The Follower (14 page)

“What do you mean? I thought she was in New York.”

“No, no, she lives in Mexico. It was a long-distance relationship and we drifted apart, you know?”

“Yeah, that’s hard. When I was in college I was dating this guy for a while. He was going to Penn and, yeah, it was tough. Why does life have to be such a bitch?”

“Your life’s a bitch?”

“It’s just an expression but, yeah, things have been kind of…stressful lately.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way.”

He was looking into her eyes intensely. She had to look away.

“Yeah, I know,” she said, “but sometimes things seem so…I don’t know…out of control.”

“Trust me,” Peter said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

The instructor was getting ready to start the step class, and Katie said, “Well, better go. It was really nice talking to you.”

“Would you like to have dinner with me tomorrow night?”

“Oh, shoot, you called me, didn’t you?” Katie said. “I got your message, but I didn’t have a chance to call you back. I’m really sorry.”

“That’s fine, I understand. So I was thinking I can make a reservation for around seven. There’s this great French place between Madis—”

“Sorry, did you say tomorrow? I can’t make it. I have so much stuff to do for work, and I have a Pilâtes class.”

He waited a couple of seconds, then said, “Oh, okay. How about Wednesday?”

“Can’t make that, either,” she said. “I have to go on this double date. Remember that guy I told you about, the one I’ve kind of been seeing? Well, I’m setting his roommate up with one of my friends. Not sure how that’s gonna go but—”

“I thought you were breaking up with that guy.”

“Yeah, I know, I know. I’m such a loser, right? I’m not sure what’s going on with us. I mean I still like him, he’s not a bad guy. Or maybe he is a bad guy. I don’t know. I’m just kind of confused…obviously.”

“I know it’s not my place to get involved, but can I give you some advice?”

“Sure,” Katie said. “Help me, please. God knows I need it.”

“I don’t think you should go out with this guy anymore,” Peter said. “He’s not good enough for you. You deserve better. A lot better.”

“Yeah, but—”

“He’s a jerk. He text messaged you.”

“That turned out to be a misunderstanding—he really was sick. I think he was, anyway. I mean, we went out again and had a good time.”

Looking at her in that intense way, Peter said, “Are you happy, Katie?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m just asking, Are you happy? If the answer’s yes, then go out with him, I hope it works out for you guys. But I asked myself the same question, I mean about my girlfriend. The answer was no, so that was it—I broke up with her. I know I made the right decision, too. Life’s too short to waste time being unhappy.”

Katie was suddenly teary-eyed. Embarrassed, she said, “Sorry, it has nothing to do with any of this. It’s just stuff building up. Other stuff.” She dabbed her cheeks with the back of her hand, then forced a smile and said, “What is it with you men anyway?”

Maybe something was off in her delivery, because Peter didn’t take it as a joke. He said seriously, “Not all guys are assholes.”

“Okay,” Katie said, “then what is it with ninety-nine point nine nine percent of you men?”

Peter still wasn’t smiling.

The step class had started.

“I really have to go before all the spots’re gone,” Katie said.

“So are we on for Wednesday?” Peter asked.

“I can’t cancel. How about Thursday?”

“Thursday’s great. So I guess I’ll pick you up at your place and I’ll make a reservation for seven. Do you like French food?”

Suddenly there was something in Peter’s tone that hadn’t been there before, or at least Katie hadn’t noticed it before. It sounded like he had…expectations.

“Yeah,” she said, “I mean—”

“Great,” he said. “Zagat’s gave this place a great rating. There’s garden seating so if the weather’s nice we can eat outside.”

“That sounds really cool,” Katie said. “But…I mean, this is going to be, like, casual, right?”

Katie thought she saw the letdown in Peter’s eyes. But it only lasted a second or two because then he just seemed confused and said, “What do you mean?”

“I mean, going out to dinner. I just want to be sure…I mean, I want it to be, you know…I mean, I don’t want it to be—”

“Don’t worry, it’ll be casual.”

“Cool,” Katie said. “Yeah, this is gonna be a lot of fun. I’m really looking forward to it.”

She said goodbye and joined the step class, which had started. They were just doing warm-ups, but Katie was having trouble following the instructor. She was distracted, worrying about Peter. She was afraid she’d hurt him or something. He was a nice guy, but she just couldn’t see dating him. But she definitely wanted to be friends with him and she was afraid things were going to get weird between them now.

