fic: the mating habits of group social life (rpf)
the mating habits of group social life
rpf. all parties end; best be prepared to relocate. ensemble: g. jacobs, g. gerwig, c. hemsworth, j. johnson w/ s. rogen, k. bosworth, et al. 3145 words.
notes: for the FREE-FOR-ALL FALL COMMENT FICATHON, this clearly got too long! written for titi's prompt, The Last Days of Disco + anyone, haha. I haven't watched that movie in AGES, so I just sort of took what I remembered and extrapolated it like 15 years in the future lol. um, idek why i chose the assortment of people i did here, but it totally made sense at the time! so clearly, as all rpf is, all lies.
1.
“We were never all going to be stay friends anyway. You knew that, right? I mean, you had to know that. Like sand shifts through the glass, the number of your friends will dwindle.” Gillian fiddles with the remote and pauses on a commercial for a made-for-TV movie about General Custer.
“Oh god, please. Shut the fuck up.” Greta hides her face in the neck of her sweater. “You talk like a Valley Girl-infused Nostradamus when you’re stoned, I swear.”
Gillian ignores her.
“Dude, Custer was a bad-ass.”
“I hate my life,” Greta says, more to herself than Gillian. She returns her attention to what’s supposed to be her dissertation and pretends the sound of Gillian droning on about General Custer is soothing.
It’s not.
2.
Zooey was the first to bail. They all went from that small liberal arts Virginia college up north to Washington DC, despite the fact only Greta seemed to possess political leanings of any sort. They all went north to DC except for Zooey.
Zooey went to New York.
Zooey broke Jake’s heart.
No one’s talked to Zooey in probably six months, and when they do talk to her, it'll probably be another six months before they talk again.
They all assume she’s still alive, still wearing polka dots, and still dating folk singers.
3.
Hemsworth still acts like he’s in college. By that, anyone who accuses him of such means: his dining room table has been converted into a permanent beer pong table (granted his dining room table is shared by Jake and Seth, but Jake’s a pushover and Seth is never home, so the blame falls squarely on Hemsworth’s incredibly square shoulders) and he still goes for either college girls or the girls fresh out of college. He likes the ones fresh out of college better. A certain cynicism starts to creep in during that senior year -- he explained this to Gillian one night, accused her of being the perfect case study; “no man wanted to sleep with you, they all assumed your vagina was as sour as that frown of yours” -- where you think you know everything you ever needed to know and you’re so Over This. That cynicism wasn’t just limited to the college campus or the Tau Kappa Epsilon lushy luaus or the paper due for your poli sci class about the echoing effects of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, but they stretched to everything. At least it had for Gillian, and Hemsworth had noticed that in her, and he resented that.
“You just resented it because I wouldn’t fuck you.”
He smiled knowingly. “You would have fucked me. I just never tried.”
He likes the fresh from college girls better. It was like that terrible cynicism evaporated the week after graduation. Suddenly everything was new again and everything they thought they knew or had discovered in their freshman door or a library cubicle or the bathroom at the oddly named Dime Street Disco felt woefully weak and only colored a part of the picture. There was a whole world out there, a whole world waiting, and that was wonderful. They were suddenly buoyant and optimistic girls, at the least the ones he sought out, and they loved him. They loved him because he was equal parts a relic of their immediate collegiate past and older and mysterious enough to lead them onward, like that carrot dangled in front of a trotting horse.
His current girl is Emma. Emma Stone. Emma Stone strikes them all as smarter than his usual crop, her eyes wide and young but critically aware. She’s a smart thing, just out of school and already more successful than most of them. She had been interning for some geriatric senator representing the bloated part of the American breadbasket but she had just been hired by some lucrative lobbying firm. Whenever she met up with them at happy hours, she’d come wearing her suit, the jacket neatly slung over her arm, her shirt still tucked in, pencil skirt tight across her thighs. Sometimes Gillian and Greta thought that everyone at that table, every male, was in love with this girl.
Greta had gone back to school. She had toiled away at some non-profit meant to give mosquito nets to Africa or something (they all had a habit of tuning Greta out when she talked about her job or the world or herself; usually it was all three at once) and they paid her maybe $20k a year, no benefits. The solution for her had been grad school, and now whenever they saw her she was dressed like a sad artist version of a student who still thinks anarchy is a great thing and not just a tired punk slogan (read: oversized men’s button down perilously unbuttoned too low, too much old gold expensive jewelry she inherited from her dead grandmother, combat boots, and skin-tight jeans).
