1.

It all goes back to this party at Kevin’s. Kevin was short with dark pinprick eyes that made him look like a cartoon. We had been dating on and off for a year; he was the on, I was the off. He lived with a hundred roommates in Greenpoint in the middle of a long block of squat, ugly rowhouses. The rowhouses were clad in cheap vinyl siding in pastel hues that gave them a lonely, forlorn feeling. I used to enjoy annoying Kevin by anointing each building, pointing them out as we walked by: Mint Malaise. Eggshell Ennui. Periwinkle Self-Loathing. Later, after he stopped speaking to me, I heard through friends that Kevin joined AA. According to Instagram he got really fit in addition to sober, but this was before all that, while he was still drunk and in my league.

I can’t remember the occasion for the party that night – someone had just arrived in the city or someone was about to leave – but it was packed. We shoved all the windows open and still the overheated air pushed down on us, gummy and thick. I stood sweating next to Kevin at the makeshift DJ station, an old MacBook missing half its keys perched on top of a packing crate. Kevin put on this song about New York that everyone loved, and not in some ironic way. As the dancing throngs whooped and swelled, Kevin passed me a pill. I stared at it, glowing white in the flat of my palm. My dissertation advisor had threatened to dump me if I didn’t turn in a draft of my first chapter by Monday. It was Saturday and so far all I had was a title: Chapter One. I tossed back the pill and took a deep swallow of whatever was mixed in my red cup. “Be right back,” I told Kevin, and jostled my way through the crowd.

Just inside the kitchen stood a tall, lanky guy with longish hair. I had never seen him at any of these parties before. He was talking to some girls I also didn’t recognize. The girls didn’t look very interesting and yet were hogging all his attention. I kept throwing looks like cheap plastic lures in his direction, trying to catch his eye. I felt weirdly agitated, like he was ignoring me, and then – the pill kicked in. A warm fuzziness spread across my chest and I wove toward the kitchen. 

“Hey!” I shouted over the music and wedged past some guy blocking my way. “Did I see you on the F train yesterday?” I myself had not been on the F in weeks, but my friend Alice and I had discovered the point of a pick-up line was just to make contact. “You can literally say anything,” Alice said. She had recently brought home a girl by asking if she identified more with Michelle Williams in Dawson’s Creek or Keri Russell’s Felicity. I swiped my line about the F train from a guy who had used it on me. (Now there was someone who could have benefited from, if not all twelve steps, at least a few.) Things didn’t work out between us, but I was grateful for the line, of which I made regular use.

The lanky stranger went hmmm – “I’m not sure if I’ve been on the F train” – then reached to shake my hand like he was my uncle, or an overeager intern. “I’m Justin.” As we talked, I slowly, though not that slowly, edged nearer. When his ear was in reach of my mouth, I lowered my voice to a smoky purr, like Kathleen Turner in Serial Mom. “Let’s ditch these losers and go make out in the bathroom.” I pulled him by a sleeve out of the kitchen and down the hall. The fabric of his shirt was starchy – freshly dry-cleaned. Weird choice for a house party. 

There was a line for the bathroom. The door swung open and I shoved Justin forward. Somebody snapped “What the – ” but I slammed the door shut and missed the rest. Unflattering antiseptic light bathed the small windowless room. I flicked off the light with one hand, plunging us into darkness, and reached for the snap of Justin’s jeans with the other. He jumped back.

“I thought you wanted to make out?” 

“I do. Broadly.”

Justin, it turned out, was a virgin. And not only in terms of gay sex, but an actual virgin. He had just moved to Brooklyn from Louisville two weeks before. He offered all this by way of explaining why he didn’t want a blow job.

“Okay,” I said. “They don’t have parties in Kentucky?” 

By now, someone was yelling and banging at the bathroom door. I couldn’t pull the words from the din but I shouted back, pounding my fist in time with each syllable: “You. Need. To. Re. Lax.”

There was more shouting from the other side and then Justin said, “Maybe we should go back out there.” His tone was difficult to decipher, but I pictured him giving me a sheepish grin which I could not see since I had cut the lights.

