If you had told me, aged 20, that in the future I’d be bombing down a dual carriageway on the English South Coast in torrential rain, cripplingly hungover, en route to meeting my stepdaughter-to-be and occasionally fretting over my not-quite-completely-betrothed’s swollen black eye, inflicted by my ex-husband after a weekend of bad behavior I’d expect from a couple of hormonal teenagers, I wouldn’t have believed you. The hangover, the divorce from Julian, the driving in England, sure. But I’d never have countenanced the thought that Julian, rarely one to result to anything quite so common as violence, even knew how to throw a punch, let alone land a stinger of a right hook to Alex’s eye socket. But as it turns out, Al wasn’t the only one training at the gym that summer, getting in shape just in case he needed to lay his old best mate flat out on the dancefloor.

Let’s move a step back and to the left here. There was a certain inevitability to the dust up — it wasn’t just that Alex had stolen his girl (a mortal sin amongst men if ever there was one) that had summoned Julian to test his boxing skills at the Fairleigh-Smith nuptials. Even I — a consummate egotist, I know, nearly as deft at the profession as the grand master Julian — recognize that Alex’s black eye wasn’t all about me. Sure, purloining his supposed blood brother’s wife played a starring role in what went down, but it wasn’t the alpha and omega of it all. It was far more, the accumulated detritus of so many years where their lives had overlapped and wrapped around each other, green tendrils of vines climbing higher and higher together, occasionally finding a path apart but forever finding their true course was joint.

“Like mutually parasitic little pests,” Miranda had explained to me at Lucy’s christening afterparty. (Yes, that was a thing.) “I think after all this time they don’t know how to stop living so much in each other’s pockets. You’d have thought — and no offense meant here, San — that after Jules figured out you’d gone to Al yet again, he’d have pulled the plug once and for all. Men are such bothersome little toads, rarely good for anything but the occasional bit of fun. If you can find a fun one.”

Miranda wasn’t the only one surprised when Jules and I announced our engagement in 2010, our second bite at the succulent cherry of matrimony. When he’d posted my photo online for his fellow Ipswich Town fans to salivate over, I drew in my mind what I thought was a shockingly bright line under the terms of what I wanted from a relationship. No more secrets, no more belittling, no more twisting my psyche so that I no longer knew who Melissa was (not that I had a particularly firm grasp of that to begin with). After I’d sunk six of the Michelob Ultras, smoked half a pack of Marlboro Lights, watched most of A Walk to Remember and inhaled an entire tub of Cherry Garcia while I sat in my underwear on the hardwood floor — surely enough time to consider what the fuck I was going to do with the wreckage of what I’d assumed would be my life — I did three things, of varying brilliance.

First, because it was 2009 when such things still had online emotional resonance, I changed my Facebook status to “single.”

Next, while I waited for the comments to fly in from home and abroad, I drew a bath hot enough to pull the poison of the past four years from my reddening skin. As the water cooled, and the Pantene hair mask soaked into my hair, I drew my knees to my chest, thinking on the what next of it all, a question I’d been chasing an answer to for most of my life, its tail forever slipping around the corner before I could catch it.

Finally, after I’d dried off and put on some pajamas (even though it couldn’t have been later than 3pm), I did the second most sensible thing I’d done that day, after dumping Julian that is: I reached out to Alex, who surely would have a plan. While I waited for him to connect to my Skype call, I fussed with my wet hair (messy bun? braid?) and started in on beer seven.

His image brightened onscreen from the gloom of his bedroom as he switched on his desk lamp. “Mel, I was just finishing up a problem set. Stochastic calculus, absolute fucking killer. How you holding up there?”

While he sipped at a glass of red wine and nodded comfortingly from time to time, I told him what I’d done, how I’d made it clear to Jules it was over at last, and I was never, ever coming back. How I’d wallowed in self-pity, drinking awful low-calorie beer and watching an absolute piece of shit teen movie I knew was a mawkish piece of shit when I’d seen it as a teenager. How I’d spent 40 minutes in the bath shrivelling up like a mummified apricot, trying to marshal my thoughts into sketching a map for the years to come that had no Julian waiting at every signpost to guide the way. And how I had no fucking clue what to do next.