Gillian had a theory that Greta was in love with Hemsworth, but she also had a theory that in the end, contrary to what she always told Greta, the four of them would couple off. Greta would want Chris, and Gillian would take Jake by default. She knew they were nothing like Seth and Zooey, that the four of them were incapable of striking out on their own. They needed each other, they had yet to shrug that security blanket off of themselves.
She also had a theory that when she told herself she’d settle for Jake she was lying. The word settle didn’t really apply when you loved the person already.
4.
Seth will be the second one to leave. Seth will go to New York, but not to be with Zooey. Seth had never liked Zooey. Seth always thought there was something dark and terribly wrong with Zooey.
“Someone that upbeat? Someone who nonironically plays the fucking ukelele? Oh yeah, the girl’s cracked, I don’t trust her.”
Seth will go because Seth will have new friends. Seth also will have a job interview at some promising start-up (or so they will say, but everyone said everything was promising in New York: a promising start-up, a promising comedy gig, a promising Broadway show, a promising upturn in the stock market) and he will tell them that he was going to take his chances, see what happens.
“I can always come back, you know?”
5.
“Are we allowed to call ourselves recent graduates considering we’ve been out of school for the last, like, half of a decade?” Gillian asks. They’re sitting out on Jake and Hemsworth’s front stoop, over on H Street, at the point where gentrification and non-gentrification efforts are their most obvious.
She eyes Kate’s lit cigarette enviously; she had decided earlier that year, as a belated New Year’s Resolution (by about four months) that this would be her year. She’d get healthy and get a good job and get awesome and stuff, and as part of that she’d quit smoking. She’d been victorious on that front, but then she’d quit a whole lot of other stuff in the process. Stuff like that yoga class she signed up for in a fit of overambitious optimism and then quit, and she quit her job and she quit dating that guy who was perfect on paper (but not in bed). It had turned into the year of quitting.
Jake considers her with that super serious face he makes when he’s thinking about his rent or Zooey or whether aliens really exist or if it’s just a hoax by the History Channel. “It’s a bad economy, so I’m going to say yes.”
Gillian scoops up the last of her frozen yogurt. “What’s the economy got to do with the passage of time?”
“Everything, my friend. Like my father, and a lot of other rich older white gentlemen, says: time is money.”
“Your dad didn’t invent that phrase,” Greta says.
“And I never said that he did,” Jake replies. He takes her cigarette and she lets him and Gillian feels jealous.
She’d kill for a cigarette.
6.
There was no real replacement for the Dime Street Disco in DC.
They started making do with a hole-in-the-wall bar down on New York Avenue where more often than not a live band would show up, and even more often than that, Greta’s coke connection would be waiting in the women’s restroom.
Her name was Kate, and she was a tiny skinny thing, her head too large for her body, her breastbone sticking out under any shirt she wore.
The first time they went to the bar, aptly named Good Times, Chris had proclaimed: “I like it! I want to die here.” He said it the same way he said a lot of things. The way he proclaimed that they were his best friends and he’d die for them. The way he said he loved Elsa or Kristen or Charlize or Natalie or whichever woman he loved that week, and that he’d die for them too. Chris was always talking about dying when he talked about the things he loved. It was like the two were so deeply connected in his brain that he could never separate the two -- if you love someone, you have to be willing to die for them. If you loved a place, you have to be willing to die there.
One night at Good Times, a long time after that first time and after Chris decided he wanted to not only die there but be buried out by the dumpsters (“That could be arranged,” Ruffalo, the bartender, had said), he had thrown his arm around Gillian’s shoulders. He smelled like weed and beer and dude and she liked the heavy weight of his arm around her. He was drunk off his ass, and she was high, too high, her eyeballs were all pupil and black, but he said hot and wet against her ear, “Oh my god I would die for you.”
