Kate gripped the phone like she was going to hurl it into the woods.
“Another country heard from,” she said brightly. “Don’t worry, I’ll stay out of sight for now. But, Coral, this new Congress is a true nightmare. This train’s still moving even if I decided to get a piece of ass once.”
We spent Christmas of 2030 camping in Tishomingo State Park in Mississippi then the Sam Houston National Forest in Texas until well into February. We hiked every trail we could find, swam in whatever freezing pool of water looked clear, and had sex at least once a day beneath a beautiful forest of spruce, aspen, and fir. We learned of the Mall of America shootings only after emerging from the wilderness. We were at a rest stop where a group of women in hijabs watched the news of an Islamist father-daughter team murdering thirty-three people in nine minutes. Mackowski and Braden hustled to outdo each other’s venom.
We kept on west, driving beneath a sky with island-sized clouds.
For many years after Wyoming, a part of me still held on to this dream I had of my life with Kate. We would spend a few years in D.C., she would get all the crazy activist passion out of her system, and then we’d go to North Carolina where I could write while making good money at my dad’s business. It’s incredible to recall how long I held on to that fantasy. Our third month living in that first dumpy apartment in Hill House, Kate took a trip to Savannah with a “college friend.” It wasn’t just that Kate demanded an open relationship, it was the way she made me feel small for any discomfort I gave voice to. Whenever I let her see that her dalliances got under my skin, she would ridicule my conception of monogamy as purely a form of sexist, patriarchal control. She brought home fresh venereal diseases and told me I would’ve caught them one way or another. But we also brought women home, had more threesomes than I can count. Her attraction knew no specific type or gender. At a show at the 9:30 Club, Kate met an Asian woman with bangs and tattoo sleeves, and they hit it off. That night I sat in a chair in our living room and watched the two of them for a long time before joining. Even the memory of that night still makes me weak with a very base lust. “I love sex,” Kate said during one of our early fights. “Our culture demands that a woman sleep with one man, loyal as a dog, for her entire life, and it’s bullshit. You’re beautiful and sexy and energized for only this fraction of a geologic nanosecond in all this darkness, so how can you not drink down to the last drop this thing that makes you feel vital and alive?”
“Because I don’t have the energy to fuck every night,” I said.
“Oh, I know,” she shot back.
I never got over it. I probably still haven’t. But after a while I stopped being surprised by it. I came to see these men she was with as passing fads, like she was reading a new book she couldn’t put down. Yet she would always finish it, close it, and return to me. I stopped fearing she would leave me for someone else.
“It gets it out of my system,” she explained after the embarrassment of the Frisk episode. “Half the reason people have quote-unquote affairs is they’re just bored. They want new dick, ya know? You want new dick too, Tar Heel, I know it. And we can always come out the other side still loving each other.”
Kate, in other words, encouraged me to sleep around. At first, I just couldn’t. Even the thought of spending the night with another woman scared me. We would have sex, and I knew the second it was over I would hurt. I’d never meet another woman who spoke her own particular language, who’d accuse me of “wanting new dick,” who I would hold at night and just feel such a deep, bone-pressure joy.
Moniza asked me if I would leave Kate.
Following her first feature as a cub writer for Vanity Fair, Moniza happened to be down in D.C. and asked if I wanted to grab a drink. We sat in a smoky bar without the smoke, drank cocktails, and talked transpolar shipping. Moniza was short and curvaceous, with deep brown skin, a round pixie face, and lustrous black hair she pulled over one shoulder and played with as we talked. She’d grown up in London and gone to Columbia, before working her way up at Vanity Fair. I made a joke about the expansion of shipping through the Northern Sea Route as the Arctic ice melted, and when she laughed, she put a hand on my thigh and leaned into my space, so that her long hair dropped briefly into my lap.
“Don’t laugh at what a nerd I am,” I scolded.
“It was a papa joke crossed with some nerdy book-reading,” she declared in that immaculate British accent. We went back to her hotel, and it was the first time I’d been with a woman without Kate involved since my college girlfriend. When we woke up in the morning, I put her against the wall and one of her thighs on my shoulder, brushing her clit with my lips and pushing two fingers as far inside her as they would go, a technique Kate had trained me in, and one that sent Moniza into conniptions.
“Jesus Mary,” she said after she came. “Jesus Mary, Tar Heel.”
Later, I would ask her to not use that nickname.
I followed Kate’s lead: We would tell the other that we had plans with a friend, and then one of us would take a leave of absence for twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours. At first, Moniza and I would simply get dinner and drinks and retire to her hotel room, but then we began taking trips. We actually had to evacuate from Ocean City as a hurricane bore down, and the ruined weekend became a small miracle as we stayed in a dumpy motel off the interstate and did nothing but have sex, order takeout, and listen to the rain. Then I began visiting her in New York.
We saw each other like that, intermittently, for a year and a half. As the 2028 election geared up and FBF sank more and more energy into the final push, I stopped having any time. I had to cancel on her twice, and when she finally did come down to D.C., everything felt off. After dinner, we took a walk past the Nationals stadium, a game in progress. She was awfully quiet.
“It’s better if you just tell me what’s on your mind,” I said.
“I’m sorry.” She stared at the ground. “It’s just been so long since I’ve seen you. I’ve spent more than a bit of time telling myself this is all for fun and play, but it would be nice to know.”
Then she didn’t say anything for a while. I waited, but she only walked forward with her gorgeous brown eyes cast down.
“Need to know what?” I finally asked.
She stopped, looked at me. “Would you leave her?”
So stupid, I told myself. I’d basically fallen in love with every woman I’d ever dated. She gazed at me, confident in her question but as vulnerable as I’d ever seen her.
“It’s not fair to ask me that. I’ve told you our situation. I’ve been totally honest about it.”
Moniza looked away, her face crumpling ever so slightly.
“No, you have,” she agreed quickly. She finally looked me in the eye. “She doesn’t deserve you, Matt.”
Embarrassed, I shook my head. “No one deserves anything or anyone. That’s not how it works.”
“I’m only saying—maybe you don’t want to hear this, but—Kate is a manipulator. She’s a user. I’ve known women like her my whole life. She takes endlessly from you. Charms you when she needs to, and then goes back to using you.”
“Moniza,” I said, as calmly as I could, “please, don’t talk about what you don’t understand.”
She bit her lip, and the tears finally achieved their freedom.
“I love you,” she said. “I hate how hurt you are all the time. I would never treat you like that.”
“You don’t know anything about how she treats me.” Again, I said this with as much calm as I could summon, ignoring how she’d begun that statement.
She laughed, as if this explanation suddenly made total sense. “You’re right, I don’t…” Her voice choked with mourning. “I simply find myself missing you every day.”