I woke up Saturday morning in a frigid hotel room to a bright clock that blinked 6:30 am, too early to wake the warm body next to me. His loose arms wrapped me up when I inched closer. Completely ignoring the calamity I resurrected the night before, I rolled over to his open eyes and warm smile. This was real. This time things would be different.

Rewind the clock five hours earlier. Same hotel room, Bombay Sapphire flowing freely through my veins, my head slowly processing the words ex-boyfriend cried to me: He still loved me, he missed me, he hated that I wasn’t part of his life, he wanted to be with me. He loved me. I loved him and I didn’t need to hear another word.

Are you getting a bad feeling from this story already? Because I am, all over again. I won’t blame inebriation for the impressive rap sheet of poor decisions I tallied up in a quick forty-eight hours. Despite what I told my friends, despite those monotonous conversations that circled and circled, I knew if given the opportunity I would sleep with ex-boyfriend. But who didn’t?

The story kicks off with a mundane car ride. I’ll sum it up in a quick paragraph:

We loaded the car with seemingly endless amounts of alcohol and started the two-hour journey to the hotel. I worried the ride would be awkward: two-hours, ex-boyfriend, myself and a friend, no music, no clear exits, all a potent mixture with the potential for disaster. My friend blatantly struggled to find a mutually acceptable topic of conversation. No discussing ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend, no referencing my new found alcoholic side. My mind raced as I lost interest in the conversation. Their voices droned childish jokes at the groom’s expense, but I idly focused on the bumps in the road and the weekend ahead. How on earth would I behave myself?

Pinpointing signs of trouble that should have sounded off the loudest, shrieking sirens in my head is simple. Why I ignored them all, however, is not.
The first unmistakable sign of trouble came immediately after we checked into the hotel room. Some part of me (that I want to hunt down and destroy) snapped back into domesticated-girlfriend mode when I offered to iron his shirt for him. So much for the strong-independent-woman-themed weekend. Ex-boyfriend has always been oblivious and lackadaisical, the two qualities I strangely loved and thought set him apart from others. Turns out those two qualities keep him trapped in adolescence when he was going to wear a wrinkled maroon shirt and ugly khakis to a rehearsal dinner. I still felt, for some odd and unknown reason, that he was a reflection of me. I couldn’t let him leave the hotel looking like a disgusting slob.

The bridal party headed to dinner at a run-down country club that would make Tiger Woods weep. I took to the bathroom and packed seventy beers and four bottles of liquor in a tub of ice while mentally preparing for the marathon of drinking that would soon ensue. Shortly there after another group of friends arrived and thus began the drinking. Most of the attendees viewed the wedding as a friendly reunion rather than the union of two people in love. It’s not that we didn’t support our friend’s decision to marry a woman who could be the spawn of Anne Coulter and Keanu Reeves, we just needed alcohol to get through it.

Six beers, four rounds of beer pong, five cigarettes and one pint of gin with a dash of tonic later, the drama began to unfold. The second unmistakable sign of trouble came when ex-boyfriend followed me outside for a cigarette. He took a drag and with his exhale came a plume of smoke and emotion. In the span of five minutes, he filled me in on the previous year of his life in which sparse communication had kept me safely at bay. His mouth, moving at auctioneer speeds, rattled stories of family problems and girlfriend stories. Yeah, I know. Girlfriend stories. My effort of feigning interest clearly failed when I heard myself spewing out supportive comments with genuine interest. I should have walked away right then. No, I should have ran. Telling me about possibly moving in with his girlfriend served as a huge sign I missed or ignored: either he’s enough of an asshole to tell me something like that in an effort to hurt me or prove a point, or he’s one hundred percent foolish. An elaborated version of our mini-heart-to-heart was on the way. I passed time with gin.

Writing about the specifics he said to me that night would be pointless. At the time, I believed every word. Looking back though, he didn’t mean any of the speech he effortlessly delivered. How foolish I was to believe it all. I embraced each ounce of attention he paid me. Until that moment, it felt like I hadn’t been whole, like pieces of me had been missing. But each overzealous compliment filled those holes. I felt safe, like I could finally break down the walls I spent so much time meticulously building. But the little voice in the back of my head (often taking the combined tone of my mother and best friends) reminded me of the feeling’s transience. I ignored it. That voice issued caution and warning: be cordial without being inviting; drink but not in excess; sleep in a separate hotel room; and most importantly, at all cost, remember the girlfriend waiting for him at home. So when he asked if I wanted another drink as his hand brushed across my back, I replied with a smile “Of course I do.” Each sip of gin lulled that annoying you’re-better-than-this voice. I certainly knew better, but clung to each moment of fleeting intimacy.

As if it wasn’t painfully obvious, we slept together later that night, sans condom and acted as if we hadn’t missed a beat in our relationship. We spent Saturday morning in bed, nursing hangovers while reaffirming the sincerity of our drunk words, ad nauseum. When we left the room for stale bagels and coffee, surprisingly none of our mutual friends questioned what transpired the night before. I imagine they just assumed the worst, which happened to be correct. Early in the afternoon, he tended to groomsmen tasks (most notably getting the groom drunk and telling him a gassed car waited should he choose to run) and I met up with my best friend who drove in from South Carolina to commence the disaster relief effort.