So she laughed hysterically. So she thought about what it’d be like to fuck him in the bathroom, the one with Kate flitting around (and god, Gillian always wondered about that -- how a rich white girl like Kate wound up dealing coke at a bar on New York Avenue; she decided one night it must be an elaborate social experiment), but that didn’t happen. They just stood together at the bar while Greta danced with Seth and Jake to “The House of the Rising Sun” played too slow by the house band Tarred and Feathered, and even though she laughed, Gillian thought that she agreed.
Oh my god she would die for these people.
7.
Hemsworth started seeing Kate soon after that. Hemsworth didn’t even like coke: he was a weed and beer and whiskey kind of guy.
Kate had grown up in California and then came to DC when her father was named the secretary of such-and-such.
“So you’re like loaded,” Greta said slowly. Kate just looked at Greta, no question or confusion to her face, just a lot of judgment. “Why are you a drug dealer then?” Greta asked, the words even slower.
“Why not?” Kate said dismissively, and Chris laughed.
Kate was the oldest woman Chris had dated since they graduated college. And dated was sort of a big word to use for fucked, but Gillian always liked using big words.
Greta didn’t like Kate.
“I thought you loved her,” Gillian pointed out one night at Good Times. Greta had refused to do any coke so long as Kate was one dealing it. “You said that, like, a month ago. You said she was tiny like an elf and you loved her and then kissed her hair. It was weird.”
“That was before,” Greta said, like it was obvious.
8.
Shortly after Seth leaves and Jake and Chris start looking for a new roommate the news breaks:
Good Times is closing.
The whole city block is going to be razed and a condo complex is going to be put in its place.
“That’s so depressing I actually want to cry,” Jake says staring at his laptop screen.
“When don’t you want to cry,” Greta says.
9.
Gillian always assumed that Jake and Greta had fucked in college, but she was wrong.
The first time they fucked was after a night at Good Times, a night when Chris was dating one of his 22-year old dames and Seth was with his new friends down in Adams Morgan and Gillian had gone home with a Marine because she thought that was her American duty.
Greta went home with him to that house he shared with Hemsworth and Seth, the house with the yard and the chainlink fence and the liquor store across the street that was robbed at least bimonthly.
She told him she loved him but not like that don’t get excited I love you because you’ll never leave me I love you because you know me and like me and he said I don’t like you I tolerate you and he doesn’t remember fucking her clearly at all, he just remembers that it happened.
Greta remembers it better, but what she remembers even more is that she never let it happen again.
“I’m only going to hang out with you if you can promise me you aren’t in love with me.”
“Okay. I promise I’m not in love with you.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Yeah, you bet your sweet beautiful narcissistic ass I mean that.”
She crosses her arms. “But?”
“But.”
“There’s always a but.”
“I’ll say,” he laughs.
“But,” she prompts, ignoring him.
“But I’d still totally love to fuck you again.”
10.
Gillian fucked Chris but she never told Greta about it.
It wasn’t in college, when she was too much for Chris, and it wasn’t the night he told her he’d die for her, though it should have been.
It was born out of another night at Good Times, a night when Greta had thrown herself at a table of visiting Swedes and told them about her ancestors and kept telling the most attractive one how tall he was as though he might be unaware of this fact. Jake had been depressed at the bar; that day they all had heard from Zooey for the first time in, as predicted, six months.
She was getting married. And now Jake was getting drunk.
Greta went to the Marriott the Swedes were staying at (“I have mace and a rape whistle, and besides, the Swedes aren’t known for their violence, Dragon Tattoo aside”) and Jake was shoved into a cab by Ruffalo before midnight, and for whatever untold reason, Chris came home with Gillian.
Chris was a giant in their tiny apartment on Logan Circle. It was always that way when he visited, but usually when he visited there were other people around, never just the two of them. Now it wasn’t just the apartment that felt too small with him inside, it was her too (and she was getting ahead of herself, he wasn’t in her, not yet, not in a physical sense; in an any-other-kind-of-sense he had been in her a long time, and that was another thing she never told Greta).
In a way, fucking him felt like they were capitulating on some longstanding dare between the both of them. More than that, she felt like they were fulfilling every cliche about men and women being unable to be just friends, and she sort of hated them for that. She knew she’d hate them the next day when she sat down with Greta at brunch in Dupont Circle and she’d be sore and fucked out feeling still and she’d have to wear a scarf to hide all the places he had bit her on her neck like he was a goddamn rabid vampire or something (more like a wild dog; she imagines vampires have more finesse and grace) and that challenge would become all the more impossible when Greta came back home with her to that tiny apartment they shared and eventually she’d lie to Greta and tell her that yeah she got laid and whoops she can’t remember the dude's name hahaha isn’t that funny and Greta would say oh my god you slut I love it did you know Swedes are fantastic in bed fun fact.
