Page 42

CHAPTER 42

brEAKING MARGAUX

MARGAUX

TWO WEEKS LATER

I decide to check his phone again, just to be sure.

I just have a feeling.

Then I see another shortcut to a girl’s Facebook profile—the one who wouldn’t stop blowing up his phone. The one who he slept with right before he met me.

What the actual fuck?

My stomach churns, and I feel the familiar sting of betrayal wash over me.

I storm down to the beach, where he’s bent over, picking shells from the sand. My heart pounds in my chest as I thrust the phone toward him. I don’t care that I’m not being calm. I’m feeling incredibly betrayed, and I want answers.

“Why the hell is Methany a shortcut on your Facebook?”

He looks up, his face flickering with guilt. “I just looked at her profile once,” he mutters, brushing off my anger. “I didn’t talk to her, or anything. I just accidentally clicked on it.”

“What do you mean, accidentally clicked on it?”

“I mean, I went to see if she messaged me on there. I didn’t want to look at her Facebook profile. Matty just told me she was in town, and I was terrified she was going to message me, and that you would see it and think I wanted her to contact me. And I don’t. I can’t stand her. I will happily never talk to her again. So I tried to keep it from you in case she had messaged. But she hadn’t. Not even a loser like her wants to message me anymore. It’s a bit sad in a way. Nobody misses me. Nobody wonders where I’ve gone.”

“Okay,” I say slowly. “So you tried to protect me by lying to me? You promised me you wouldn’t lie about her again. But now you have.”

“Because I knew you’d act just like this,” he snaps, his frustration bubbling over.

“No, Timmy,” my voice is sharp, my patience unraveling. “If you had just told me the truth about it, I wouldn’t be upset. But you lied. Again . And now she’s still in your life, even though you said she wouldn’t be.”

“Fine. I’ll block her,” he mutters. “I don’t want anything to do with her anyway.”

I watch as he blocks Manthrax on Facebook and Instagram.

But deep down, I know it’s meaningless.

There are other ways for him to stay in touch with Trashleigh if he really wants to.

My mind keeps ruminating over the same things.

I can’t get over him having Britney Despair’s Facebook profile showing up as a shortcut on his phone.

Not that I think he’d know how to set up a shortcut. It clearly wasn’t intentional.

I check my own phone to see how it works, and do a bit of googling to help make it make sense. The contacts in my shortcuts are random people, but they’re people I’ve interacted with recently, so they’re who I would expect to show up..

I guess the interaction could be that he looked at Ketamine Kardashian’s page like he said, and he just doesn’t have many friends and doesn’t use it a lot. So the magnitude of his looking at her page would be much greater than for someone like me, who visits many pages a day to interact with friends all over the world.

If you have only one friend, like it’s beginning to seem is his situation, they’re going to be your shortcut if you’ve had any interaction with their page at all.

But I can’t stop thinking about all the possible explanations, and I find myself googling all the answers to this mystery. There’s a ton of information online, and a lot of people asking similar questions in relation to their significant others.

I feel a bit crazy, looking all this stuff up. I never had to do this with my last partner, because I trusted him implicitly. I haven’t had to do it with any partners, actually.

Yet Timmy keeps doing shit that makes me question him.

I open up a golf solitaire game I like on my phone, and I find myself thinking about the situation more as I start to mindlessly play. It’s meant to take my mind off things, but something snaps inside me, and I come up with a strange theory.

Methamine Monroe will leave us alone and get the fuck out of my relationship if I win a round of this game every day with a perfect score. Logically, I know my conquering of this silly phone game has no correlation with my fiancé’s ability to remain faithful. And it certainly doesn’t have any impact on K-Hole Kourtney’s behavior.

But I have to do it. I’m compelled to do this game every day. Who knows? In some weird universal phenomenon, I might be right. This is what I might need to do to protect our relationship.

Some people might cast a spell. Others might reach out to the crazy bitch and tell her to back the fuck off. Others might simply trust their spouse. But I’m feeling a little unhinged myself, and so I decide to hinge everything—at least in my mind—on whether I can maintain a perfect score each day, whether that takes me five minutes or three hours, it’s what I have to do.

A couple of times, Timmy gives me weird looks. “You’re still playing that game?” And I’ll realize it’s past 2am, and even he wants to go to sleep. But I feel like if I don’t win a level every day, then I have to do two the following, and then three the following if I fail then, too.

This isn’t going to be sustainable if there’s a really hard level every so often. I’ll be up all night trying to save my relationship using a method that makes absolutely no sense. Golf solitaire isn’t going to fix anyone’s relationship.

I feel hugely embarrassed by this, and I know it probably sounds a bit compulsive.

Okay, it is compulsive, and obsessive and illogical, I logically know that.

But I can’t stand the thought of someone who won’t respect the boundary of our relationship.

I hate that he’s misled me about some of their conversations, and having denied saying things that could potentially lead her on.

It comforts me when he says what a mess she is and how he’d never be with her. But I’m reminded he was okay enough being around her to have sex with her, more than once. That if she ever comes up in conversation, while he’s usually very insulting about her, he’ll occasionally refer to her as ‘a kind friend’.

And I’ve only really heard him speak negatively about his exes, so who knows what’s true?

I don’t think everything his most recent ex told me was necessarily one hundred percent true from an objective, neutral bystander’s perspective. But I do think the vast majority of it was. I’ve seen many of the behaviors myself at this point, and I understand how challenging it must have been for her too. No matter how much of the toxicity within the relationship was because of her, clearly there was a solid share coming straight from Timmy.

But how many crazy ex-partners can someone truly have? He only seems to be able to describe one girl as being someone he still stays in contact with via sporadic phone calls. Someone he dated right out of high school. Everyone else has a huge amount of animosity aimed at them.

In my case, sure, I’ve dated a couple of people I’ve had to block. I’ve been married to a couple I’ve had to block. But there are plenty more who I can say nice things about, where we ultimately just weren’t right for each other and ended things relatively amicably. I’m still Facebook friends with some of them, and I wish them well.

He doesn’t seem to be able to do the same.

According to him, this one kicked him out, that one kicked him out. They were all abusive, toxic drunks who talked down to him and accused him of being ‘too much’. He’s always the victim.

I wonder if that’s how he’s describing me to Scrap-heap Sabrina?

If he’s in touch with her behind my back.

I would be sick if I found out that was the case.

Because I deserve better than that, and quite frankly, so does she.

Not that I have an ounce of respect for intentional home wreckers, but I do realize that people can be led on, especially by someone as charming as Timmy.

I go back to the phone golf game. Because it’s a hell of a lot better to worry about that than all of this.