“If you expect the person on the other side of this screen to know the answer to that,” he teased, “you’ve reached the wrong Skype contact.”

I couldn’t help myself: “Has he let you know yet?” I imagined Julian, strolling back into the pub, shoulders back, swagger to his gait, claiming it was all a bit of nothing to Jamie and Will, that I’d seen a spider and needed calming down. You know how women can get, right? Fancy another round? I didn’t doubt Jules thought he could swing me back to his side, given a day or two, and no one needed to know.

“Mmm,” Al replied through a mouth of wine. “First person he called when you changed your status on Facebook. Blighter was absolutely mortified, didn’t expect you’d make it public so fast, sweetest.”

The use of my old nickname didn’t sit well with me. “Don’t use that name for me. If you’re even thinking about me that way, don’t.”

“Sorry, Mel. And I’m not. None of this was about anything more than showing you that you needed to stop it before you stumbled into marrying someone who just isn’t compatible with who you really are. I know you. He doesn’t.”

“So you said.” Some part of me wanted to believe what Al had done in revealing the monster in Julian was pure altruism, but even on the grainy video stream from Bristol to Pasadena I saw something in his eyes that wasn’t all sympathy for my loss, a certain sparkle of triumph. Fucker. You’re a beast, just like the rest of them.

Alex followed along with me as first I unfriended Julian (forgot to do that earlier, thank you Al), and then waded through Facebook comments, classifying them into two general categories: (1) how sad! and (2) about fucking time.

Healing thoughts to you Little Em. The universe brings us challenges to teach us who we really are. (Sean came by the next evening with a bottle of mid-range Chardonnay, enough pad Thai for us both and a PJ Harvey CD which I mostly shriek-sobbed through.)

<<<hugz!!! so many other fish in the sea. make sure to treat yourself to something lovely right now>>> (Minty, as mumsy as ever — we’d made our peace during my postgrad UK sojourn and we were “as right as rain,” as she put it, but we never, ever spoke of Miranda.)

Fly domestic next time, babes (Thanks Mack, I think.)

ABOUT BLOODY TIME! Promise me this means we’re not losing you. ❤ (Sasha, always good at getting to the point.)

I’d like to say I’m sorry but I’m not. Cocktails TONIGHT at the Esquire, Jen and I are picking you up at 8pm, NO NEGOTIATING. (Jenn, even pre-law school, was not to be bargained with, and I dutifully poured myself into a minidress four hours later to get shitfaced and cry into a series of expensive drinks none of us could really afford.)

Of course there could be no comment from the man of the hour, the great and now unfriended Julian himself, whose name was pointedly absent in the comments left on the status update. While I watched him munch through an entire packet of bourbon creams, Alex painted a picture of a Julian at once in agony and defiant, enumerating every one of my past sins against him, while begging Al to tell him I’d change my mind.

“He made me promise I’d try to talk some sense into you, which of course I am,” Alex chortled between bites of chocolate biscuit. “Just not the kind he’s thinking of. First he says he’ll never meet another girl who’s as perfect for him as you, won’t hear a word against you. I mentioned to him that you’d cheated on him before — he only knows about me, of course, never breathed a word about what you were up to in your final year — and he’s best shot of you, you’d only break his heart later when it was too late and you had your paws all over his money.”

“Alex!” I gasped. “That’s not… that’s awful.”

“Mmmmm,” he murmured, popping half of another biscuit in his mouth. “Probably awful, but mostly true. Except the part where you break his heart. I’m more worried about the other way around. Worked a treat though, he stopped sobbing for a bit. Can’t recall ever hearing him cry before, not even when Susannah Grieves finally gave him the old heave-ho right before he sat for his A-level politics paper. Still managed a decent mark, though, I’ll give him that.”

I couldn’t recall Jules shedding a tear either, except when England didn’t make it to the 2008 European Cup, and then I pretended I didn’t see it.

