Their festive mood perhaps sullied by our spat, all but my boyfriend’s out-of-town (and thus dependent) friend opted to part ways, declining to join us for our next stop, at a party thrown by more distant acquaintances of my boyfriend. I was not excited to watch my friends walk away as we headed to meet his. When we arrived at this party, I knew no one, and they made no indication of wishing to get to know me at 11:30 on New Year’s Eve. I spent the night on a stranger’s couch, talking only to my boyfriend’s friend, with no midnight kiss, and tears stinging my eyes. Even the friend felt sorry for me, I think.
All fun gone out of the evening like the air out of a balloon, we made our way back to my apartment shortly after the ball dropped. It was there we sat when my roommate and friends reappeared. They wanted to go to another bar, and my boyfriend wanted to go with them. I, on the other hand, had had about enough of a rollicking good time for one New Year’s Eve, so I bid them adieu with my blessing. After all, his friend was in town and deserved to be shown a good time.
My boyfriend slipped noiselessly into my bed later that night, or rather morning. At brunch with his friend the next day, I was told that they’d met a group of girls at a bar, one of whom his friend had slept with. That my boyfriend had been hanging out with a group of drunk and apparently hook-up-minded women into the wee hours of the new year unsettled me. It stuck in my heart like corn sticks in your teeth, rankling with a dull, annoying ache in my emotional gums.
Later, I figured out why. When we broke up and very likely before we broke up, my boyfriend started dating the woman his friend supposedly slept with and who had been calling my boyfriend with questions about his neighborhood, which she’d recently moved into. I know enough to know that my boyfriend was not the kind of guy to recycle his friend’s old conquests, and it is with great certainty (though admittedly little proof) that I say now that it wasn’t his friend who had the belated New Year’s kiss with this woman, but my boyfriend. Before he slinked back into my bed.
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