When I opened the door Kevin was standing there, face shiny and red, his little, beady eyes littler and beadier than ever.

◆

Sometime around two the next afternoon, I crawled moaning from the cave of my hangover and messaged Kevin an apology. His reply was immediate, like he had it drafted and ready to go. Do not contact me again, it read. Perhaps one day you will be less selfish, but in the meantime, you have revealed yourself to be a person of absolutely no virtue. Absolutely no virtue? That’s kind of extreme. I read through the message again and again. Eventually my phone battery died. I set the phone on the floor and rested my cheek against the soothing, cool porcelain of the toilet, lifting it a bit later to throw up. 

◆

I worried I wouldn’t have much in common with a virgin from Kentucky, but I had caused such a scene I thought I should see things through. Our first date, Justin got tickets to a movie by this director everyone loved. The movie was about the mafia, which didn’t interest me in the least. How many movies about the mafia do we need? Afterward we went to Justin’s place, where I was surprised to discover he had a king-sized bed. 

“This is a big bed,” I said, in case he hadn’t noticed.

“I bought it just before I moved out here. It seemed like a waste to get rid of it.”

The bed pressed against all four walls, filling his entire room. “Looks like a tight squeeze,” I said, and winked, but even I could tell the joke didn’t land. Justin clambered onto the bed and I followed.

Sex with Justin was slow to start. Three hours in and we were both still wearing t-shirts, underwear, and one sock each. It was even slower to finish: Justin would not come. Over the next couple weeks I tried every trick in my book. I even revived one I had sworn off after this guy said he couldn’t believe I would let anybody do that to me. Justin wordlessly yet adamantly resisted all of my efforts and sex resolved only when, giving up, I would roll off him and frantically masturbate myself to a close. I tried to get him to talk about it but this had the opposite of my intended effect, and Justin and his penis only shrunk further from me.

I ended things one night in his enormous bed. I was exasperated and had a pubic hair stuck in my throat. “This is not working!” I yelped, then hacked out two scratchy coughs.

“Jesus,” Justin said. “It’s just a pube.”

I thought he’d be devastated and beg me to stay. After all, I was Justin’s first. But as I crouched in the hallway, wobbling on one foot and cramming the other into my shoe, Justin stood by his open front door, texting. 

◆

2.

A few months later on a trip to San Francisco for a conference about literature and something, I sent Alice a message: I met a guy. I think I’m in love.

Good job, she texted back. What’s his name?

I paused on the sidewalk, somewhere along Market Street, thumbs hovering over my splintered screen. A guy dressed as a unicorn but in a jockstrap flew past me. “Quit hogging the road, sweetheart!” I turned back to my phone.

Umm Justin?

After a minute, Alice replied. End it now. Too confusing.

It’s ok, I typed. We’ll call him Second Justin. 

I had met Second Justin at a pop-up gallery the night before. The “gallery” was an alley between a health food store and a shop that sold fair trade dildos. There were a lot of people at the opening and I didn’t know any of them. Being anonymous and also jet-lagged, I felt glamorous and European. I sipped at my flask of whisky and checked out the show. The artist made sculptures out of pantyhose. They were actually pretty cool but there were no lights in the alley so it was hard to see. I was trying to make sense of one that called to mind a pile of potatoes (I had skipped dinner) when Second Justin approached.

“This is a really evocative piece,” he said. “I’m friends with the artist.” 

“Yeah,” I said, “totally evocative.” 

We chatted for a bit and when he mentioned his name, I said, “Oh that’s funny. I was dating a guy named Justin in Brooklyn.”

“Why is that funny?”

“Not like funny-funny. Just like, you know… funny.”

He made a small, non-committal noise. “My apartment is just two or three blocks away.” 

I smiled. “Two blocks I can work with. Three might be pushing it.”

“I don’t understand,” he said and tilted his perfectly shaped head. “Does that mean you’re coming over or not?”

I pocketed two beers from an Igloo cooler and we headed out. 