“So the knob pulled himself together, and really put some welly into riffing what I was saying about you, all the awful tosh I trotted out when I was so fucking angry at you for walking away from me.” This was the story Alex had spun me about why he’d been so appalling in the weeks after we’d been found canoodling in my bed — I’d yet to learn it had been Julian’s money paying him to stay far away from me. It says much about how Josh had groomed me to believe men who supposedly cared about me were more reliable narrators of my reality than I could ever be.

“Yeah?” I sniffled.

“Fuck yeah. Dear god, he hoovered up every nasty little jibe I made about you — all lies, of course — and he just laid into you. Let’s see… you’re too common, you hate his mum, says he had to teach you how to cook so what kind of wife were you going to be? Oh, your clothes are relentlessly high street and it didn’t matter that he gave you a credit card and sent you over to Browns in South Moulton Street, you just came home with shite from Karen Millen and fucking River Island. You don’t know a Merlot from a Malbec, and your friends are harpies who never wanted to see you happy. Oh, and your sister is a whore. Literally a whore.”

“He’s actually sort of right about that last one, if you count having sex with guys who are sort of not really your boyfriend to help you pay for your lifestyle of doing not very much being a whore,” I offered. Rachel was still pretending to write her screenplay, but my parents had made her continued rent-free presence in their house contingent on a job. She was half-heartedly playing at selling bras and panties at her friend Lila’s new lingerie shop on Melrose — the end nearer WeHo, Lila never failed to stress, not East Hollywood.

“Debatable. I’d probably be doing much the same had Goldmans not snapped me up on the milkround. With some rich woman in St. Tropez, mind you. But I really pressed this point with him once he’d sunk his teeth into it — you know how he is about money, and who gets to have any of his. I suggested you were probably only ever in it for the money, and he was only, oh, what did I say? ‘You’re only a conduit, Jules. A spigot she can turn on and leave on.’ That snapped at him right in the wallet, right where it hurts him the most. He just explodes, says you’re a grasping slut, worse than Amanda, if you can believe that. So I told him he should give her a bell, see what she’s up to.”

“Alex!”

“Eh, he wouldn’t rise to the bait. Actually, it was a rather poor move on my part, because he folded back into his despair, calling himself unworthy of even cleaning your cooker. I left him like that, I think he needs to wallow in it a bit more, really sink down. Shit, I sound like such an arsehole but you both need different people. I still love Jules, you know that, in spite of all of this.”

“Yes, Al.” As do I, scrabbled through my head.

“Once we find some suitable match for him, he can move on, and we can all go back to being mates again. And you’ll have no problem finding a partner — when you’re ready, of course. No rushing.”

“Of course.” In my mind though, I was already thinking, Maybe that partner is you, idiot boy. A noxious little thought I tried to shoo away, but it had proved trickily sticky over the years, like a nettlesome hair that blows in your mouth that will not be found, but vexes you for being both hidden and awfully, awfully present.

I did try for a while, you know. Dating, that is. Two Saturdays after the breakup, the Jen(n)s and I sat bare-legged on Jenn’s tiled living room floor, each with a Macbook perched on our laps and a cold bottle of Strongbow at the ready. It was Jenn who’d decided we all needed boyfriends by the end of the year, and Jenn who selected OKCupid as the place to find eligible targets to fit each of our criteria.

“Jen needs an artistic type,” Jenn proclaimed as we put the finishing touches on our profiles. (I was legally_strawberry_blonde, for the record.) “But with an income. And he can’t live at home. He can live with roommates, but needs to have an eye on his own place in the next six months.”

Jen blew at the bangs she had been working on growing out since May, when we’d first started wedding planning in earnest and I informed all my bridesmaids that bangs were going to be a no-no for my wedding party. (Jesus, who was I back then?) “Look, I just want him to be single this time and not in an ‘open marriage’ that isn’t really open, it’s just that his wife is dying of uterine cancer and ‘Daddy wants to get laid.'”

