“So then eventually there’s this one night, and he’s got some good news, he just got promoted at the store, he’s now assistant manager, something like that, and in addition to getting high we drink like an entire bottle of vodka, and I’m thinking This is it, this is the time that I’ll fuck him, but I still don’t want to, and eventually I stumble over to my normal spot on the sofa and I crash out. And when I wake up in the morning he’s on the couch with me, kind of crammed in behind me, and our clothes are all still on but he has his hands up my shirt and on my tits. And I kinda pull myself out of there and am just like Goddamn it. It’s like, it was a shitty thing for him to do, but I don’t want to make too big a deal out of it, because I still want to like Joseph, I still want things to go on as they’ve been going on, so he wakes up, a couple minutes later, and we kind of share this look, the look that says that we agree not to talk about it, that we agree to pretend that it never happened.
“And around then it kind of fizzles out. Maybe because of that and maybe not. I double down on my schoolwork, get more serious about my writing, start liking my Penn friends again, I graduate, I get the job that I want at the Philly Museum of Art, and then, poof, that’s it, Joseph is gone. End of story.
“Except then, a couple years later, bam, my parents die, and then, double bam, a month later I turn into a wolf for the first time. And it fucked me up. So, yeah, I screw up a big grant, lose my job, and my boyfriend dumps me. Basically I’m losing my mind. So, whatever: I just start spending days sitting on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, drinking herbal tea and fucking meditating or something until I come to terms with the way my life is now and figure out what the fuck to do next. And Joseph finds me. On Facebook. He sends me this long, kinda heartfelt message about having missed me, all that shit. He doesn’t mention the thing where he put his hands on my tits. And at this point I’m desperate for a friendly face from the past, and maybe I’ve even convinced myself that the incident or whatever never really happened, or it didn’t happen the way I remember it, or …” She shrugs.
“So I friend him, and I write him back, tell him it’s good to hear from him and all that, and I kinda confess that things are fucked up for me—I tell him about my parents, and my job, and my boyfriend. I don’t mention the wolf thing. And that’s when shit gets uncomfortable. Turns out that the record store Joseph worked at has gone out of business, and he starts talking about moving to Philly. And the second I hear that I’m like Uh oh. He promptly comes up with this idea that because we’re both out of work we should be roommates, to defray the cost of living is how he puts it. And we end up talking on the phone a bunch, and I get caught up in this stupid dance where I keep making up reasons why I can’t room with him, and he keeps kind of disassembling them, which he can do because they’re flimsy, because I don’t want to say the real reason, which is I don’t want to live with you because actually you skeeve me out, and the fact that you appear to not be getting that is skeeving me out even worse.
“In the end, Joseph does move to Philly, living on his own, and we hang out a couple of times, public places only thank you very much, and it’s—it’s odd. Something’s changed in him. It’s like his intelligence has curdled, turned into meanness. I can kind of see it in his eyes; that he either really loves me or he really hates me, and that maybe he can’t exactly tell the difference anymore. So I start making all these excuses to not hang out with him, which isn’t too hard, ’cause by this point I have a new job, waiting tables at this shitty fake Irish pub, and I can always beg off by telling him I picked up an extra shift or whatever. But a shitty Irish pub is a public place, right? And so at some point Joseph figures out that he can just show up there, and sit at the end of the bar while I’m trying to work, and he’ll get drunker and drunker and try to get me to come home with him at closing time.
“To top it all off, I get involved with someone, one of the dishwashers. It’s nothing serious. She’s twenty-one years old. It’s just service-industry after-hours fucking around, the two of us going out on the loading dock for cigarettes at one in the morning and making out and groping one another, trying to see how much we can work each other up. It is what it is. It’s nice.
“So one night I’m out there, making out with Vicki, and who’s out there by the Dumpsters and the fucking waste oil bins but Joseph. He’s drunk, and his stupid hair is pushed up at like a ninety-degree angle from his head, like he’s been leaning up against a wall for a while. But also he’s pissed. It’s like the valve in his head that holds all his shit back has finally burst. He’s cursing at me, cursing at Vicki, Fuck you you cunts, all that. And he starts trying to climb up onto the loading dock, which he can’t really do, ’cause he’s stupid drunk, but it’s still scary. I mean, he’s a skinny dork, but he’s bigger than me, and he’s stronger than me, and in that second I really understand that he could kill me.”