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October 21,2025 – November 10, 2025
Violet had asked to get her things.
She still had his shorts that she had borrowed. She had left things at his place. After everything that had happened, after the awful day, after the silence, after trying once again to understand what they were doing and what he was willing to be honest about, she wanted her belongings back.
His response was not what she expected. “Would you like to bring it by this evening?”
Then he added that his roommate was at work.
Then: “Bring me a bottle of 4 Roses and I’ll venmo you?”
Violet stared at the message. “What,” she wrote back.
She did not know what Four Roses was. He had written it like she should understand, like the meaning was obvious. Eventually she figured out it was bourbon, but that was Jerry: cryptic, oddly specific, and somehow making her work to understand what he was asking for.
He asked if she wanted to talk. “If you want to,” she said.
He offered to make chili beans and crackers.
By then, Violet was already trying to figure out what was actually being offered. A conversation? Dinner? Gas money? An errand? Some strange combination of all three?
“Does that mean you want to talk or give me gas,” she asked.
“Both,” he said.
Then he asked again. “Will you please bring the ‘Four Roses’?”
She told him he knew he could DoorDash that shit.
But yes. Of course, yes.
Then he promised to rub her feet. That was Jerry. Somehow making a request that should have annoyed her, and wrapping it in just enough familiarity that she could feel herself softening even as she rolled her eyes.
So Violet brought him the bottle.
When she got there, he fed her dinner. Chili beans and crackers, exactly as promised. She sat across the room from him instead of beside him. She did not want to slide too quickly back into the old pattern of closeness, where the room got smaller and her body started answering before her mind could catch up.
He told her about the memorial for an old friend he had gone to out of state. He told her about traveling, about losing his wallet and phone, about having to get a new phone, about still not having replaced everything in his wallet. That, he explained, was why he had no way to pay for the bottle. He said he would Venmo her.
It sounded plausible. It also sounded like Jerry.
There was always a story. Usually a story with enough chaos in it to explain the thing that had just happened. A lost wallet. A new phone. A missing card. A logistical mess. Another complication. Another reason something normal had become difficult.
After they ate, he asked Violet to come sit next to him on the couch so he could rub her feet.
She let him.
He started rubbing them gently, and for a little while there was only the familiar quiet of his hands on her. She could feel how easy it would be to let the whole thing dissolve into that. To let the evening become tenderness. To let her body accept what her mind still could not.
But Violet had not come there just for dinner or a foot rub. She had come because she needed him to answer her.
She told him again what she had been telling him all along. She had never asked him to be something he could not be. She had not asked for promises. She had only asked for honesty, transparency and basic respect.
She asked him why he had not contacted her after that awful day, when he knew she was so upset.
He did not have an answer. He just sat there, rubbing her feet, looking sad in the way he often looked sad when the conversation got too close to responsibility.
Eventually he got up to get her a drink from the kitchen. When he came back into the room, he said it casually.
“I have two regular partners.”
Then his voice dropped lower, trailing off into a mumble. There was another name, one Violet had not heard before, and what sounded like a vague reference to someone else he saw less than once a month. He said he thought that had run its course.
Violet went still.
They had just had a conversation about honesty and transparency.
And now, more than a year after he first pulled her into his life, he was telling her this.
Two regular partners.
Maybe a third.
Maybe more.
Violet said she knew about Sara from last year. He said yes, and that Nicole was new.
New.
The word landed hard.
What did new mean? New since when? New since they met? New since Violet had started asking questions? New since the conversation where she had explicitly asked for transparency? New while he was still letting her believe she understood the basic shape of his life?
She had so many questions that she almost could not form any of them.
It was more of a statement than a question: “So I’m just a backup option.”
Jerry’s only response: “Perception is reality.”
Violet almost laughed out loud at the absurdity of this response. Once again, Jerry was being coy with what the both knew was true.
He had now given her three names. But she knew instantly there were more. She knew it in the carefulness of his phrasing. She knew it in what he chose not to say. She knew it in the way “regular partners” opened a door instead of closing one.
Regular partners implied irregular partners.
It implied categories.
It implied a system.
And Violet was only just now being told that system existed.
Then he asked, “You didn’t think we were exclusive, did you?”
She stared at him.
Exclusive? As if that was the issue.
As if Violet had been sitting there under some naïve fantasy that they were boyfriend and girlfriend. As if she had not told him, over and over, that she was not asking for exclusivity. She was asking for honesty and transparency. She was asking to know what she needed to know before consenting.
There was no universe where Violet should have had to ask herself whether they were exclusive.
She should not have had to “think” anything.
She should not have had to guess.
She should not have had to infer the structure of Jerry’s life from omissions, categories, and delayed disclosures.
She should have known what the situation was because Jerry should have told her.
Especially after she directly asked.
Especially after she demanded honesty.
Especially after she made clear that sexual transparency mattered to my consent.
What enraged her was not that she had assumed exclusivity – she had never done any such thing.
She had not been demanding exclusivity. She had been demanding transparency.