◆

To my great relief, Second Justin had no problem coming at all. He was definitely not a virgin and had never been east of Denver. Over the next week, as I skipped the entire conference, we had sex three or four times a day –  in public restrooms, on beaches and fire escapes, in other people’s beds as visiting cousins wandered in, searching for misplaced purses holding quarter bags. Second Justin had a broad, flat chest and after we finished I liked to lie with my back against him. “You’re like a sexy headboard,” I said. If anything, Second Justin came too much. By the time I got back to New York (after changing my ticket twice) I had gonorrhea in my throat and my hemorrhoids were on fire. 

◆

Before I even knew of Second Justin’s birthplace (Calabasas, whatever that is), we had agreed to a long-distance relationship. I suggested we try an open arrangement like I had read about in a zine. While Justin initially resisted, a couple weeks later he met a guy named Ross who waited tables at a new ramen spot in the Mission and called to say he had reconsidered.

I was working late in the library, not really getting anything done, and now I really wouldn’t get anything done. “Alright,” I said, “have fun with Ross,” and hung up. A librarian shushed me loudly from across the room. I didn’t even think Second Justin liked ramen. I sat there, unsure what to do next, so I downloaded a bunch of apps and spent some time on a website called Squirt I’d learned about from an ad posted over a urinal.

The next day, I meditated on wanting good things for Second Justin. I sat legs-crossed on a thin pillow like they do on TV. The floorboards dug into me, irritating my hemorrhoids, but I breathed out and said, “I release this pain.” I tried a visualization exercise from this book about mindfulness. I’d bought the book at the airport and then left it on the plane. But the part I got through had this whole thing about how the most generous color is amber. So I pictured an effusive, amber happiness filling Justin’s life. I saw my petty feelings of jealousy flooding from me and washing away, down the gutters of insecurity and resentment.

That evening before bed, I put a Ziplock filled with ice cubes down the back of my pants and called Second Justin. I was telling him about a hilarious dog I’d seen that morning with a Snickers wrapper stuck to its leg, but the story wasn’t quite coming together, and he seemed distracted. 

“I should really go,” he said.

I could hear some muffled background noise. It sounded like a cow giving birth in a field, but that didn’t really make sense.  

“Sorry. Are you out?” 

After a pause, he replied. “Yes?” It sounded like a question.

“That sounded like a question,” I said.

“Yes. I’m out. Is that better?”

I said nothing and waited.

I waited some more.

“Fine. I’m having dinner with that guy Ross.”

The amber cloud I’d been conjuring during our call, a rangy cumulous number rolling across the stretch of continent between us, quickly deepened to blood red. “What the fuck is wrong with you? When I said have fun with Ross, I was being sarcastic.”

I hurled my phone across the room. It hit the wall next to a limp houseplant and exploded in a small shower of cheap plastic and glass. I fell asleep with all the lights on. When I woke a few hours later, I thought I had wet the bed, but it was just from the ice pack melting. 

◆

For some reason, Second Justin and I kept dating, and I took on another thousand dollars of credit card debt. We had one more go-around of gonorrhea (along with a heated dispute on the N Judah about who started it) and an ill-conceived visit to a bathhouse in the Castro before I pulled the plug. Although I waited until I was home to break up with him, I knew we were beginning the end at Eros Spa for Men, as I sulked in a corner and adjusted the scratchy towel over my bony hips, wondering how many gallons of bleach the towel had been through in its lifetime. Around me, everyone else seemed to be having fun. I had lost Second Justin to a circle jerk earlier on. When I tried to join, the ringleader touched my shoulder and said in a husky voice I would not describe as a whisper, “Sorry buddy, you’re just not for me.”

Later that night, as Justin snored contentedly, I curled away from him, settling into a dip in his lumpy mattress. The saccharine scent of lube mixed with poppers lingered in my nostrils and I vowed never to set foot in San Francisco again. 

◆

3.

Some years passed. 

