Free Animal Husbandry by Laura Zigman

pillow. “I guess I have to tell her, don’t I?”
    I rolled my eyes. “Well, I would
think
so. Unless, of course, you want us
all
to move in together.”
    The extra pillow
.
    The extra place setting
.
    The extra toothbrush
.
    The extra name on the mailbox
.
    All those macrobiotic cookbooks and packages of miso and fluffy clouds of tofu floating in watery …
    “I know, I know,” he said. “I know I have to do it. I just haven’t known how. Somehow I feel like it’s the ultimate act of betrayal, of desertion.”
    “That’s because it is.” I could hear myself saying the words slowly,
too slowly
, as if I were talking to a moron. “Look, I don’t want to feel like I’m forcing you to do something you don’t want to do. I mean, maybe it’s too soon to do this.Maybe you need some time between Mia and me to process everything. And maybe we shouldn’t rush into living together just because in New York it’s too expensive not to.”
    “I don’t want to live with you because it’s
cheaper
,” Ray said.
    “I know.” I paused. “It’s just that if you really want us to move in together—to be together—then I think you better tell her before someone throws her a surprise bridal shower.”
    Ray stopped fondling mid-ab and looked stricken. “God. You’re right.”
    “Not to mention,” I added, since I had his attention, “the fact that it’s wrong to continue deceiving her like this. I mean, if my fiancé wasn’t in love with me anymore and was in love with someone else,” I began, not knowing where I was going with that sentence but suspecting I was headed for a big fat fucking lie, “I’d … well, I’d want to know.”
    “You would?”
    “Of course I would.” I clicked my tongue and hissed like a pissed-off twelve-year-old. “Wouldn’t you?”
    Ray looked pale. “I guess.” He lay on the bed not moving, barely breathing. For a moment I almost felt sorry for him.
    Maybe a triple bed wouldn’t be so bad
.
    I put his hands on his stomach and moved them around slowly, hoping he’d catch on. But he didn’t.
    “You’re right,” he said. “I’ll tell her. I’ll tell her tomorrow after work.”
    The next night Ray didn’t call. Imagining the worst about what they were doing (talking, crying, consoling, reconciling, having sex for the first time in however long they hadn’t had it for), I paced, called Ray’s apartment, called Joan, called Ray’s apartmentagain, called Joan again, then swore to dump him before he had the chance to dump me.
    But the next morning, when he walked into my office, he looked like he’d been hit by a bus.
    “I feel like I’ve been hit by a bus,” he said.
    “You told her?”
    “I told her.”
    “How bad was it?”
    “It was bad.”
    I paused. “How bad?”
    “Let’s put it this way: We started talking at seven, and at four in the morning she was still crying.”
    “Four in the morning?”
    Ray nodded. “I’ve never seen her so upset. It was gut wrenching.”
    Like I cared.
    “I wish you’d come over afterward.”
    “Well, I couldn’t exactly excuse myself. She wanted me to stay with her until she fell asleep, and I felt like it was the least I could do.”
    “You
stayed
until she
fell asleep
?” I hated women who made their boyfriends stay until they had fallen asleep on the nights they’d been broken up with. Besides practically forcing Ray into breaking up with his fiancée, it was the most pathetic thing I could ever imagine doing.
    “I think so. I kind of fell asleep first.”
    “Really.”
    Ray sat down and took off his glasses, rubbing his eyes with his hands. “Look, I couldn’t leave after that. We’ve been together for six years.” He put his glasses back on. “Nothing happened, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
    I bit my thumbnail and stared at him. It didn’t
look
like anything had happened—not that I was certain I’d be able to tell if it had. And besides,
nothing had happened for two and a half years
,