We all gagged in unison thinking of Jerry, Jen’s latest mistake in a series of poor and worsening partner choices. He’d be hard to top, but now she had all of the San Gabriel Valley to select from, ordered up like a pizza from Pietro’s or a three-pack of pantyhose off of Amazon.

Jenn soldiered on, a slightly manic glint to her eyes as they scanned my bio for her appraisal. “Mel needs someone fun. Something light, nothing heavy and NOT someone to marry. She could date someone living at home.”

“Hey!” I objected and tugged my Macbook back. “No more losers. That goes for all of us. You aren’t going to get another shitty clone of Patrick and expect us not to notice.”

Patrick and Jenn had been classmates at BU, and stuck together from her sophomore year through graduation. He’d been the very best boyfriend any of us had ever had, no drama, no cheating, no codependency. And the very worst stereotype of a Vermont trust fund stoner, all cargo shorts in any weather warmer than 40°, black lab and “Legalize It” stickers plastered on the tailgate of his tan Volvo station wagon, he was super into Phish and quoting Aldous Huxley. On the other hand, he was low-key brilliant and utterly besotted with Jenn, and let her steer the entire cruiseliner of their relationship, which suited both of them nicely. Two weeks after graduation, watching the sun set from the veranda of his parents’ summer house on Lake Champlain, he’d casually asked her to marry him. She promptly freaked out, broke up with him and drove to Manhattan that night to go sleep on Caitlin’s couch for the next three weeks. A rare fuck up from Jenn that I (very) secretly cherished.

During the months I spent being picked over by every loser in the greater Pasadena area in the online love meat market, I shared more of the horrors with Alex than with the Jen(n)s, who had nearly immediately landed two easygoing JPL engineers who happened to live together in a gorgeous Craftsman on Oak. As far as I could tell, Gaspar and Jeremy’s shared greatest sin against womankind was being really, really into Magic: The Gathering. I could work with that. I think many women could.

But that’s not what the universe brought me. There was the guy who showed up for dinner at the Grove wearing a toreador’s cape, and who addressed me exclusively as “ma chère.” The dude who made it clear that if he agreed to go out with me, I’d be Wifelet #4 in his growing harem, and would need to know my place at the bottom of the Wifelet heap. (His breath also smelled like hot New York garbage on an steamy August day, so there’s that.) The blonde one, who when I asked him at the end of our walk along Venice Beach if he’d like to share an ice cream with me, leaned in to whisper in my ear, “Yes, if it involves me pushing you over the side of a chair and fucking you from behind while you eat it.” The one who asked for a video of me jumping up and down and bending over in my yoga pants, but I had to wear a sweatband and no top. For his personal use only, he assured me. (This was after a perfectly pleasant dinner at the Barkley in South Pas where there was no indication that he was pervier than any of the other dudes who regularly sent me unsolicited dick pics.)

I fed these stories to Al by e-mail and the occasional phone call, and when I swore I’d never meet anyone as good a bet as Jules, he’d remind me of the bullet I’d dodged. “Can you imagine having to wait on his sorry arse for the rest of your life? ‘Darling, this copy of the Telegraph hasn’t been ironed, see to it.’ Or, ‘Darling, do be a pet and use that pedicure tool on my feet.’ Bleccch. Keep on the hunt, you’ll find the right one.”

By the time I met Noah, Alex had made it back to Goldmans with a few more letters after his name, a fancy new title and a pay hike when so many of his colleagues had been canned during the downturn. Along with the elevation in status came an elevation in workload, and fewer opportunities to perform detailed autopsies on my utter failures at dating, fewer chances for him to tell me how poorly Jules had been handling his own attempts at romance. (As in, he wasn’t handling it well at all, unless you count the woman Alex was pretty sure was an escort Julian had brought to a performance of Carmen at the Royal Opera House.) So Alex wasn’t around to pass me the compass and sextant to aid in navigating what might have been… well, maybe not love. But maybe something more like what the Jen(n)s had going on with Gaspar and Jeremy: untaxing, calm, affectionate comradeship. With some sex thrown in.