And more or less that was how it all went.
She laughed with Chris the entire cab ride home to her apartment and he kept touching her, a hand on her bare leg, a hand wrapped possessively at the base of her neck, his fingers getting caught in her hair, and she understood them all then. She understood each and every one of those young girls he plucked straight from graduation and knew exactly what they saw in him.
She never felt happier and she never felt more optimistic even when she knew that this feeling, like everything else, would never ever last.
11.
So Good Times closes.
The final night the bar is packed. Ruffalo is giving free shots out at the bar and Greta kisses him square on the mouth and he kisses her back and even from her vantage Gillian can see tongue.
Gillian does five tequila shots within an hour and a half and starts thinking about what it’d be like to fuck both Jake and Chris at the same time, if that’s the logical next step.
She gets close to making that a reality: in the morning she wakes up in Chris’s bed in only a pair of panties, Chris’s heavy body draped over hers, her head in the crook of Jake’s neck, his beard scratching her face. She has no idea where Greta is.
“Oh my god,” Jake groans when he sees the both of them. He peeks under the sheet covering mainly himself, Chris’s bare ass and her legs visible. “I’m still wearing pants! I still have my pants!”
He starts laughing then. “Thank god for whiskey dick, am I right? We almost acted out the climax scene for our Cannes Film Festival submission.”
“Where’s Greta?” Gillian asks, her eyes still closed, her mouth moving against Jake’s bare skin. “Did we kill her?”
12.
The four of them get brunch later that morning, the Sunday after Good Times closes.
“I think I’m getting tired of this city,” she says to the three of them. Greta still has her sunglasses on, slumped next to Jake and across from Gillian, her hangover still raging. Jake smiles with his mouth closed, and beside her Chris swings his arm across the back of her chair.
“Where you wanna go then?” he asks.
fin.
rpf. all parties end; best be prepared to relocate. ensemble: g. jacobs, g. gerwig, c. hemsworth, j. johnson w/ s. rogen, k. bosworth, et al. 3145 words.
notes: for the FREE-FOR-ALL FALL COMMENT FICATHON, this clearly got too long! written for titi's prompt, The Last Days of Disco + anyone, haha. I haven't watched that movie in AGES, so I just sort of took what I remembered and extrapolated it like 15 years in the future lol. um, idek why i chose the assortment of people i did here, but it totally made sense at the time! so clearly, as all rpf is, all lies.
1.
“We were never all going to be stay friends anyway. You knew that, right? I mean, you had to know that. Like sand shifts through the glass, the number of your friends will dwindle.” Gillian fiddles with the remote and pauses on a commercial for a made-for-TV movie about General Custer.
“Oh god, please. Shut the fuck up.” Greta hides her face in the neck of her sweater. “You talk like a Valley Girl-infused Nostradamus when you’re stoned, I swear.”
Gillian ignores her.
“Dude, Custer was a bad-ass.”
“I hate my life,” Greta says, more to herself than Gillian. She returns her attention to what’s supposed to be her dissertation and pretends the sound of Gillian droning on about General Custer is soothing.
It’s not.
2.
Zooey was the first to bail. They all went from that small liberal arts Virginia college up north to Washington DC, despite the fact only Greta seemed to possess political leanings of any sort. They all went north to DC except for Zooey.
Zooey went to New York.
Zooey broke Jake’s heart.
No one’s talked to Zooey in probably six months, and when they do talk to her, it'll probably be another six months before they talk again.
They all assume she’s still alive, still wearing polka dots, and still dating folk singers.
3.
