
He managed an almost-natural laugh. “You think I keep track?”
“Too many to keep track of? Maybe you and Artie could invent a track-keeping app.”
“Smart-ass.”
Pause. “So...how long does it take you to fall in love, Matt?”
“What is this? The Spanish Inquisition?” He tried out another laugh, but this one missed natural by a mile.
“Just a simple question.”
“Then here’s a simple answer—I don’t.”
“Not since you were seventeen, I suppose.”
Back to that. He pushed his chair back from the desk, then pulled it straight back in. Restless. Agitated. “It’s like this: both people in a...a...”
“Relationship?”
“...situation need to want the same thing or someone’s going to get hurt.”
“Are you saying you never want the same thing they do?”
“No, sometimes we want exactly the same thing, and that’s great.”
“But it’s never love?”
“Search your memory for a contradictory example, Romy. You won’t find one.”
“Well, that’s a shame, because you’ve gone out with a lot of wonderful women.” She sighed. “I hope you at least warn them up front what to expect.”
“Oh, I make it clear, what’s in it for both of us.”
“Sex.”
“Good sex. And fun. And respect. I’m not jealous or possessive, which means they can leave whenever they like, no questions asked. No stalking or bad-mouthing or revenge porn when it’s over. Friendship if they’re up for that at the end, although very few are and that’s okay, too. I just...don’t want them to love me.”
“And yet they do love you, Matt. I’ve talked enough of them off the ledge at the end to know it.”
He shook his head, dismissive. “They don’t stay on the ledge for long. And that’s because although they say they love me, they really don’t.”