I stopped crossing paths with First Justin, eventually hearing from his old roommate that he’d left New York and had been bouncing around out west. Second Justin and I stayed friends, by which I mean, stayed friends on Facebook. I took a small, sad glee in hiding everything from him but the most flattering photos of myself. I also unfollowed his feed. But every once in a while I would check on his page, scouring for something to refresh my list of grievances. 

During one of these quests, in the small hours of morning after an unsuccessful gauntlet through the gay bars, I found some photos of Second Justin at a wedding. I sat in bed with my laptop and my shoes still on. I had a crick in my neck and hunching over the computer wasn’t helping. The wedding looked to be a quirky California affair, with guests in clown wigs and those headbands with bobbles on top. Gross. The only thing worse than a wedding is an alternative wedding; if you’re going to get married, do it in a church with a priest like a normal person. I clicked through, muttering to myself, and landed on a photo of Second Justin with his parents. That’s weird. Why would his parents be there? 

I jumped from the photos back to his page, scrolling and panicking, panicking and scrolling. And yes, here it was, a post from his friend Carly – but we always shit-talked Carly, together! It said, Congratulations Justin. I squinted at the screen, my vision blurry with alcohol and disbelief. Stupid old Carly had missed a typo. She’d added an “s” to his name so her note read Congratulations Justins.

And then, before I even saw the photo – obnoxious grins plastered across their ridiculous, vegan-cake smeared faces – I knew what I would find.

Justin and Justin were husband and husband.

◆

Sometimes an obsession emerges slowly, like a murky stain seeping across your ceiling. And other times it crashes down on you at once, raining chunks of soiled plaster and toilet water all over your life. Not only did I switch my settings to follow Second Justin, I unfollowed all of my other 1,013 friends so I only saw his posts: the trip to Florence, painting the guestroom of their new bungalow in Oakland, getting matching tattoos on their first anniversary. I would leave a comment (House is looking great!!) then melt down and delete it, then spiral out about the ghost notification hanging around and alerting the Justins to my insanity.

“Listen,” Alice said, rotating in her barstool so she faced me head-on. We’d met for a drink at this place we used to go to all the time. We hadn’t seen much of each other lately. A while back she’d run into that girl whose name I could never remember because we always just called her Felicity, and they had decided to give it a real go. “You have to get over this. You didn’t even like Justin.” 

Alice was looking me dead in the eye and it was making me antsy. I felt an overwhelming urge to pick up my phone, like it would shield me from her stare. Instead I asked, “Which one?”

I meant the question sincerely, I really did want to know, but Alice just slammed down her beer and lit a cigarette. The orange flame of her lighter wagged back and forth like a tiny, reprimanding finger. 

◆

I returned to my apartment. It was hot inside. The previous summer my a/c had fallen down the airshaft and I hadn’t replaced it. I opened all the windows, both of them. A warm, smelly breeze exhaled across the room. I walked to my computer, taking slow, ceremonial steps. After a final mournful look through his page – how did those motherfuckers afford to take so many trips? – I unfriended Second Justin.

A potent mix of excitement and despair poured through me, an excitement-despair cocktail. Fingers shaking, before I could stop myself, I went one step further and deleted my account. I shut the laptop.

There. It’s done. I’m free.

I lunged for the computer. A quick Google search and I found what I was looking for. A LinkedIn profile. I scanned for contact info but was prompted that I needed a paid account. Well how much does that cost? I scrambled for my credit card. I carefully copied and pasted the email address.

Taking a deep breath, I leaned forward and began typing:

Dear Kevin, I hope this message finds you well.

◆

The words flowed through me, an effortless kind of poetry: a flurry of fingers and keys, an abundance of ellipses. An hour later, I was done. I started to read through the email but decided against it. No revisions, no games. Just my unfiltered feelings on the page – or on the screen, I guess. Kevin would finally know the real me. My finger hovered over the trackpad for just a second and then struck it, one fast jab.

Sent.

I closed my eyes and sat for a few long moments. 

I opened my eyes. No reply. Outside, a garbage truck bleeped and heaved down the darkened street, making its late night rounds.

That’s okay, I thought. After all this time, I can wait.

Patience is a virtue, right?

I closed my eyes again and counted to ten.