I’d had it with OKCupid, done with the unsolicited pics of yet another Cal Tech student’s wiener flopping out of his jeans with a ruler next to it, done with guys who texted for two weeks then ghosted me, so over the mid-life crisis sad dads pretending it’s not cheating unless you fuck on the first date. The worst of the breakup with Jules behind me, every day I carefully drew a convincing facsimile of a smile on my face and conned the world (as I always do) that all is well, nothing to see here. No mess to sweep up, onwards and upwards! Excelsior!

But by mid-September, I felt completely alone in a post-Julian world. Cait was out in New York, running away from her own domestic bliss gone awry. With the Jen(n)s now ensconced in their perpetual double date reality, I rarely wandered into their domestic Arcadia. I felt too much the memento mori, or Ozymandias in the dust — look how my love hath blossomed and taken root, ye mighty, and despair! The brass ring of what should have been a brilliant marriage had slipped so easily from my hand; surely my presence served only to remind them how it might all blow away. And Alex was far too distracted by his new responsibilities at work and some domestic calamity at Balcraigie involving what sounded like several mice army battalions performing war games in the music room to do much more than tag me in the occasional Facebook post, or send an email promising me a phone call that never materialized. As for Rachel, she’d bamboozled Lila into a month-long buying trip to Paris and London and was completely incommunicado.

Noah was a fluke. I’m sure you’ve heard a similar story a million times: I logged in to shut down my account, but I just had to look at that new message from [insert username] before I said adios, au revoir, auf wiedersehn to online dating. For me, that was a note from bagelloxbagel:

Hi there, LSB (sorry for the acronym, but the dash key on my laptop is broken, hence the lack of underscores in my own handle). I won’t bore you with the usual encomium to your beauty, or ladle on too thickly praise for your witty, pithy profile. You must read 50 of those a day, how dull. But your reference to a “second-tier Ivy” intrigues me — did we ever see each other in passing on the Dartmouth campus? I would have been the brown-haired guy in the Akron Is For Lovers t-shirt, scuffling my way to a studio art class and thinking, no, knowing, some day I’d be the next Jasper Johns. Or maybe you spotted me feeling very upper-middle-brow listening to Television or Shostakovich in a solo scull on the Connecticut River at dawn. Reality is, post-graduation, I haven’t painted in over a year, I’m up to my bushy eyebrows (refer to pics in profile) in student loan debt I service working as a management consultant, and I’ve packed on a few pounds now that I live in the desert without a navigable river nearby.

Shortcut if you don’t want to look at my profile: I’m 25, live with two dogs in Pasadena, and when the frat gods were handing out bro regalia, I forgot to set my alarm. Turn ons include pastrami sandwiches from The Hat, John Waters movies, and talking about thinking about going out to some show because hey! we live in this amazing city but crowds freak me out so let’s stay in and flip listlessly through cable channels. Turn offs include that intersection at Lake and Orange Grove, hornets, and mean people. Because as we all know, mean people suck.

Message me, or not. I’m another dude intruding where I might not be welcome, but as my college roommate used to say: live a little, it’s not going to kill you. Until it does.

I messaged him immediately. (Okay, I’ll be honest, I did zip through his pictures first to ensure his eyebrows weren’t too bushy and make sure our match percentage was at least 90%.) After a flurry of notes throughout that afternoon, we’d set a first date for that night, at The Hat, naturally. Emails to the Jen(n)s and Alex went out to let them know where I’d be, and that if no one got a 9pm check-in from me, to send the SWAT team.

There was no need for anyone to worry, not that anyone responded to my “all is good” messages. Noah was as advertised in his messages and profile: a little extra padding girded his rower’s long frame, a slightly beakish nose that served as the fulcrum for a pair of steel-framed glasses, and a laugh as infectious as he’d written that his friends all said he had, though he’d never understood why. In the utterly unromantic surroundings of the Pasadena branch of The Hat (he preferred the one in Alhambra, but he told me later he was saving that one for our second date if he liked me enough, which he did), I felt it stirring in me for the first time since I’d seen Julian some five months earlier on a week’s vacation in London.

