If he brings it up, simply breathe in, truncate the subject, tell him the roast duck is stuck in his teeth, and that poor oral hygiene is a leading cause of tooth loss in the elderly. Peter’s voice reaches me in the sacredness of my bathroom, and I am seized by nausea. He swings the door open and tells me to step out. I am late, dinner at seven. I put on a red dress to look sexy for him. The dress shows I am not wearing a bra. It goes with the kitten heels we got in Brentwood, where women have that vacant postpartum look on their face. I sit for a moment on the edge of the cold bathtub, staring at my pale face in the mirror. A shadow alongside the open door tells me Peter is standing in the middle of the bedroom. I think of the feasted-on gazelles from the wildlife documentary I saw on TV once. Somewhere, a monkey was enveloping a gazelle, eating it from the ass up. The image reels in my head while I apply brown mascara.

Under the halogen lamps, the white sheets look orange from the self-tan. Peter collapses on my lumpy bed, his gut straining the buttons of his shirt. He doesn’t catch the rivulet of sweat running down his temple. The cheap clock on the wall says we are twenty minutes late. He gestures with his hand to hurry up, so I take my mini bag and walk outside. The bag fits a lipstick and the leftover diazepam.

I should have married Dan, but he didn’t return my calls. Dan made any expensive bag look ugly: he was a poet, and he hated himself. I met him during my conceptual haircut phase. We sat close to each other for a screening of Almodóvar, and the next day, I bought new lace underwear with what was left in my bank account. He had nothing to say, but he was tall with blue eyes. Pointing my chin up to him while we discussed post-structuralism made me feel monastic. His girlfriend had a sort of expensive art degree and sucked in her guts for social media. We never used condoms.

The sidewalk is still golden from the sun as Peter and I proceed to his car. Moments later, we sit in the fast lane, stuck in the palm-lined traffic while someone tries to merge. When we started talking on the app, I made up different scenarios in my head of riding in the passenger seat, strands of freshly bleached hair hitting me in the face. My first messages were something along the line of, I have no money or food in the house. I want to cuck my boyfriend for a daddy. Can you send me some money. I didn’t picture having to contain a sob in a Mercedes, my shiny eyes catching briefly in the sideview mirror, one tear ruining my makeup.

When we arrive at the restaurant, he mumbles something to a waitress in her mid-twenties with skinny arms. Behind her, a couple stands up and leaves their napkins crumpled and dirty on their table. The restaurant is full. At intervals, people start leaving their tables. I am content to look at others enjoying their meals, talking, the women in their plunging necklines, their men in low-effort khaki shorts. There are such things as happy families with a Labrador and a KitchenAid. A tinge of jealousy sits in my stomach with the shrimp cocktail. Peter never notices me wandering off, and I do often, until my eyes become dry from not blinking. If he did notice, all it would take is one smiling motion to put him at ease. He loves me, or loves how young I am.

His fat fingers take a glass of whiskey to his mouth, and I am reminded that later he will want to go back to my apartment and fuck me, one last time. The apartment I lived in when he first met me was an impossible living situation, and he was bothered by my roommate’s collection of Wizard of Oz decor. Her most treasured item was a plate with Judy Garland looking as if she understood she’d be permanently affixed to the wall. He asked me to move away from Judy, so I did.

After eating, he makes a shifty face as he sometimes does when he is naked and on top, staring past me at the wall.

“You look very beautiful tonight,” he says, still holding the whiskey.

“Thanks.”

“Nights like this don’t last forever.”

“They don’t.”

“But while they’re still ours, I want to hold onto them a little longer.”

He looks at me with fisheyes, then looks out over those faces lowered to their plates and withdraws. I regroup and brush his wrist, but he doesn’t respond. He wants me gone.

 

One night, late at night, I wore red lipstick and a mini skirt size two, and this guy took me to Taco Bell. His name was Jonathan. I was suicidal and bored like every summer in Portland, barely alive. Summers in Oregon were sweaty and gray. He had long curly hair and a blonde wife who wanted a new kitchen. He pretended to love me for a few months so he could taste the wetness between my thighs. I gave him head after he bought me a burrito and before he told me his wife was pregnant with his third child.

It was more painful than my crush on my fat college professor. Jonathan didn’t care if I lived or died, and he was great at lying. He loved buying me junk food, and when we went to a sex shop, he made me use my credit card because he was scared his wife would find out. We bought a whip and lingerie. He didn’t know how to use the whip, and we ended up having a therapy session on the bed he had brought to my house in his pickup truck. He didn’t feel man enough, and I told him he should cut his hair. Seeing naked men in my sheets always made me feel pity for them, especially if they shaved. The bed stayed in Portland, and so did Jonathan.

Peter has the same short neck as Jonathan. When they wear turtlenecks, their face sits directly on their shoulders, and the fabric climbs to their chin. Men with short necks love to be seen with tall, long-necked women. They walk with their hands around her waist like she’s an extension of them. Men always compensate for their lack by using women’s bodies. I suppose I can get over a short neck if the man is rich or married, or both. I can make this work.