She looked over her shoulder, toward the Plexiglas partition and in the mirrors where she could see more of the gym, but didn’t see Peter anywhere. She hoped he didn’t leave because he was pissed off at her. Maybe he wasn’t asking her out at all. Maybe he just wanted to have a friendly dinner and she’d jumped to the wrong conclusion, creating all this tension for
no reason. She could’ve had another friend in the city, somebody who she could’ve hung out with and talked to, and now she’d blown it.

Then she realized she was still doing the previous exercise.

“I hate this,” she said, louder than she intended.

The instructor and a few other people had heard her and were staring. She glared back at them until they looked away.

In his senior year at Michigan
, Andy went out with this chick Mindy Somethingorother. He’d actually met her during freshman year—she lived in his dorm and had a super-hot roommate—and although he knew she was into him and he could’ve scored with her at any time, he never tried. She had a nice ass, but needed serious help in the face department, and he didn’t like her personality either. She talked way too much. He didn’t mind girls who talked a lot—it wasn’t like he had to dominate every conversation or anything—but Mindy just never shut up.

Then he was leaving an economics lecture one day, walking with this dude, Cory, when they passed Mindy. Cory gave Mindy a big hug and started talking to her for a while and Andy hung back. Andy said hi to her but not much else. Then when Mindy left and Andy started walking with Cory again, Cory told him about how one of his friends had just broken up with Mindy and she was available.

“I wouldn’t waste my time with that,” Andy said.

“I don’t know,” Cory said. “I heard she’s pretty nasty.”

“How nasty?”

“Really nasty. I heard she does everything.”

“We talking anal?”

“We’re talking anal.”

Suddenly Andy saw Mindy in a new light. Anal sex was the only type of sex he hadn’t had yet and it was starting to get embarrassing. He liked to think of himself as a stud. Maybe
he didn’t do as well as some guys in his frat who seemed to hook up with a new girl every week, but he didn’t have a problem meeting girls. He’d had a Chinese girl, a black girl, and a Puerto Rican girl, and he’d gone short, tall, skinny, and fat. He’d done all the positions he knew about—he learned most of them from watching pornos—and although the sex never lasted very long, he knew he was good in bed. He’d gotten a ton of blow jobs and he even did tantric sex one time. But whenever he tried to have anal sex with a girl, it never worked out. Most of the time the girls just weren’t into it, acting like he was some big perv or something for even suggesting it. Meanwhile, all the guys in the frat—the major studs anyway—claimed they’d done it with practically every girl they went out with.

So, figuring he’d finally fill the last gap on his sexual résumé, Andy looked up Mindy’s schedule and then casually ran into her a couple of days later in the hallway outside of her art history class.

“Mindy, wow. We have to stop running into each other this way.”

Mindy seemed a little standoffish at first—well, pissed-offish was more like it. Andy realized he must’ve acted pretty harshly toward her in freshman year when he blew her off, and that it would be an uphill battle to get her to like him, much less to get her to want to have anal sex with him.

But Andy went to work, telling Mindy how great she looked—even though she’d put on some weight and still had a kinda big nose and double chin—and how cool it was to see her for the second time in a week. Mindy, standing with her arms crossed in front of her chest, was friendly, but not super-friendly. Andy could tell she was still into him, even if she wasn’t really showing it, so he asked her out for that Friday night. Mindy acted surprised, wanting to know why Andy was suddenly interested in her, out of the blue, when he didn’t give her the time of day freshman year. It was weird, but Andy wondered if Mindy was reading his mind, if she knew he was just after her for anal sex, and she was just trying to give him a hard time about it. But Andy, keeping his cool, laid on the
bull nice and thick. He told her how he’d been really shy freshman year and how he’d always had a big crush on her but never had the guts to ask her out. He managed to say all of this with a straight face, even putting on his vulnerable, sincere, sad-eyed puppy-dog look that chicks always seemed to dig, and Mindy was no exception. She admitted that she’d always had a crush on Andy, too—big surprise there!—and she gave Andy her address and phone number and arranged to meet at her place, Friday at eight.