The wriggle of desire wound its way through me as we chomped through twin stomach-destroying sandwiches. (And yes, at first I thought it was heartburn.) Noah reminded me of some of my male friends at Brown — goofy, casually brilliant, unstudied, unsure of his attractiveness but still confident. Confident without being arrogant, which I hadn’t come across yet in the two months I’d been meeting men for dates. (I wouldn’t call it dating — that implies some level of pleasure, of which there hadn’t been any, at least for me.) After two months of men who were trying too hard to impress me with their money (sorry, can’t compare to Julian) or their eight pack (nothing I hadn’t seen before, or cared about before) or their blossoming career in Hollywood (no, North Hollywood doesn’t count), Noah was a jolt of normal fun.

I had to hold out on sex with Noah for a while. That’s not to say I didn’t want it, oh no. After two dates at two different branches of The Hat, a Saturday afternoon jaunt to Ojai followed by a trip to the dog park, and a particularly boozy meal at Tre Venezie, the fluttery it had unfurled into desire so intense and so distracting I had to be asked twice if I wanted to look at the dessert menu. Noah and I had danced around the question on that date, both of us blushing and flushing furiously from red wine and craving. We were snatching every chance to touch hands over and under the table, ravioli forgotten, polenta ignored. But after we’d tumbled out of the taxi and into his apartment, it was to watch Amélie with all our clothes on, his dogs Buster and Foxy Brown resting their snouts in our laps. And when I shifted Buster to one side to dot kisses up Noah’s neck, I expected the shiver of desire that visibly coursed through him, but I didn’t anticipate any resistance, let alone a hand to block my further progress.

“Mel, please stop.” His voice was ragged, but firm. “I don’t want to risk us messing this up too soon.”

I flopped back on the sofa and gathered Buster in my arms. “Buster likes my kisses,” I protested, pressing my lips on the top of the schnauzer’s wiry head. “And you didn’t seem to hate them either when we were in Ojai last weekend.” Noah was, to be honest, a fair to middling kisser, especially compared to Julian, but I thought there was significant room for improvement with some more practice.

Noah tipped his head back and sighed, shifting awkwardly on the couch to hide what I could plainly see was evidence of his own desire. “You know what I mean. Kissing in that courtyard in Ojai was one thing, but kissing on my couch…” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. “Don’t get me wrong. I know what I want, Mel, and I think it’s the same thing you do.”

“So? I want you. We’re adults, and we can put the dogs in the other room.” I couldn’t remember a time I’d told a boy or a man I wanted him and he hadn’t responded with a “hell yes!” since Josh had denied me, claiming I wasn’t ready for sex until he said so. “The man should decide, you know that, Melissa.”

“Can I be honest with you?” The cleaning he was giving his glasses must have been sorely needed, as he kept it up and refused to catch my eye.

“Always. I told you I broke it off with Julian because of his lies.” On our first Hat date, we’d gingerly poked around each other’s dating histories. I learned about Stephanie, whom he’d been with nearly his entire time at Dartmouth, and who dumped him unceremoniously by text message three weeks before graduation for a woman she’d met at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Hanover. And Noah got a 30,000 foot view of my love affair with Julian, and the mess I’d made in Pasadena trying to date again.

On our trip to Ojai, I’d filled in more details: that Julian and I had a history of drifting apart and coming back together, but I saw no future as Mrs. Julian Cranford. What I didn’t share with Noah or anyone was Julian’s frequent phone calls, which I invariably picked up. Stressing that he wanted to salvage a friendship from the wreckage of our engagement, not try to get back together, Jules’ communication was regular and light, surprisingly uncomplicated. He’d ring during my lunch hour, right after he’d finished dinner, to share the minutiae of his day, recommend a film he’d seen or a song he’d heard, recount some bit of gossip Will had tossed his way I might laugh over. Never more than 10 or 15 minutes, never any discussion of what had passed between us only a few months before.

