Free I Like You Just the Way I Am by Jenny Mollen

sabotage, I left the house to go hate-fuck Cab.
    “You feeling better?” Cab asked me later, while gnawing on a postcoital Cliff Bar.
    “Yeah, I’m good,” I lied.
    I spent the rest of that night alone in my apartment, trying to get some catharsis by painting a picture of a woman bleeding all over herself. Before I knew it, it was 8 A.M . and still too early to drive back to the house to confront Lance. The thing that upset me most was the fact that I’d spent the last week feeling sorry for him. He kept telling me how he hoped I’d change my mind about us, how he might be developing an eating disorder, and how he still pictured me wearing his mother’s wedding veil. He even got me to fucking make a Sophie’s Choice between my dogs! By 8:05, I was furious and already in my car, speeding up Mulholland.
    When I arrived at the house, the mystery car was still there. This time I didn’t bother with entering through the garage. I marched straight through the front door.
    “Bubby? Hello?” I called out, feigning innocence and walking briskly toward the bedroom.
    When I entered, I saw a blonde, not-as-cute version of me with weird eyebrows looking up from my side of our bed.
    “Hi,” she said awkwardly as Lance charged out of the bathroom in his Christmas pajama pants to intervene.
    I eked out a hi before my macho exterior crumbled and I dashed out of the room in a cold sweat. Whatever harebrained schemes I’d been plotting seemed to vanish from my mind as I ran into the workout room (read: empty guest bedroom with a shitty treadmill) and tried to regain composure. It wasn’t the visual confirmation of Lance fucking someone new that bothered me so much as the fact that he now had a part of his life that I had no involvement in. I felt like I’d just walked in on my father with another family he’d been hiding from me. (Thank God my real father had a vasectomy the minute he realized the shelf in the back of his convertible wasn’t considered a legal seat for passengers.) My pain didn’t stem from wanting to be the chick with weird eyebrows lying in our bed; it stemmed from feeling out of control and abandoned. In seeing Lance with someone else, I was being forced to accept that I no longer had any power. Lance wasn’t going to die without me. In fact, he was doing just fine. Up till this point, I’d managed to preserve all my exes, like a butterfly collection on the wall. Every one was color coded, with a needle through their hearts and a vague look of approval in their eyes. The relationships might have ended, but their love was forever frozen in time.
    Just as I heard the front door shut behind the girl, Lance walked into the room.
    “I wanted to tell you, but I was just scared. You know I’m not over you or us. It’s been a fucking week. But it’s just like you said, we have to accept that this is happening. This other person is good for me. She is helping me heal, and I really need that. I need company. You know I can’t be alone without ending up covered in udon noodles and my own vomit.” He tried to hold me.
    “I just— I— Her eyebrows scare me and she was touching Jaggy—and—she’s clearly seven to eight years older than me.”
    “Jenny, she is three years older than you and very sweet. She knows all about you. You and I are always going to be in each other’s lives. It’s all going to be okay.”
    As I left, I convinced myself that Lance was right. I even started to like the idea of him being with someone I wasn’t remotely threatened by. I kind of couldn’t wait to buy her something stylish and take her for a spa day, where we could reshape her brows and I could judge her naked. I always thought of Lance as a sort of father figure, so I decided to look at his taking a new mate as giving me a much-needed mother figure.
    I spent the next month doing all the things I would have done if Lance and this new woman were my parents. I stopped by the house for mail, ate all the unwashed