Andy took her out to dinner at Uno and then they hit a couple of parties. She’d started drinking beer with her pizza and by the time they got to the second party, she was nice and toasted. Meanwhile, Andy had been nursing his beers all night and had been drinking lots of water so he was ready to rumble. They went back to her place, started going at it in the living room, then moved to the bedroom. Everything was right on schedge. She was a good kisser—she moved her tongue around a lot and she made squeaky orgasmic-like noises—and Andy hoped this meant she would be a nasty dynamo, just like Cory had promised.

But then, when he tried to reach into her shirt, she kept pushing his hand away, and he thought,
Houston, we have a problem
. Finally he got her shirt off and was playing with her big, heavy tits, and then she said something about how “we shouldn’t.” Andy came back with “Yeah, we should,” and a few minutes later her jeans and panties were off. She went down on him for a while—he didn’t like her technique; too much hand—and then he sat up and, from a jeans pocket, took out a little tube of Vaseline. He dangled it in front of her face, expecting her to get the hint, but instead she said, “What’s that for?” sounding confused.

“You know…” Andy said.

“No, I don’t know.”

She really didn’t seem to understand.

“Oh, I get it,” Andy said. “You put some in already, right?”

Mindy was silent for a few seconds, then she started laughing. Andy had no idea what was so funny.

“Come on,” Mindy said. “That was a joke, right?”

“What was a joke?”

Now Mindy got serious and said, “What exactly did you think we were gonna do tonight?”

Andy recognized Mindy’s shocked, suddenly offended tone because he’d gotten similar reactions from other girls after he’d reached for the Vaseline. He knew Cory must’ve gotten some bad information because there was no way Mindy was going anal tonight, or any other night.

Andy could’ve stuck around for the regular sex, but he couldn’t deal. He told Mindy he had to use the bathroom and then he just bailed.

After the Mindy screw-up, Andy continued to try to have anal sex with every girl he went out with, but he took a more subtle approach. Instead of going for it right away, he waited until the second or third time, but he still couldn’t pull it off. He realized that in the age of AIDS it was very unlikely for a girl to be willing to have anal sex with a guy she hardly knew. He needed more time, maybe a month of dating, to make a girl feel comfortable enough to do it with him. The problem was most of his relationships lasted less than two weeks. Another hurdle was that, when he met a girl, it was impossible to tell whether she’d be into it or not. With oral sex, it was a lot easier. If a girl bit on a pen a lot or ate bananas or licked icecream cones in an erotic way, the odds were pretty good that she liked to give blow jobs. But there were no obvious tip-offs for anal sex. It wasn’t like you could look at a girl’s ass, watch the way she walked, and think, Yeah, she’d take it in the caboose. Some girls who looked like the biggest sluts in the world thought Andy was nuts when he even brought up the idea. But from what Andy had heard, some of the sweetest-looking girls, the girl-next-door types, were totally into it. He figured he just had to keep trying and eventually he’d get lucky.

Andy had no clue whether Katie would be into it or not, but he planned to find out. Actually, it was the only reason why he’d asked her out again. He’d decided that having any kind of long-term thing with her—any longer than a month
anyway—was out. She was nice and pretty and all that, but she just wasn’t Andy-Barnett-serious-relationship material after all. She was too boring, too moody, too melodramatic, too intense. And he noticed that she had a couple of zits on her forehead. He knew he couldn’t blame her for that, but he couldn’t understand why she didn’t cover them up better with makeup. At the very least, he felt it was an
indication
. If a girl didn’t tend to herself, what would happen when she started getting older? Would she put on a ton of weight? Would she just let herself go? These were serious questions guys had to ask themselves.

But it was Katie’s attitude that really turned Andy off. At the movie theater, it annoyed him how, when he touched her knee, she acted like he had cooties. They’d already had sex, so what the hell was her problem? What, he wasn’t allowed to
touch
her now? Andy was sick of all this game-playing shit. Sitting next to her during the Lindsay Lohan flick, Andy felt like he was in a prison cell. He regretted even asking her out again. He could’ve been out with his buddies, searching for his next victim, but then, when the movie ended, he reminded himself what the ultimate goal was. He’d already put in some time with Katie, gone on a bunch of dates, and it would’ve sucked to break up with her before he even had a chance to
try
for anal sex.