Hemsworth still acts like he’s in college. By that, anyone who accuses him of such means: his dining room table has been converted into a permanent beer pong table (granted his dining room table is shared by Jake and Seth, but Jake’s a pushover and Seth is never home, so the blame falls squarely on Hemsworth’s incredibly square shoulders) and he still goes for either college girls or the girls fresh out of college. He likes the ones fresh out of college better. A certain cynicism starts to creep in during that senior year -- he explained this to Gillian one night, accused her of being the perfect case study; “no man wanted to sleep with you, they all assumed your vagina was as sour as that frown of yours” -- where you think you know everything you ever needed to know and you’re so Over This. That cynicism wasn’t just limited to the college campus or the Tau Kappa Epsilon lushy luaus or the paper due for your poli sci class about the echoing effects of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, but they stretched to everything. At least it had for Gillian, and Hemsworth had noticed that in her, and he resented that.
“You just resented it because I wouldn’t fuck you.”
He smiled knowingly. “You would have fucked me. I just never tried.”
He likes the fresh from college girls better. It was like that terrible cynicism evaporated the week after graduation. Suddenly everything was new again and everything they thought they knew or had discovered in their freshman door or a library cubicle or the bathroom at the oddly named Dime Street Disco felt woefully weak and only colored a part of the picture. There was a whole world out there, a whole world waiting, and that was wonderful. They were suddenly buoyant and optimistic girls, at the least the ones he sought out, and they loved him. They loved him because he was equal parts a relic of their immediate collegiate past and older and mysterious enough to lead them onward, like that carrot dangled in front of a trotting horse.
His current girl is Emma. Emma Stone. Emma Stone strikes them all as smarter than his usual crop, her eyes wide and young but critically aware. She’s a smart thing, just out of school and already more successful than most of them. She had been interning for some geriatric senator representing the bloated part of the American breadbasket but she had just been hired by some lucrative lobbying firm. Whenever she met up with them at happy hours, she’d come wearing her suit, the jacket neatly slung over her arm, her shirt still tucked in, pencil skirt tight across her thighs. Sometimes Gillian and Greta thought that everyone at that table, every male, was in love with this girl.
Greta had gone back to school. She had toiled away at some non-profit meant to give mosquito nets to Africa or something (they all had a habit of tuning Greta out when she talked about her job or the world or herself; usually it was all three at once) and they paid her maybe $20k a year, no benefits. The solution for her had been grad school, and now whenever they saw her she was dressed like a sad artist version of a student who still thinks anarchy is a great thing and not just a tired punk slogan (read: oversized men’s button down perilously unbuttoned too low, too much old gold expensive jewelry she inherited from her dead grandmother, combat boots, and skin-tight jeans).
Gillian had a theory that Greta was in love with Hemsworth, but she also had a theory that in the end, contrary to what she always told Greta, the four of them would couple off. Greta would want Chris, and Gillian would take Jake by default. She knew they were nothing like Seth and Zooey, that the four of them were incapable of striking out on their own. They needed each other, they had yet to shrug that security blanket off of themselves.
She also had a theory that when she told herself she’d settle for Jake she was lying. The word settle didn’t really apply when you loved the person already.
4.
Seth will be the second one to leave. Seth will go to New York, but not to be with Zooey. Seth had never liked Zooey. Seth always thought there was something dark and terribly wrong with Zooey.
“Someone that upbeat? Someone who nonironically plays the fucking ukelele? Oh yeah, the girl’s cracked, I don’t trust her.”
Seth will go because Seth will have new friends. Seth also will have a job interview at some promising start-up (or so they will say, but everyone said everything was promising in New York: a promising start-up, a promising comedy gig, a promising Broadway show, a promising upturn in the stock market) and he will tell them that he was going to take his chances, see what happens.
“I can always come back, you know?”
5.
“Are we allowed to call ourselves recent graduates considering we’ve been out of school for the last, like, half of a decade?” Gillian asks. They’re sitting out on Jake and Hemsworth’s front stoop, over on H Street, at the point where gentrification and non-gentrification efforts are their most obvious.
She eyes Kate’s lit cigarette enviously; she had decided earlier that year, as a belated New Year’s Resolution (by about four months) that this would be her year. She’d get healthy and get a good job and get awesome and stuff, and as part of that she’d quit smoking. She’d been victorious on that front, but then she’d quit a whole lot of other stuff in the process. Stuff like that yoga class she signed up for in a fit of overambitious optimism and then quit, and she quit her job and she quit dating that guy who was perfect on paper (but not in bed). It had turned into the year of quitting.
