Julie’s face looked puffy when I saw her. She’d obviously been crying. The expression on her face looked very sad and sorrowful, and I might have felt sorry for her except for one thing. Just as Grandpa Frank predicted, Julie wore an especially low-cut top, and she kept bending over to make sure I got a lot of opportunities to see her boobs.
She was trying to manipulate me. It made me skeptical of everything she said.
We started with Julie telling me what happened and why. She acted as though it was hard not to cry. It felt weird to listen to her and have no idea how sincere she was. She finished her story, and I got the feeling that she expected me to accept her apology and resume our relationship exactly as it was.
I made sure she understood that wasn’t going to happen. “I’ve done some thinking about this. I like you, Julie. I sincerely like you. If you want to continue having a relationship, I’m willing to do that,” I said.
“But it won’t be an exclusive relationship anymore. We will both be free to date other people. In retrospect, we should have done it that way from the beginning. We wouldn’t be in this mess if neither one of us ever expected we’d be exclusive.”
“Ben, I don’t want that,” she said. “Please give me another chance. Nothing like this will happen again. I promise I’ll never cheat on you.”
That sounded good, but I noticed that as Julie was talking, she was bending over in a way that let me look down her blouse. It was just like Grandpa Frank predicted. I realized I shouldn’t automatically believe anything she had to say.
“Julie, I think people our age shouldn’t commit to exclusive relationships,” I said. “We are too young to put chains on each other. People our age come to college hoping to have all kinds of experiences and adventures. People our age drink too much and take too many risks. Julie, I’m willing to forgive what happened last night, but I can’t forget.
“I’m reluctant to say this, but I need to be honest. I realize now that I don’t know you as well as I thought. I realize now that I have no way of knowing if what happened last night is normal behavior for you. I’ve never asked about your relationships with your high school boyfriends. I can’t help but wonder if you cheated on any of them, too.”
At that moment Julie’s face turned bright red, and she looked down, refusing to make eye contact. So. This wasn’t the first time she cheated. Valuable information.
“There’s one more thing I hate to ask, but there’s no way to avoid it,” I said. “Julie, did you have unprotected sex with that guy? The only thing I know about him is that he’s happy to have sex with a girl he just met. Do we need to worry you might have picked up an infection?”
Julie started to cry.
“Yes,” she said. “We had unprotected sex.” I wondered if she would have volunteered that information if I hadn’t asked. Somehow, I doubted it.
“Why don’t you go over to the student health center and get tested?” I said. “That’s something that needs to happen before we can resume having sex.”
The expression on her face is hard to describe. It looked like a combination of humiliation, sadness and regret. I don’t think Julie ever imagined that someone would refuse to have sex without proof she was clean.
When it was all over, I got the feeling that Julie hadn’t expected me to be so determined. I think she imagined that she’d promise never to cheat again, she’d show me her tits a few times, and I’d let things go back to normal.
Because Grandpa Frank encouraged me not to hide in my dorm room, I decided to look for social events that very day. One of the sororities had a mixer, so I decided to go. I wasn’t surprised that some of the people there gave me some funny looks. Julie had made such a spectacle of herself that I knew I’d look like a cuck for a while. @#$!
Otherwise, things went pretty well. I hung out with several cute girls. Things got interesting while I was chatting up one in particular. I was standing on the sorority house’s front porch with a girl wearing a nametag that said SONYA. She said something surprising.
“Isn’t your name Ben?” she asked.
“Guilty as charged,” I replied.
“I’m sorry about what happened last night,” she said. “I heard about what your girlfriend did at that party.”
“Thanks for the kind words. I’m trying not to sulk about it,” I said. “She’s having a much harder time today than me. She’s the one who made a mistake. The only mistake I made was trusting someone who isn’t trustworthy. I expect I’ll make that same mistake again – just not with her.”
“Still, I’m sorry you lost that relationship,” Sonya said.
“Don’t be sorry. I haven’t actually lost anything. I told Julie I’m willing to keep dating her, but not exclusively. If I’d insisted on having an open relationship in the first place this mess wouldn’t have happened.”
“Really? You’re willing to see her again? After what she did?”
