Free You'll Grow Out of It by Jessi Klein Page B

sleep. I shared the last of my chewable Mylanta mints with him, crunching on them till both our tongues turned aquamarine.
    He was going back to New York the next afternoon, and I gave him the key so he could let himself out, showing him the secret hiding place under the doormat 4 where he could stash it when he left. We kissed good-bye. Even though the weekend had not unspooled in the exact manner I’d planned, I wanted to believe it had led us to a deeper understanding. I felt good that I had stood my ground and made it clear I was not to be trifled with. In hindsight, I had in fact done none of those things, and I understood literally zero about anything.
    But that night, as I returned home from work, I was driven by the excitement of finding the gesture that would surely be waiting for me somewhere on the premises. I went from room to room, first scanning the obvious places—the kitchen table, the sofa, my desk. Then—and again it is horrible that I must confess this, I am disgusting—I started looking under things. I looked under the blanket on my bed, in the medicine cabinet, in the refrigerator. I don’t know why I was behaving so manically, or why I felt so certain that he would have done what I asked.
    But the thing is, I wasn’t wrong. After twenty minutes of frantic searching, I found it. It was actually on top of the refrigerator, not inside. But I finally saw the little brown paper bag resting atop his business card. I reached in and pulled out a new bottle of chewable Mylanta mints. I looked at his business card—good stock, classy font, letterpress. I flipped it over, and in all-caps he had written, “IT’S A GESTURE!”
    What should I have learned from this? That his gesture was, in fact, telling me exactly who he was? That he would always be the source of a stomachache? That ironic gifts are a red flag? That when I periodically went through all the Facebook photos he was tagged in, it should have been clear to me that I wasn’t the only girl he was sleeping with? That four months later, after several more cross-country rendezvous, after I invited him to accompany me to a comedy festival in Seattle where I was performing, I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover, when I pulled off his underwear, that there were about fifteen mysterious little white bumps all around his penis? That I should have asked about the bumps right away, instead of waiting through two more days of sexual activity, because his silence about them made me feel embarrassed to say anything? Or maybe I should have learned that when I finally did ask him about the bumps, and asked if he’d been having unprotected sex with other girls, of course he would say yes, and that the worst part about it was that I knew I’d been lying to myself way more than he had. And then I could have gleaned that when we got back to New York, and he went to the doctor to get checked out, and I was lying in bed waiting for his phone call to confirm or deny that the bumps were herpes, that I shouldn’t have expected him to call me as soon as he left. That if his appointment was at two p.m., and I hadn’t heard from him by five, of course he had gone to get a drink with a friend, rather than calling me right away to tell me that we were in the clear, and in fact the bumps were a benign fungal infection acquired from a rented kilt he’d recently worn while on a business trip in Scotland. 5
    What I did learn was how easily my standards could go out the window when I met a man whose charm made me weak. Even after the bumpy penis and the hours of not calling to tell me the status of my health, I’m embarrassed to say our relationship still didn’t end until a few weeks later, when I went to his apartment late at night and asked him if he thought we could try really dating just each other, just to see. We were lying in his bed, and I felt sure he’d say yes. Despite everything, we had so much fun together. We made each other laugh and had inside jokes