Jake considers her with that super serious face he makes when he’s thinking about his rent or Zooey or whether aliens really exist or if it’s just a hoax by the History Channel. “It’s a bad economy, so I’m going to say yes.”
Gillian scoops up the last of her frozen yogurt. “What’s the economy got to do with the passage of time?”
“Everything, my friend. Like my father, and a lot of other rich older white gentlemen, says: time is money.”
“Your dad didn’t invent that phrase,” Greta says.
“And I never said that he did,” Jake replies. He takes her cigarette and she lets him and Gillian feels jealous.
She’d kill for a cigarette.
6.
There was no real replacement for the Dime Street Disco in DC.
They started making do with a hole-in-the-wall bar down on New York Avenue where more often than not a live band would show up, and even more often than that, Greta’s coke connection would be waiting in the women’s restroom.
Her name was Kate, and she was a tiny skinny thing, her head too large for her body, her breastbone sticking out under any shirt she wore.
The first time they went to the bar, aptly named Good Times, Chris had proclaimed: “I like it! I want to die here.” He said it the same way he said a lot of things. The way he proclaimed that they were his best friends and he’d die for them. The way he said he loved Elsa or Kristen or Charlize or Natalie or whichever woman he loved that week, and that he’d die for them too. Chris was always talking about dying when he talked about the things he loved. It was like the two were so deeply connected in his brain that he could never separate the two -- if you love someone, you have to be willing to die for them. If you loved a place, you have to be willing to die there.
One night at Good Times, a long time after that first time and after Chris decided he wanted to not only die there but be buried out by the dumpsters (“That could be arranged,” Ruffalo, the bartender, had said), he had thrown his arm around Gillian’s shoulders. He smelled like weed and beer and dude and she liked the heavy weight of his arm around her. He was drunk off his ass, and she was high, too high, her eyeballs were all pupil and black, but he said hot and wet against her ear, “Oh my god I would die for you.”
So she laughed hysterically. So she thought about what it’d be like to fuck him in the bathroom, the one with Kate flitting around (and god, Gillian always wondered about that -- how a rich white girl like Kate wound up dealing coke at a bar on New York Avenue; she decided one night it must be an elaborate social experiment), but that didn’t happen. They just stood together at the bar while Greta danced with Seth and Jake to “The House of the Rising Sun” played too slow by the house band Tarred and Feathered, and even though she laughed, Gillian thought that she agreed.
Oh my god she would die for these people.
7.
Hemsworth started seeing Kate soon after that. Hemsworth didn’t even like coke: he was a weed and beer and whiskey kind of guy.
Kate had grown up in California and then came to DC when her father was named the secretary of such-and-such.
“So you’re like loaded,” Greta said slowly. Kate just looked at Greta, no question or confusion to her face, just a lot of judgment. “Why are you a drug dealer then?” Greta asked, the words even slower.
“Why not?” Kate said dismissively, and Chris laughed.
Kate was the oldest woman Chris had dated since they graduated college. And dated was sort of a big word to use for fucked, but Gillian always liked using big words.
Greta didn’t like Kate.
“I thought you loved her,” Gillian pointed out one night at Good Times. Greta had refused to do any coke so long as Kate was one dealing it. “You said that, like, a month ago. You said she was tiny like an elf and you loved her and then kissed her hair. It was weird.”
“That was before,” Greta said, like it was obvious.
8.
Shortly after Seth leaves and Jake and Chris start looking for a new roommate the news breaks:
Good Times is closing.
The whole city block is going to be razed and a condo complex is going to be put in its place.
“That’s so depressing I actually want to cry,” Jake says staring at his laptop screen.
“When don’t you want to cry,” Greta says.
9.
Gillian always assumed that Jake and Greta had fucked in college, but she was wrong.
The first time they fucked was after a night at Good Times, a night when Chris was dating one of his 22-year old dames and Seth was with his new friends down in Adams Morgan and Gillian had gone home with a Marine because she thought that was her American duty.
Greta went home with him to that house he shared with Hemsworth and Seth, the house with the yard and the chainlink fence and the liquor store across the street that was robbed at least bimonthly.
She told him she loved him but not like that don’t get excited I love you because you’ll never leave me I love you because you know me and like me and he said I don’t like you I tolerate you and he doesn’t remember fucking her clearly at all, he just remembers that it happened.