Remember how I wrote that we sexed without a condom? What a great decision! The scene of the wedding happened to be in your average small town, USA. Not only is the Morning After Pill a complete bitch to get in small, conservative America, but I spent a sweet three weeks paranoid about STDs. That, my friends, will teach you to use a condom every. single. time. Luckily, my best friend had a few hours to spare before the wedding. As we drove to the first pharmacy, I made a mental list of extra items I could purchase in order to make the transaction as nonchalant as possible. A magazine, diet coke, morning after pill, vitamin C, double-sided tape, just your average Saturday afternoon grocery list, I’d say. Truth be told, there’s really no good way to buy the morning after pill without feeling like a little bit of a whore. Lesson learned.

I dealt with so many assholes in my quest to avoid having a bastard-affair baby that I could have created a rating system. It would attempt to describe the pharmacists’ better-than-thou response on that Saturday when asked of the morning after pill. I’d imagine it would use a scale of zero (meaning the manner in which the most liberal doctor on earth, having been in a similar predicament, would empathize with and handle the situation) to ten (meaning the manner in which Jerry Falwell’s reanimated-bloated corpse would respond when asked of premarital sex).

The first pharmacist received a five out of ten. She informed me, with a slightly raised eyebrow, that I could find the pill at the nearest Wal Mart. Wal Mart, really? Skeptical but desperate, I had no better option. To Wal Mart we went. This is where Marge came into my life. Big Marge. Wal Mart employee number 65,000. Before she even opened her fat lips, I knew asking for her assistance would be like pulling fucking teeth. Marge get’s a perfect ten out of ten on my imaginary scale. In fact, I’m going to go so far as to give Marge a big fuck you for blatantly judging me. Like I didn’t feel shitty enough about the situation. No, certainly not. My hungover eyes and alcohol-dripping pores clearly begged for her to take thirty seconds to answer each question with bonus dagger eyes the whole time. It’s absolutely comical to go from New York City, where even Bloomberg seemed excited about Babeland’s vote-and-get-a free-dildo promotion, to a small, conservative town where everything sex related is an abomination. Call me naive for thinking buying Plan B would be easier than storming the beaches of Normandy.

The third and final attempt, we hit up the CVS across town (twenty minutes before the wedding, mind you) with success. The pharmacist at CVS received a gold-medal earning three out of ten. Slightly judgmental in tone but no clear facial expressions that made me believe he would remember me once I exited the store.

$50 dollars and a body full of hormones later, I sat in the church as the bride walked sternly down the aisle. The groom looked like he was about to shit his pants and barely cracked a smile, my friend wept tears of great, great sadness and ex-boyfriend’s eyes were locked on mine for the majority of the service. I thought about giving him the ol‘ we-aint-having-a-baby- thumbs up, but felt it wasn’t the most appropriate church mannerism.

The reception was to be expected: the food so-so, friends and family members danced stupid group dances, I quadruple fisted gin and tonics and mentally prepared for the rest of the night. For those of you out there who are morning after pill virgins, two pills are taken twelve hours apart. I needed to stay up til 3:30am to take the second pill. After the reception, we settled in the same frigid hotel room, the clock blinked 11:30 as our friends retired to their own suites. Four hours to kill before I could take the second dose of the morning after pill, ensuring my poor decision the night before would be nothing more than a distant memory. We killed time with tickle fights, spooning, massages, and various other nauseating activities.

I have thought about 3:35 am on June 14th hundreds of times. I’ve talked about, over analyzed and replayed that moment over and over. I can’t figure out how I didn’t see it coming. How naive was I? There is no acceptable reason why I thought he wouldn’t disappoint me, again. Ex-boyfriend is the only person on earth who constantly lets me down. He did it when we were together and continued the tradition long after we broke up. Shame on me for allowing it, for expecting more of him solely because he told me he loved me. As we laid tangled together, I asked him what he was going to do about the situation. Surprise shouldn’t have been my first reaction when he said “I’m going home to Toronto to be with the girl I love.”

One more time: I’m going home to Toronto to be with the girl I love.

A fatal blow, effortlessly delivered as he held me.

Speechless is one word to describe how I felt after hearing those words. Angry is another. Hurt is a third. But what really drove the nail in the coffin is when he yelled at me for ten minutes and told me that I “just didn’t understand” and had “no concept of how special she was.” She must be special, you know, if he was willing to cheat on her with his ex.

The endless talk about loving me and wanting to be part of my life, the crying, the cuddling, and love-of-my-life speech, all emotional warfare to get me to sleep with him? Seems that way. The sad thing that I hate admitting is he could have treated me like shit and I still would have done it.