Noah balanced the glasses back on his nose and sighed again before the words tumbled out in a tangle of truth. “I don’t know if you’re over your ex, Jules, or whatever his name is. I don’t know if you’re over him enough for you to move this to the next level, as much as I want you, because fuck me, Mel, you’re kind of exactly what I think I need. But everything we do together, it feels like you’ve done it before with him. Everything seems to remind you of him, and I have no idea if you know you’re doing this, but you drag it back to him over and over and all I can think is, am I going to be compared to this asshole in bed, too? If we really hit it off and this relationship goes somewhere, am I going to spend months or years with his name coming up again and again? I just… I don’t know.”

Truth hurts, what a dumb cliche. But Noah’s truth was sharp enough to slide through my skin so cleanly the wound didn’t gush blood. It hardly even looked open, but still it throbbed.

“Not everything, though,” I protested. “Jules would never go to The Hat.”

“I know. You told me. More than once.” Noah groaned and pushed Foxy from his lap; she grunted in disapproval. “If you can get rid of him, or work on it, let’s try this again. I want to be with you, but you have to be here with me. Not back in the UK in your head.”

It is, I think, a testament to my ability to shove the messy and difficult parts of myself under the floorboards that the following night Noah was in my bed, cherishing every inch of my skin. Even if he was a mediocre kisser, he was a patient lover, asking for direction throughout, ensuring I was always comfortable in what sensations he summoned in my body. Do you like this? Where should I touch you next? Do you want to come now? Can I… Can I…. And I took from his body without returning the favor of seeking his approval, eager to feel some man who was not Julian inside me, so eager for his orgasm he had to slow me down, repeatedly.

I wish I were more embarrassed to tell you that as soon as Noah had slipped out of my apartment, headed south towards Old Town, I called Alex to tell him I’d sealed the deal. For a change, Alex actually picked up, possibly because he was still on his way into the office and had forty minutes to kill in the back of a black cab. Al tried to fob off his less-than-enthusiastic reception of the news as a lack of caffeine, but what he lobbed back at me spoke to something I could read quite easily, even with some 6,000 miles between us.

Are you sure you were ready? Is he really deserving of you? Are you just with him because he lives so nearby or is this going somewhere? Mel, wait. Mel, I’m not telling you what to do, please don’t misunderstand me. I worry about you. You’re so far away and I can’t even see if you’re telling me the truth. What if you’re just another fuck to him, just another story he can tell about some stupid girl he lured in? If he doesn’t call you back, he never deserved you, never.

“It was great, thanks,” I snarled. “He was great and I enjoyed myself. I thought you’d be happy for me.” I poured in my mug a little more of the red wine Noah and I had abandoned before retreating to my bedroom.

“Happy? Sure, I can be happy for you. But you don’t know this guy, sweetest. I wish you’d had a chance to connect with me more before you jumped into bed with him.”

“Who’s fault is that, Al?” I shot back. “You don’t return my calls, you don’t respond to my emails. If you had, you’d know Noah is exactly the kind of person I need to be with: funny and smart and genuine and really into me as a person, as a whole person.”

“Oh yeah, he sounds like he got really into you as a whole person,” Alex sneered.

This was miserable, but I couldn’t let go. “You sound jealous, anything you need to tell me?”

“If I sound jealous, you sound drunk,” he snapped.

“Fuck you, Alex. Fuck you. And don’t ever call me sweetest again!”

I slammed down the cordless phone in its receiver, furious. Furious and turned on and furious for being turned on, so I drank the rest of the bottle and sexted Noah for a bit so I could work the lust I knew was there for Alex out of my system through a quick, hot wank via someone else.

Noah wasn’t a fool, though, and even though we continued to slouch our way over to each other’s apartments nearly every night to watch Rachel Maddow and fuck, he kept asking questions about whether I saw this going anywhere.