There is scorn in his voice when he says we need to talk. Perhaps I shouldn’t have ingested 800 calories. I should have given him a discount on that trip to Jamaica. I shouldn’t have worn kitten heels with my dusty feet. I shouldn’t have let my manager from the corporate job that made me cry fuck me. I liked the manager’s robotic voice. Peter’s voice is crude, like his laughter.

“I have really enjoyed our time together.”

I nodded. There is a familiar sting in my eyes. It’s already dark outside, and the red light of a bar next door tinges the exit of the restaurant, which is five happy families away, or two face lifts away.

“You’re great company, I just don’t feel the same level of connection anymore.”

The ice in the whiskey has melted. A ponytailed waitress asks if he wants a new glass, and he responds with alacrity. I wonder if my manager would hire me back if I threatened him.

“Please don’t do this, I love you.”

I say this while playing with the Cartier bracelet he gave me.

In the morning, I am going to feel pathetic. I am resigned that he will not answer the phone if I call him, and I know he has blocked calls from No ID numbers. He looks at me like I am a movie playing on mute. I worry he is looking at the pimple under my nose, which is horrible, and the reason why he doesn’t want me.

“I can’t live without you.”

So now I am stuck with the miserable spiral he pulled me into, the existential burrowing that will follow, and the apartment I can’t afford. I move my manicured hand close to his watch, but he shifts again and puts his arms under the table.

“Excuse me for a moment.”

I get up and walk through the noise of the restaurant, finding my way to a bathroom. The pans and plates in the kitchen, the snotty children squirming while their parents ignore them, the mindless chat of a couple on their first date. The couple looks at each other with the certainty that they will eat each other out in the dark after he picks up the check, and their car will smell like sex.

 

Bathrooms in restaurants that rich old men go to always have dim lighting and a Dyson air dryer. My eyeliner has melted and sits under my eyes, mocking me. My red dress is tight and shows that I ate two meals. A pair of sneakers sticks out of the stall next to me, disturbing my alone-ness.

Think.

He can’t leave.

Beg.

First, get bangs that will make him reminisce about his high school sweetheart, who almost became Miss Texas, but didn’t. She married a quarterback who paid for her breast implants and became a nurse.

He loves telling me about the time he was in a jacuzzi with her and other blonde Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders who gave him blue balls. He told me how he sold blood to take her out to dinner, like a real man, he said, only to cheat on her with his first wife during his master’s degree in advertising. He wouldn’t sell blood to take me out to dinner. He must think about the life he could have had with her if he hadn’t cheated. A modest house in Texas, with the occasional renovation that he would go into debt for. She would say, “You shouldn’t have paid for that trip to Hawaii with your mistress. We need the money for the French doors, and the open-concept layout is going to cost you.” They would have two raucous children who would grow up to be vaguely good-looking and to hate them, and they wouldn’t engage in conversation with customer service. A memorable moment in their marriage would be the death of the family cat; he would hold the elderly thing in a warm towel, the veterinarian would tap the syringe with a clear solution, his mouth would go dry.

The last time I had bangs was during a manic episode. According to my therapist at the time, it made sense because Saturn is in retrograde during your 27th year. I used my kitchen scissors at 3 AM like many other times before, and the hair in the sink looked like a work of art. I went to sleep four hours later, just as the sun was coming up, and I felt energized. The next day was the Fourth of July, and I impulsively went on one date with a scientist with pit stains and long sideburns. He wore beige shorts with small American flags embroidered on them and told me he loved America. He didn’t want to drive or go to a restaurant. Not on the Fourth of July. I was used to men who wanted to make out in the backseat of their Prius. His idea of a first date was a trip to the supermarket where he bought his own Cheetos to consume at the park, and a free hot dog he finished in two bites on the way there. We sat for four hours on a bench, and the only moment his eyes lit up with excitement was when he mentioned the last time he’d been on a boat with his parents, back in Chicago. It was his parents’ boat. I recognized his Chicago Cubs hat, and he looked at me like what I said had moved him. I was so focused on the fact that he didn’t like me that I didn’t realize he was pathetic. I kissed him on the cheek outside my apartment and blocked him two hours later after he texted me that he saw a deer on the way home. That night, I cut my bangs shorter.

I don’t want LA to spit me out the way other cities have done before. Peter is my free ride in the city. He is everything the scientist and the married man were not. He loves driving me places and going shopping. He picks up the check without looking at it. The sex doesn’t last long, and he doesn’t drool when he kisses. He doesn’t own a Prius.

Catfish him on his dating apps.