There’s this Bob Marley song called “Waiting in Vain,” replace all the female pronouns with their masculine counterparts and you have an excellent summation of my relationship with ex-boyfriend over the last two years. It hit me that Sunday morning, hours after he lectured me for judging him and his girlfriend unfairly based on his previous night’s actions.

Picture this: I’m sitting on the curb of  the hotel with my hood covering most of my face. Ash waits at the tip of a smoldering cigarette for the breeze to dispose. The iPod in my hand blares Marley’s beat from my headphones for any passerby to hear. If you had passed me at that very moment, you probably wouldn’t have noticed the tears in my eyes as they collected faster than I care to admit. Completely engulfed in Marley’s tune, I didn’t notice the blue sedan that rolled to a stop two feet in front of me. The windows slowly rolled down, but I couldn’t hear my friend’s voice as he called my name. He exited the car and sat next to me. I tried to hide the heartsick expression that graced my face.

“We’re going to go pick up the tuxedos and cuff links. You wanna come?” he said.

“No thanks” I replied.

He moved towards the car and asked if I was okay.

Clearly, I was not okay. I felt used, like a section of the newspaper you read and throw away without giving a second thought. I couldn’t tell if my stomach cramped and churned from the assault of hormones  or a result of the sheer terror I felt when thinking about how many diseases I potentially exposed myself to. He said he had been safe since we broke up, but also said it as easily as when he told me he loved me and didn’t want to hurt me.

After three cigarettes, I peeled my jello legs off the curb, made myself presentable in my best friend’s suite as she coached me for a the conversation I was about to have with ex-boyfriend. I didn’t hear a word she said. Whatever I was going to say would come from pure heat-of-the-moment-anger sprinkled with overemphasis on pretentious words.

I entered our room. Ex-boyfriend has never been good at hiding his feelings. He threw clothes across the room and smashed chargers and toiletries into a bag while exhaling loudly, unmistakeably signifying his anger. Why, exactly, he was mad I have yet to figure out. Guilt has an interesting way of transforming to anger in cowardly men who refuse to own up to their mistakes.

I pass my luggage to my best friend. The adrenaline kicked in as I locked the door behind her. I don’t remember exactly what I said. But at the very least I made the following points:

• We weren’t going to have a two-way discussion.
• He was going to listen to everything I had to say.
• He used me.
• He treated me unfairly.
• He had no right to yell at me like he did previously when I question how “special” his girlfriend must have been if he was so quick to cheat.
  

Being the big fucking punching bag that he is, he agreed with everything I said. I wanted a fight. I wanted to lunge across the room and rip the fake RayBans off his twisted little face. I wanted to call his girlfriend and tell her every detail of what happened, so he’s never be able to hide from it. Instead, he absorbed every criticism and kept his mouth shut. It was the least satisfying fight I’ve ever had with him and I still had a two-hour ride home to look forward to.

On the ride home, I kept my mouth shut with the exception of one or two sarcastic comments, all of which he over zealously laughed at. We stopped for drinks halfway home. My friend gassed the car and he followed me into the gas station like a weak puppy. He didn’t need to say anything: it was all in his eyes. He looked sad and distraught, like he was the one who had been used. He wanted to talk, but I was perfectly fine never having a conversation with him ever again.

Finally, after the longest car ride of my life, we dropped him off at his home. My friend got out of the car and hugged him. I stayed safely seated in the front of her car. He looked at me and clearly was wishing I would get out of the car for a few last words, maybe even a hug. I put my sunglasses on and turned away. It might have been the most dramatic moment of my life. Writing about it really doesn’t do much justice.

An hour later, he called me repeatedly. I ignored each call. He texted me, telling me that if I didn’t want to talk that I should just tell him and not ignore his calls. I responded with the last words I have ever said to him.

“Really not interested in hearing anything you have to say.“

Five months later, I still hope those are the last words I ever say to him.

What I did was wrong. Plain and simple. If the situation had been reversed, if he had cheated on me with her, I would have been furious. That said, I’ve always believed that people cheat for a reason.

So this is where I stand: despite this blaring summation of forty-eight hours of my life I don’t regret a single hour. I made bad choices, clearly, but regret is for those who refuse to learn from mistakes.

It’s not all bad. In the end, no matter how brutal the ride was, I finally found the closure I desperately needed. If we’re being honest, I spent the summer performing a self-inflicted emotional coup. Populated by binge drinking and bonding with friends, I overthrew that paralyzing, tired mentality I once loved. The one that kept me from erasing ex-boyfriend from my life. I broke down that mother fucking cage and set it on fire. I’ll never let another person use me again.

The best part about this whole disaster is how my friends responded. I came home to a group of people who are more or less family now. They listened to me endlessly, got me drunk when I needed it, helped me burn everything he ever gave me. I shut that box in my brain that kept every memory of my relationship with ex-boyfriend, locked it and threw away the key. Now that I’m almost finished writing this, I don’t ever need to open it again. And, luckily, I am still STD free.

Bless my friends, really. I never hit rock bottom because they wouldn’t let me. And for that, well I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to repay them.

-Anastasia