Sex, Lies and the Dirty (39 page)

I started taking more of an interest in the things Amanda was working on,
asking about her career and her plans. I tried to be encouraging, communicative. I tried to be the guy she met all those years ago, and it started to work. She smiled more, and we were kissing good-bye again rather than simply parting ways in the morning. We were intimate. For the first time in forever, we were having sex and sleeping in the same bed. Most importantly, I never mentioned
The Dirty
. If she asked how things were going (she usually didn’t), I kept it short and said either “fine” or “good” or “okay.” There was no need to brag or rub salt in the wound. I had learned a long time ago that despite her emotions toward me, she was still a competitive person that didn’t like being outshined. The least I could do was keep it to myself, so I did.

We went to movies.

We went on dates.

Hooman Karamian and Nik Richie started to become separate people again. She saw her husband, not the blogger or the chicks he ragged on. She was starting to be happy again. We both were.

And then she got pregnant.

Amanda had been pregnant for about a month, but it was confirmed around Thanksgiving. We had never planned on having kids. Not at that particular moment, anyway. Amanda and I were finally getting along
again, but the idea of having a kid reintroduced a certain amount of stress into our lives. She had things that she wanted to do with her business that would need to be put on hold. I was more concerned about the idea of Amanda and I raising a child together. Our relationship as husband and wife was rocky. Adding a kid would introduce a whole other level of complication. That, and Amanda still didn’t approve of what I did all day with the site. Quite honestly, I had a suspicion she’d use the kid to get me to discontinue my involvement, either by selling it to the first bidder or shutting it down completely.

And I was also worried about being a good father.

I was having a lunch with Jim and told him about all these issues, but he insisted that this was going to be good for me. This baby would bring a lot of joy into my life, he said.

So Amanda and I had a series of talks over the next few weeks, more or less preparing ourselves for the changes that we were about to face. We were both going to have to scale back on work. We’d have to rearrange our finances, set up doctor’s visits, and start reading books like
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
because we were both fucking clueless when it came to kids. The two of us needed to mentally prepare for this, because up until this point, we were both all about our careers. We were going to have to stop being so selfish, and right around the time we finally accepted this new reality is when it happened.

She lost the baby.

It was December. I’m not sure which day.

What I remember is that my wife was screaming out in pain from the bed, clutching her stomach. There were faint blotches of blood coming through the sheets, so I was already starting to feel faint. Light-headed. The old phobia was kicking in, but the situation was making my adrenaline pump. It kept me conscious. I helped her walk from the bed to the bathroom, and she was crying, telling me how much it hurt. Her stomach was in pain. Sharp pain. And there was blood coming out of her vagina into the toilet. I couldn’t see anything, just kept hearing drop upon drop of it coming out of her. She cried and cried, and it was like this for I don’t know how long. I just squeezed her hand until she felt like she was ready to try and move, try and go to the hospital to see what was the matter. We already knew, but we had to hear it from a doctor to be sure. As if to make it official,
they had to run their tests and take their samples.

Before we could confirm that we weren’t going to be parents, a doctor had to tell us, “I can’t find the baby.”

Amanda blamed me.

For some reason, I couldn’t say why, it was my fault that we lost the kid. We lost. The both of us. Not just her. I had to keep repeating that it was my kid, too. She wouldn’t listen, though. It was easier to make me the scapegoat. The villain. The bad guy.

After she miscarried, the air in the apartment became something worse than it ever had before. She started resenting me again. Hating me. Hating me for being Nik Richie and hating Hooman Karamian for killing her baby. I disgusted her on so many levels that she couldn’t stand the sight of me, and so I went to the place where I was accepted. Wanted.

I lost myself in my work.

Relished it. Needed it.

I wanted to be Nik Richie all the time now because my other life was in shambles. Broken beyond repair. Hooman Karamian slept on the couch and was hated by his wife. Nik Richie was loved, feared, adored, funny. He was all these things that Amanda didn’t see, or didn’t want to. He started out as the escape from work, and then he became the escape from my marriage. My life.

All day I would go over posts that Gayden and JV sent.

All day I got to be Nik Richie. I got to escape myself.

People had been asking for years how I could stand being Nik Richie, and my answer was usually along the lines of how this kind of figure was warranted. Needed. There needs to be a guy like this to call people out, keep them in check. This answer is true, but not the whole truth.

The reality is that compared to how bad things got in life, being Nik Richie is easy. Nik Richie didn’t have the same problems that Hooman Karamian had. He was above it. Beyond it.

That all changed on January 23rd.

I was about to have my own dirt.

79
Refers to when something, typically a job, is done less than ideally.