He will be back on the apps after tonight. And he will be desperate to send pictures of his travel-sized dick in the hope of receiving nudes from a twenty-four-year-old. I will be a blonde, or a ginger, and I will be twenty-four and full of dreams and balanced in every carefully executed yoga pose. I will be performatively bisexual, have read Women Who Run with the Wolves, and I won’t need a man to trap a spider with a cup.

 

The bathroom I am hiding in is now empty, no more tension between me and the stranger in the stall next door. I don’t know how long I have been here, but I haven’t shed a tear. He would have hated to see me cry. He would have said something dry out of his slant mouth. I hold my hand to my stomach as I walk out haltingly, trying to suck in my guts for when he sees me come back to the table. He is looking at his phone when I sit down, his gray hair pitched forward. The distrustful ponytailed girl keeps looking towards us. She asks if we want dessert.

“I’d like the check, please,” he says, looking at her. Impeccably polite

I adjust my dress hatefully. His grubby hands are now parallel to mine. If only I had prepared a strategy for tonight, if only I had gotten bangs sooner. Hadn’t he wanted to come to my apartment after dinner? I can smell his sweat from across the table, and I get a picture of his nakedness in my small apartment. His pale legs and the rough, calloused big feet, his breath in the morning that makes it hard to kiss him on the mouth. I didn’t want him, but I wanted what he owned. His cars, his watches and rings, his confidence, his arrogance. He is balding, and his head reflects the light above us, with the sparse grayness. Skinny arms came to our table to take the plates away. The first thing that happens when he gets the check is that he gets up fast and without looking. The couple at the restaurant is still chatting and sucking on their drinks when we leave.

The only noise outside is my heels on the pavement and his heavy breathing. The pastel neon lights of the bar now in front of us remind me of lonely nights in backless dresses and older men with cheap taste. That and the breeze smelling of summer trash make my chest crack open with a hot sensation. My heels are stabbing the back of my feet, and tonight even the light touch of the sheets will make them burn.

Add to the list: buy new shoes. If he doesn’t ask for his American Express back tonight, instead of crying in bed waiting for a panic attack, go shopping. I read a book once about a rich girl in New York who advised her sister’s friends to use their parents’ credit cards before they took them away. It made me wonder how my life would have been if I had access to my parents’ credit cards, instead of practicing my fuck me stare for dying men in the hope they would like me enough to buy me food. I could have been in Bushwick writing a semi-autobiographical novel about my jobless boyfriend who wears sandals and drinks swamp-colored iced matcha’s, but New York couldn’t contain me. Not the way LA can.

My crotch is visible while I sit in the passenger seat. I am slouched backward to signal that I want him to come over, but I am not opening my legs to look desperate. Not only that, but I also stopped begging him. I am looking straight ahead at the road, trying not to make too much noise while rummaging in my mini bag for the diazepam. The diazepam is gone, probably sitting in the restaurant’s bathroom. Someone’s mom might have taken it home and hid it in the medicine cabinet. Or the distrustful waitress. She had the look. She whooshed her hair in front of us, in front of Peter. Cross off the list: attempt suicide with the diazepam. For all he knows, I could be dying. Earlier that week, a mole on my neck started bleeding. I was hunched over the sink, plucking my nipple hair, when blood appeared in the sink.

I let my fingers reach out to his shoulder and linger there. His brow furrows.

We just passed the neighborhood where we had our first brunch with his friends and the older wives, who looked at me with suspicion and stalked my social media afterwards. He told me his best friend said, “I am good with bad.”

“Why her?” He asked. Peter shrugged and shook his head when he saw the look on my face, but I knew he felt pride when he told the story. It made his worth clear against mine, my inadequacy, my luck in having him. He pretended to feel bad, then quickly got bored. I imagined the end of Peter then. Maybe my name would come up in a casual conversation with his friends, just to let them know things are finally over. An afterthought.

Peter never took pictures of us. His social media still had pictures of his ex-wife, none of the Lululemon girlfriends his circle didn’t approve of, and he made sure never to like any of my posts online. Once, while we were burning a Sunday by the beach, he dropped my hand when he clocked his friends across the street from us. After that, the afternoon was quiet except for the sound of distant chatter and ripping motors. He left me outside my apartment, and I washed away the sand and the feeling of emptiness on my body. None of those evenings spent over plates of oysters and strawberry daiquiris had any lasting effect on Peter’s life, in which every woman felt like a meaningless complication.

At the red light, I look at his reflection in the dark car window and it reminds me of a dying cartoon alley cat, the scruffy remaining hair, and the yellow eyes with the squint of someone who owns every trash can he passes. He yawns, scratches his forehead, and keeps driving.

 

The next night, I sat at a counter stool playing with the straw in my pink drink. The air conditioning is on full blast at the bar. Crossing my legs with a lace thong is uncomfortable, but it works. A cartoon alley cat sits next to me and puts his bitten nails close to my arms. I straighten my back and put my chest out.

“Can I buy you a drink?” He asks.

I uncross my legs slowly, then cross them the other way, to show off my new shoes.