“What if I don’t want to study business?” I asked him the last time we had that argument.
Nicky looked confused, like he hadn’t been aware that there were degrees you could get outside of business. “What else would you want to study? You already know how to sing, you don’t have the right attitude to be a lawyer or doctor, and none of that liberal arts shit is useful.” I had hated him a little bit after he said that, but I hadn’t brought it up again.
The biggest con, though, was that Nicky had never asked me to marry him. I wasn’t one to dream much since the Farrell Manor Incident, but I didn’t know many other women who had been five years with a man without a peep out of him about marriage. Hell, I had gone to civil ceremonies for gay friends that were based on shorter courtships.
I had asked him about it once, and then it turned into an argument. A bad one. It lasted about a week. And at one point, he even yelled at me, “If you want to get married so bad, why don’t you dump me and find somebody else?”
This question deeply unsettled me. Nicky had always taken care of me. Did he really think I’d rather be married to someone other than him? Had he somehow guessed that even though I tried my so very hardest not to ever think about James in that way anymore, sometimes I still found myself daydreaming that things went differently in high school? I imagined myself arriving at the Farrell party in jeans and a nice top and expertly applied makeup. Maybe James would have looked at me different then. Maybe we would have . . .
I let the marriage fight with Nicky blow away. I kissed him and then lay down on my back for fabulous make-up sex.
I guessed that was another check I could add in Nicky’s pro column. He was great in bed. Surprisingly tender even, because he was so big.
He had also given me my first orgasm. And after that, he had diligently worked at it until he was able to make me climax no matter what position we were in.
I would have thought it romantic, but I suspected his determination was less based in love and more due to Nicky’s intense need to be ridiculously beyond excellent at everything he put his mind to. Which was another check in his con column.
And, of course, there was the whole cheating thing. Not to mention that all I got were annoyed sighs and orders to “just come back,” whenever I tried to question him about it.
But really what helped me decide to end things for good with Nicky was remembering how I felt after I threw that television out the window. As my heartbeat had slowed and my anger faded, an unexpected feeling had come sneaking in, while I sat on my bed.
Relief.
It had wriggled its way up from my true heart, and dissipated my rage faster than any rational thought ever could have. And as the weeks passed without Nicky, without anyone telling me what to do or making snide remarks about my hair, I found that all I missed about him was the intimacy, which I could get with just about anybody. And that made me sigh.
. . .
About two weeks after the Closet Catch, I walked into his office and threw down my application for UCLA, which had been sitting in my bottom desk drawer, all filled out, for about five months now. “We’re not getting back together,” I informed him.
“What’s this?” he asked me.
“It’s an application to UCLA,” I said. “I need a recommendation—a good recommendation—from you. I also need you to start scheduling rehearsals around my class schedule. And you have to let me do three shows a week, instead of five.”
Nicky read over the application. He wasn’t just cheap—he was also a time miser, and the thought of me not working every day at the club probably bothered him. “So, that means I only got to pay you for three performances, and I’ll have to get Chloe to sing for the other two.”