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

blackberries out of the fridge, and showered there when it was more convenient than driving all the way back to my apartment.
    Then one day, without warning, I got a call from Lance. He asked for my keys to the house and told me that we should stop speaking until Carmen, his now “official” girlfriend, was able to feel a bit more comfortable with the idea of all of us being friends.
    “But, how am I gonna see Jaggy?” I asked, appalled at the idea.
    “That’s the thing. I kind of think it’s best if you don’t.”
    “If I don’t see my own child? I agreed to let her live with you! This isn’t fair to me!”
    “Jenny, it’s temporary,” he said. “Carmen is insecure.”
    “Well, maybe you shouldn’t have told her what I said about her eyebrows!”
    “Jenny, I obviously didn’t. She knows nothing about that. She hates you for other reasons—” He stopped and refocused. “My therapist thinks I need to cut you off.”
    “Cut me off? Your therapist said that? Dr. Shaw? I thought he loved me!” I made a mental note to write a scathing Yelp review of Dr. Shaw as soon as I got home.
    “I have to do it, Jen.” His voice was drenched in maturity.
    Seething with anger and frustration, I went to the Ralphs and used our joint credit card to buy groceries for everyone in the store. Loading my car with cases of wine, crates of tampons, and a whole king salmon, I got a text. It read:
    “This is my last correspondence. Let’s touch base in six months. I love you always, Lance.”
    I stood in the parking lot as a wave of silent anguish washed over me. Despite my best efforts to stay completely connected, Lance was cutting the cord on our friendship.
    Six months came and went, and aside from one or two logistical phone calls he made to me from work, we had no contact.
    Despite the unwelcome change, my life had taken a major upswing. I was busy traveling the world, working once every two months and tripling the number of guys I’d ever slept with. There was little-to-no time to focus on my ex-boyfriend-best-friend-pseudo-father-figure and his nonthreatening-new-girlfriend-who-I-was-convinced-would-love-me-if-she-knew-me. That was, until the unthinkable happened: I met Jason.

    My Future Husband
    I won’t bore you with the details of how we got together right now. I still have a whole goddamn book to fill with shit. I can’t give you everything in this chapter, so just relax!
    For now, let’s just say, I met him: the man that would change the course of my life forever.
    On rare occasions, I’d think of Lance and wish I could share my newfound happiness with him. My world was flipped upside down and he was the only person who knew me well enough to appreciate what that meant. One night after Jason and I made a sex tape with the video camera Lance’s mom gifted him for Christmas, I expressed my sadness about the situation.
    “It’s a shame because you guys would really love each other,” I said, scratching dried semen off my navel. “What pisses me off the most is that I would never have left Jaggy had I known I was going to meet someone and get into something so serious, so fast. I really think we should just go up to the house and steal her back.” I laughed, only half-serious.
    “Yeah, and for shits and giggles, let’s just take Carmen too.”
    “Totally, and then she’ll see how cool we are and—”
    He cut me off. “Jenny, I’m kidding. We aren’t kidnapping anybody.”
    “But—”
    “No.”
    “Like, not even in a fun way?”
    “There is no fun way to kidnap someone. People don’t like it. Ever.”
    I eventually ran this idea past Lance when we met for coffee months later. He agreed with Jason that Carmen would be hard-pressed to see the humor in being kidnapped; she wasn’t even cool with the two of us getting coffee. Before we parted ways, I told Lance that I was going to marry Jason. I think he was shocked things were happening so fast, but was still able to be encouraging. The truth