I can’t bring myself to look at Nate when he parks his car and walks in this morning. I’m eating a bagel on the porch, he’s bringing food in, breakfast for him and his 21-year-old girlfriend. I heard them fucking upstairs last night around 11; she always screams like a child being kidnapped. Jilly thinks it’s gross that Nate is dating a 21-year-old, especially since he works with kids. I think so, too. When we bring this up to him, he says things like, She’s really smart, or, I hate myself. He just turned 38. Jilly thinks he’s in love with me. In April, he and I became really close when Colin dumped me. We took rides to pick up sushi or Vietnamese sandwiches, always stopping at the Turkey Hill for cigarettes on the way. We ate together on the front porch while cars drove by. He told me stories about his teenage years, of hopping CVS counters in Philly to grab packs of Camels, of dating his landlord’s 17-year-old daughter when he was 19. She would sneak out her window, climb down a tree, run to his, coax him to let her in. One time her dad showed up, banged on the door for a while, she refused to come out. I forget what happened. He also told me about the 17-year-old’s notorious cousin who slammed a fifth of Jack Daniel’s at a party, got in his pickup truck, ran over three parked cars. In a way, I was jealous of Nate. It sounded like he had lived a life. 

Jilly thinks he’s in love with me because he said stuff to her when Colin and I got back together in May, stuff about how Colin wasn’t good for me, how I was replacing him with Colin. He said this while they were waiting at the police station, because Franco’s friend had jokingly put Jilly in a chokehold to the ground, and Franco was defending his friend, and we didn’t want that friend around the house anymore. She wanted to charge him or get a restraining order. She couldn’t achieve either. It was just me, Jilly, and Nate for a bit, which was inevitable because we all identified as leftists whereas Franco was a gun-owning republican, though in the months prior we shared some nice conversations around a fire pit in the backyard. When Jilly inquired Nate about his politics one night, he was so drunk he replied, I’d kill people, then clarified he meant if there were a revolution. We often complained about Franco on the porch even though his apartment was directly on the other side of the wall.

Nate and I stopped talking after we fought twice at the beginning of summer. First, he asked me for advice about a Hinge date who hadn’t texted him back. I told him to move on and he didn’t like that and got even angrier when I wasn’t responding fast enough. He bombarded me with messages while I was working, accusing me of judging and ignoring him. I’ve been there for you ALOT, he texted me. I didn’t like the way he acted like I owed him something, like I was indebted to him, like our friendship was unbalanced.

I eventually forgave him, if only passively. Then, we fought again when I sent him a story about a shitty dude named Ben I used to hook up with and he said it was unfairly harsh to Ben even though he didn’t know him. He said writing about Ben being a shitty person made me as much of a shitty person as Ben. After talking all that shit about Franco, Nate wasn’t any better, Jilly and I realized. He often blamed his misbehavior on his job—working with troubled kids—but Jilly did the same work, casually relaying anecdotes of having desks thrown at her and receiving a slew of death threats to the face. 

Nate and I didn’t talk for basically all summer. Then, toward the end, we ran into each other on the porch and I forgave him because I was lonely. Colin and I had broken up again, though I’d dumped him this time. Nate started talking about his new 21-year-old girlfriend. I tried not to judge him at first, but I blurted, She’s younger than me? I was about to turn 23. He was saying how she had a BDSM relationship with an Evil Professor at her elite New York college. Evil Professor is a 51-year-old who has a music project with a cancelled celebrity, and he borrowed $1,000 from the 21-year-old, wasn’t paying her back. When she wouldn’t reply to Evil Professor’s texts, Evil Professor would joke about leaking videos of her online, videos of her doing things that Nate couldn’t bring himself to say. Nate didn’t know what to do. He wanted to help her, save her, but he said he felt manipulated by her, and I thought, how pathetic does a 38-year-old man have to be to think he’s being manipulated by a 21-year-old girl who’s being manipulated by a 51-year-old man. 

Jilly doesn’t have much sympathy for the girl. Even though she’s 21, she said, she’s still an adult. She makes her own decisions. I want to think the same, but I know the pleasure of manipulation, the euphoria of absolute submission and the threat of danger. Jilly says the 21-year-old is weirdly similar to me, specifically because she’s in her early 20s and has a dead dad. Nate told me about the time they had some beers and she asked him to hit her. He didn’t want to. She begged. He slapped her across the face and she started crying, totally hysterical. They went out for a cigarette on the porch. When he asked what had happened, she pretended like she didn’t know what he was talking about. Another time she wanted him to push her, she said she didn’t think he would, started pushing his buttons in order to elicit his anger, and finally he pushed her onto the bed, pushed her hard, he told me, he felt guilty, but she had pushed him to that place of wanting to prove his masculinity, prove he could be the evil man she was self-destructively yearning for. He said she wouldn’t even ride him because she wanted to be completely submissive. 

Then he asked if he was revealing too much because he was drunk. He asked if he was being sleazy. I laughed uncomfortably and said no. I remembered one of the first times we hung out, in April right before Colin dumped me. A former resident of the house kept banging on the front door, inebriated from anesthesia because he worked at the hospital and we had to call the cops on him. Nate, Franco, and I went to a bar once the police took him away in handcuffs, then Nate and I ended up in his apartment above mine at four in the morning because I was curious of what it was like. His mattress was on the floor and we were sitting beside it, he was showing me his paintings, he was telling me about snorting heroin when he was younger. On his balcony smoking cigarettes, I helped him craft a text to his boss about why he wouldn’t be at work the next day. As I was leaving, we exchanged some sort of look, like maybe we were about to kiss, but I was dating Colin and I didn’t think I was attracted to Nate and I was basically blackout drunk and I just left, wide-eyed and confused, walking down the steps and falling into bed, and never thought much of it again.