I met Tiramisu shortly after revenge cheating on my ex more times than I can morally defend.

We’ll save that story for another day.

I start with him for more reasons than I ever got out of my ex of three years. And to tell the truth, more orgasms too.

So, I guess in my simple, sometimes misandrist coded mind, that means he’s worth a chapter.

I didn’t realize at the time how much this relationship, or lack thereof, would end up shaping me.

But I guess like every girl at some point, I needed a boozy dessert of a man. Something sweet. Slightly intoxicating. Bad for my emotional digestion. And from the looks of it, my gut health too.

I met him during a blissfully elongated red hair phase. Not the box dye “I’m going through something” red. The grown-up twenty-something red. The liberating red. The kind that says I make bad decisions, but with intention.**** Insert cat sounds.**** ( sexy mami lol)

By the time I met him, I had already mentally and emotionally cut ties with my ex. Guilt free. Newly single with an attached ex. The world was my oyster. I told my ex it was best that we stayed friends, as if that was something viable. Really it was just to soften the inevitable fall. I needed that. And somehow, Tiramisu understood.

Our first date consisted of hole in ones at some aggressively Instagram coded golf date and ended with me giving him a really mediocre blowjob.

Can you tell? I was starving.

I know girl.

I know.

I’ve done worse.

Me and Tiramisu had chemistry like I had never experienced in my life from the very first time we met. I tried to explain it away. Maybe it was the adrenaline of leaving my relationship. Maybe it was the novelty of something new. But it wasn’t.

It was in our eye contact. The way our lips flowed when they met. The ache in our cheeks from smiling too hard just from seeing one another. Even pedestrians would compliment us, already seeing us as a unit.

It was in the way he held me like I was the last precious stone on this spinning globe. Everything felt cinematic, even the mundane. Rainy days. Summer nights making passersby uncomfortable on filthy TriBeCa blocks with our impromptu make out sessions. The passion was raw.

After three years with someone who never made my heart skip a beat, my heart suddenly felt like it had been injected with Red Bull and pre workout.

Love felt real then. It felt attainable.

At the time, it didn’t occur to me that I had never truly experienced love before. I had experienced tolerance. I had experienced convenience.

But limerence? This was new. As far as I knew, I had never been so sure of something in my life.

Tiramisu was a photographer long before I met him. I always loved his work. The way he captured the prettiest things in the darkest rooms. Which in retrospect made our “love story” make perfect sense.

He was quiet, awkward, but charismatic. The kind of person who didn’t try to belong anywhere yet somehow always did. Being around him felt easy. Too easy.

He had this way of quietly reassuring me that everything would be fine as long as he was there. When I struggled to decide on an entree, he would tell me to just get both. When my social anxiety ran through me like a torpedo, he somehow brought me back down.

I had never been so sure that he loved me too. I just knew it. He had to.

This would be a great ending if the next line wasn’t this.

We became fuck buddies.

At one point I told him I loved him.

He said, “Okay.”

(That fucking bitch! in retrospect it still pisses me off!!!!!)

And that was the first time I experienced real rejection. Not the cute kind. Not the kind you laugh about with friends. The kind that sits in your chest and makes you replay every moment of the relationship like security footage.

The truth was simple. He only wanted fragments of me. Not all of me.

There were many times during our situationship where I “left.” This was one of them. My face flushed with embarrassment. I couldn’t wrap my head around how we could have so much chemistry and still squander it. How the same man who smiled when he saw me, who held me like the last precious stone on earth, could suddenly drop me mid orbit.

I wish I could say that’s when I became stronger. But I didn’t.

Instead I started changing. Little things at first. Then bigger things. Trying to become whatever version of myself I thought he might love back. (OMG I Hailey beiber’ed the absolute fuck out of him, i legit want to die talking about it)

I wish I had just stayed myself. I wish I had used my talent for hyper fixation to move on to the next shiny thing. But I couldn’t get him out of my head. ( I mean it was fucking sickening )

I wanted his validation more than anything. Because in my mind, if he loved me back, it meant I was worth loving. And at the time, that meant everything.

For a while our relationship settled into what it really was. We were fuck buddies. Not the carefree kind people pretend to enjoy either. The kind where you sporadically link up whenever your self esteem is in the gutter and you need to feel desired again.

And for a while I let it be that.

Every now and then we would resurface in each other’s lives like nothing had ever happened. Like we hadn’t already gone through the emotional circus before. But somewhere in the back of my mind, my hopes were still wide open.

I kept telling myself maybe one day he would realize. Maybe one day something would click. Maybe one day he would look at me and see what I saw.

But then my birthday happened.

The day after, I was stranded somewhere and needed to get home. I asked him if he could call me an Uber.

It was fifty dollars.

Not five hundred.

Not a plane ticket.

Just fifty dollars to make sure I got home safely.

He sent the Uber. And then asked me to pay him back.

And I don’t know why, but that was the moment everything finally clicked.

Not when he said “okay” after I told him I loved him. Not during the countless times we reduced ourselves back to something casual.

But that fifty dollars.

Because suddenly the entire relationship made sense.

Here was someone I had shared my body with. Someone who had held me, kissed me, slept next to me. Someone who had seen me at my most vulnerable.

And yet when I needed something small, he couldn’t even give that freely.

For someone like me, someone who already struggles with being a little too misandrist and a little too protective of whatever sliver of self respect I’m clinging to, it felt like confirmation.

He didn’t value me. Not really.

And for a while that was the end.

Or at least that’s what I thought.

Because for the past two months he has been begging for forgiveness. Texts. Calls. Long explanations about how his “family trauma” made it hard for him to navigate his emotions.

Not that he hated me. Just that he didn’t know how to love me.

And maybe there is some truth in that.

But somewhere between then and now something else changed too.

I got a better job. My life started moving forward. And for the first time in a long time, I actually started trying to value myself.

So now when he calls, I give him exactly what he gave me.

Nothing.

Unanswered texts. Unreturned calls. Silence.

And somehow along the way he realized something I had already learned the hard way.

That kinda chemistry doesn’t come around often.

A year later he came back around like a used-up stray dog looking for a home. But by then I had already closed the door.

Sometimes I still think about the what if. I wonder if I will ever find that kinda chemistry again.

But every time that thought starts to unfold into a story, I crumple it up and throw it away.

Because whatever that feeling was meant to become in my life,

I know one thing for sure.

It can’t be him.