“We seem fine,” he explained to me cautiously over the tagliatelle con funghi I’d made in his far-nicer-than-mine kitchen. “You seem like you’re all here with me and then you start talking about Julian or your friend Alex more than I’m comfortable with. I’m not a jealous guy, Mel, but I feel sometimes like there are two other guys’ ghosts lurking in the shadows.”

Two weeks before Christmas, he ended it at what was supposed to be our holiday dinner at the Tam o’Shanter. Noah tried to put the blame on himself, claiming his jealousy wasn’t justified, but he couldn’t get over it. “You are hands down the best woman I’ve ever dated, but I can’t do this. I thought I could — it’s not like either of these guys are even in the same country as me. But I keep expecting one of them to jump out from behind the couch any moment and take you back.”

I kept shovelling toad in the hole in my mouth to stop myself from screaming.

“They are important parts of your life, of course they’re on your mind or in your life, at least Alex is. Sounds like I’d even like him if I could get over myself. But I can’t, Mel. I really, really, can’t.”

That was the last time Noah felt my kiss on his cheek, my small hand in his as we waited in the rain for separate Ubers home. Two days later, I’d convinced Alex to join me in the States over the New Year to see if we could try just one last time. “I need to know,” I sobbed over Skype that Sunday morning. “Al, I can’t move on unless I know it’s over with you, too.”

That was what I wanted, I told myself. If it was over with Julian romantically, Alex had to be in my rearview mirror as well. Maybe in his presence, I’d understand I was infatuated with his memory, not the real life man he’d become. I’d not seen him since he left Bristol, and his return to London had been a bumpy one. When we did connect, like we had that night I’d bragged about fucking Noah, he was often fractious and sullen. I’d once seen him do a line of coke on a Skype call like it was no biggie, and when I objected, lecturing that he was asking for trouble doing that at work, even after hours as he was, he condescended to me: “Maybe if you had a job like mine, that brilliant brain of yours could make short work of the responsibilities I have. But who am I with my First and my Masters and my own fucking office, before the Princess Melissa and her Very Important Job coming up with marketing strategies for new energy drinks?” (I ended the call after telling him to fuck himself. We spoke again the following night, and pretended it had never happened.)

I couldn’t visit London or Scotland — too risky, I knew it, even for a few days. If Julian made it back from Hong Kong in time for Christmas, he’d expect Alex to be around to sink a few with his best mate, maybe commiserate about their shared woman trouble. Jules wasn’t the only one grousing about ungrateful women at that time, after all. Alex had tried to start things up again with Miranda — against my counsel — but after two dates (read: carnal knowledge playdates), he remembered he couldn’t bear to be around her outside of bed. Now both Alex and Julian were single at the holidays, and Julian wanted to “hunt some Crimbo crumpet,” as he put it. (Ew.)

While the States were bigger to hide in, LA was a no-go, a complete non-starter. In Pasadena and Burbank, we ran the risk of being spotted by my people, and I didn’t want them reading anything into what might be a damp squib of a reunion. Beyond that, everything here reminded me of Julian and our failure, as Noah had rightly noted. I suggested Seattle instead — I had a college friend up there I could claim I wanted to visit for New Year’s Eve, and the place held no real memories for me beyond a childhood visit with my parents.

“You sure you want to do this?” he pried. “I don’t disagree that we have unfinished business, Mel, but is this the best way? What if we can’t end things after all? What if we end up even more fucked up than we are now?”

“You get there, Alex. I’ll handle the rest.”

I said I’d handle it, but I never said I’d handle it properly.

***

Note: I mean to write more of the very last part of last year’s wedding debacle before it’s been a year (a year!) since Bex and Jamie married. It seems nearly impossible, but my own wedding is just under five weeks away — a day I’d never thought I’d see. And while it will look nothing like the day I planned for myself — only seven of us in my parents’ backyard, eight if you count the officiant, not the 250 in a vineyard at sunset — I am at peace. Even without a dress (yet), even without bridesmaids or a string quartet or delicate appetizers or a towering masterpiece of a cake, I will have what I want: Alex as my husband, and our continued good health. It is so little to ask in these times, and yet both are by far the best wedding presents I could ever desire.