Greta remembers it better, but what she remembers even more is that she never let it happen again.
“I’m only going to hang out with you if you can promise me you aren’t in love with me.”
“Okay. I promise I’m not in love with you.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Yeah, you bet your sweet beautiful narcissistic ass I mean that.”
She crosses her arms. “But?”
“But.”
“There’s always a but.”
“I’ll say,” he laughs.
“But,” she prompts, ignoring him.
“But I’d still totally love to fuck you again.”
10.
Gillian fucked Chris but she never told Greta about it.
It wasn’t in college, when she was too much for Chris, and it wasn’t the night he told her he’d die for her, though it should have been.
It was born out of another night at Good Times, a night when Greta had thrown herself at a table of visiting Swedes and told them about her ancestors and kept telling the most attractive one how tall he was as though he might be unaware of this fact. Jake had been depressed at the bar; that day they all had heard from Zooey for the first time in, as predicted, six months.
She was getting married. And now Jake was getting drunk.
Greta went to the Marriott the Swedes were staying at (“I have mace and a rape whistle, and besides, the Swedes aren’t known for their violence, Dragon Tattoo aside”) and Jake was shoved into a cab by Ruffalo before midnight, and for whatever untold reason, Chris came home with Gillian.
Chris was a giant in their tiny apartment on Logan Circle. It was always that way when he visited, but usually when he visited there were other people around, never just the two of them. Now it wasn’t just the apartment that felt too small with him inside, it was her too (and she was getting ahead of herself, he wasn’t in her, not yet, not in a physical sense; in an any-other-kind-of-sense he had been in her a long time, and that was another thing she never told Greta).
In a way, fucking him felt like they were capitulating on some longstanding dare between the both of them. More than that, she felt like they were fulfilling every cliche about men and women being unable to be just friends, and she sort of hated them for that. She knew she’d hate them the next day when she sat down with Greta at brunch in Dupont Circle and she’d be sore and fucked out feeling still and she’d have to wear a scarf to hide all the places he had bit her on her neck like he was a goddamn rabid vampire or something (more like a wild dog; she imagines vampires have more finesse and grace) and that challenge would become all the more impossible when Greta came back home with her to that tiny apartment they shared and eventually she’d lie to Greta and tell her that yeah she got laid and whoops she can’t remember the dude's name hahaha isn’t that funny and Greta would say oh my god you slut I love it did you know Swedes are fantastic in bed fun fact.
And more or less that was how it all went.
She laughed with Chris the entire cab ride home to her apartment and he kept touching her, a hand on her bare leg, a hand wrapped possessively at the base of her neck, his fingers getting caught in her hair, and she understood them all then. She understood each and every one of those young girls he plucked straight from graduation and knew exactly what they saw in him.
She never felt happier and she never felt more optimistic even when she knew that this feeling, like everything else, would never ever last.
11.
So Good Times closes.
The final night the bar is packed. Ruffalo is giving free shots out at the bar and Greta kisses him square on the mouth and he kisses her back and even from her vantage Gillian can see tongue.
Gillian does five tequila shots within an hour and a half and starts thinking about what it’d be like to fuck both Jake and Chris at the same time, if that’s the logical next step.
She gets close to making that a reality: in the morning she wakes up in Chris’s bed in only a pair of panties, Chris’s heavy body draped over hers, her head in the crook of Jake’s neck, his beard scratching her face. She has no idea where Greta is.
“Oh my god,” Jake groans when he sees the both of them. He peeks under the sheet covering mainly himself, Chris’s bare ass and her legs visible. “I’m still wearing pants! I still have my pants!”
He starts laughing then. “Thank god for whiskey dick, am I right? We almost acted out the climax scene for our Cannes Film Festival submission.”
“Where’s Greta?” Gillian asks, her eyes still closed, her mouth moving against Jake’s bare skin. “Did we kill her?”
12.
The four of them get brunch later that morning, the Sunday after Good Times closes.
“I think I’m getting tired of this city,” she says to the three of them. Greta still has her sunglasses on, slumped next to Jake and across from Gillian, her hangover still raging. Jake smiles with his mouth closed, and beside her Chris swings his arm across the back of her chair.
“Where you wanna go then?” he asks.
fin.