Member-only story
I Was Someone Before I Was Yours
On the quiet humiliation of being loved like an empty room, and the inventory no woman should pass.
He told me very softly, the way men say the most grotesque things, that he wanted to be the only one who had ever seen my apartment with the lights off.”
He said it on a Tuesday. I think. The laundry was in the basket and I could hear the dryer making that low thump in the other room. I was holding a pair of his socks against my hip, standing there looking at the socks, feeling the dryer heat, and I thought: okay. Okay. This is what we are now.
Raymond Willis worked in finance. He liked dry martinis. He called his mother every Sunday, and he’d lived with two other women before me, both of them he’d loved, he said. He told me this early on, with the easy vocabulary of someone confessing weather. I nodded. I had also lived with someone. His name was Jason. We had a cat. The cat died, eventually, like everything does.
What he said in the hallway wasn’t “I love you.” It was something else. If we were going to “get serious,” he needed to know there had been no one else. He said it the way you ask about a dental history, like my body was a deed he needed appraised. The light from the hallway was making a thin line on the floor. I could still smell the detergent on his socks. The heat from the dryer was coming under the…