“It won’t be the same, obviously. But people are complicated. Despite her flaws, Julie has some nice qualities that I appreciate. Listen, I am very aware of the fact that she humiliated me, but she humiliated herself much more. For a while, she’s going to have a reputation as the campus slut. I have no desire to make things worse by kicking her to the curb.”
Sonya gave me a funny look. “That’s not what I would expect someone in your position to say,” she said.
“I’ll admit that it wasn’t the way I reacted this morning when I heard about it,” I said. “But after I calmed down I remembered how fond I was of her before this happened.”
“What did you think when you saw those pictures?” Sonya said.
“Oh, God. My roommate told me about the pictures. I haven’t actually seen them yet. Have you seen them?” I asked.
“Yeah. You must be the only person on campus who hasn’t seen them,” she said.
“Would you show them to me?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said, getting out her cellphone. She went to some social media page, and there was a picture of Julie, who was obviously drunk and pulling her shirt up high enough to show everyone in the room her big tits.
“I’d recognize those boobs anywhere,” I said.
Sonya laughed so hard a few drops of her drink came out of her nose. “You are taking this remarkably well. How can you make jokes?”
“I can laugh or I can cry,” I said. “I’ll take door number one.”
We chatted for a while, and after a few minutes I noticed that Sonya was looking at me the way women look at men they’re attracted to. That’s when I realized I was unconsciously acting the way Grandpa told me to act around women. I was acting confident in a difficult situation, and Grandpa Frank says confidence is the thing women like most. It surprised and impressed Sonya. I wondered if I should ask for her number, but it seemed too early for that. She was a member of the sorority, so I knew how to find her.
“I made a big mistake in a relationship once,” she said.
“You? Nah. That’s impossible. You obviously have too much common sense to ever make a mistake,” I said.
“I had a stalker. That was no fun at all.”
“Yikes!” I said. “That sounds like a mistake, but not by you. I’m pretty sure the person who made the mistake was the one doing the stalking, not the one being stalked.”
“That’s a very gracious thing to say, but it’s not really true,” Sonya said. “I ignored some pretty obvious warning signs. He was very controlling. He wanted to know where I was every minute of the day, and for a long time I went along with him. I even let him put a tracking app on my phone. I let things get way too crazy before I broke up with him.”
“I hear what you’re saying, but that still sounds like pretty minor errors in comparison to stalking someone. How did you end it?”
“He came to my place drunk, and I called the police,” Sonya said. “They helped me get a restraining order. The next time he came over to bother me, I called the cops and they arrested him for violating the order. I had to go to court and testify against him, but that put an end to it. I’m pretty sure his probation officer is helping him understand the downside of being a stalker.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” I said. “It sounds very unpleasant. Much worse than dating a woman who gets drunk and fucks a frat boy.”
She laughed again. “I think it’s wonderful that you have such a good attitude about it.”
“It’s one of my many endearing qualities,” I said. “It’s on the list right under the fact that I prefer relationships where both people are free to date whoever they want. If you think about it, I’m sure you’ll realize that if you dated someone like, for example, me, you would never have to worry about being stalked.”
“Smooth. Very smooth,” Sonya said.
“That’s what I was going for,” I said.
She was quiet for a while. “I guess I need to give up,” she said.
“Give up what?” I asked.
“Waiting,” Sonya said. “I’m tired of waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” I said.
“Waiting for you to ask for my number,” Sonya said. “I thought I was making it pretty clear I want you to do that.”
“I’m surprisingly oblivious sometimes,” I said, pulling out my cell phone.
We exchanged numbers, and I remembered that Grandpa had told me to always have a list of date ideas ready for times when I could tell a woman wanted me to ask her out. Thanks to Grandpa, I was ready for this moment.
“Sonya, a jazz pianist is performing on the cafe stage in the student center tomorrow. Would you like to hear her play? It sounds like a pleasant way to spend an hour. If she sucks, we can always walk out. Interested?”
“Sure,” Sonya said. “I’ll bet she barely sucks at all.”
I felt pretty good the next morning. I saw Julie sitting with her friends in class. They all seemed to be working as hard as they could to avoid making eye contact with me. The fact that I was going out with Sonya that night made it easy for me to feel upbeat all day.
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