But Jerry had deliberately led her toward the possible conclusion that there were no other current partners. He wanted her to continue inside that uncertainty because the uncertainty benefited him.
Then, Jerry questioned why she might have thought what he had carefully led her if not to think then at least consider the possibility.
As if Violet had invented the ambiguity.
As if she had misunderstood something Jerry had made very clear.
As if the problem was her assumption and not Jerry’s concealment.
But Violet had not misunderstood.
She had intentionally been denied the truth.
Then Jerry threw in, “You know, it’s ok if it doesn’t work out.”
Violet looked at him. If it doesn’t work out?
As if this were a casual mismatch. As if they had discovered different favorite restaurants or different ideas about scheduling.
It was such a small sentence, but it did so much.
It made him sound calm. Reasonable. Unattached. Almost generous.
Jerry was making the consequence sound like compatibility.
It’s ok if it doesn’t work out.
This was not something “not working out.”
She could not believe we were having this conversation.
She had tried to be transparent with him when she started seeing someone. She had told him because she believed that was what responsible adults did when sex, intimacy, and emotional entanglement overlapped. She had thought they were operating from some shared baseline of respect and decency.
But he was now telling her that he had at least two partners he had been seeing longer than her, and at least one new partner since they had met.
And he had never told her.
Not when they first had sex.
Not when she asked why Sara had only been disclosed afterward.
Not when she asked for honesty.
Not when she asked for sexual transparency.
Not when he agreed.
Not when he let her keep coming back.
In that moment, something snapped into focus so sharply it almost stunned her.
It was not only that he had lied.
It was not only that he had been juggling women.
It was not even that he had exposed her to risks she had not been allowed to assess for herself.
The thing that hit her in the gut was worse.
He had never cared about her as a human being.
That was the part Violet could not absorb. Because he had made her feel seen in ways that did not feel merely romantic or sexual. He had talked with her about art, faith, music, family, grief, recovery, justice, mortality, parenting, aging, beauty, longing, and the strange ache of being alive. He had made her feel appreciated on so many levels at once that she had mistaken the breadth of his attention for depth of care.
But care would have required honesty.
Care would have required giving her information that might have changed her choices.
Care would have required risking his access to her.
And Jerry had not done that.
Violet told him she could not believe he had been lying to her this whole time.
More than a year.
Jerry objected immediately.
He said he had not lied.
He had omitted things.
Violet stared at him.
She told him lying by omission was, in fact, lying.
He would not agree. There was something almost surreal about watching him hold that line. He seemed to truly believe there was a meaningful distinction between dishonesty and carefully withholding the very information someone had asked for, needed, and deserved. She couldn’t tell if he was trying to convince her that it was okay or himself.
Violet told Jerry how disrespectful it was. How degrading it felt. How much of her consent had depended on information he had willfully and deliberately chosen not to give her.
Jerry just nodded and said, “That’s fair.”
That’s fair. Violet wanted to scream.
Then she said the thing they both knew. “You know why you didn’t tell me. If you had told me, you know that you would have lost access to me.”
He did not argue. He did not deny it. He would not admit it either.
Part of her felt stupid. Stupid for not seeing it sooner. Stupid for wanting to believe the best about him. Stupid for giving him the benefit of the doubt again and again. Stupid for believing the wounded, vulnerable, trying-to-do-better version of him for so long.
She had believed him when he talked about his kids.
She had believed him when he said he wanted to do the right things.
She had believed him when he talked about therapy, recovery, accountability, and rebuilding his life.
She had believed there was a man under the mess who wanted to be honest.
So she asked him about that man.
She asked him if he wanted to teach his children to be honest. If he wanted them to learn from him how to treat people. If he wanted to be an honest person.
He nodded. He looked slightly ashamed.
But he still did not say, “I lied.”
He still did not apologize.
He still did not take responsibility.
He just sat there looking sad, still rubbing her feet and legs.
Then Jerry threw in: “It’s ok if it doesn’t work out.”
Violet was furious. Beyond furious. A part of her wanted to leave immediately, but another part of her wanted him to sit there in the discomfort of what he had done. She did not want to make it easy for him. She did not want to give him the relief of her exit before he had to feel even a fraction of what he had made her carry.
So she stayed. For a while, they sat in silence.
Jerry’s hands kept moving over her feet and legs. Slowly, almost absently at first, then with more intention. He pushed her dress higher.
Violet knew what he was doing.
She also knew she was angry.
She also knew it felt good. She hated that it felt good.
She wished her body had the dignity to refuse what her mind understood. She wished fury could shut everything down cleanly. But her body remembered him. Her body remembered the familiarity, the pull, the heat, the old pattern of his hands becoming the answer whenever words failed him.
She did not stop him. Jerry touched her for a while, and then he stood and pulled her toward him. He led her to his room. Violet knew his roommate would be home from work soon.
He sat her in the chair and pulled her close.
Then he went down on her. For a long time, Violet let him.
At one point, he lifted his head and with a wry smile said, “I didn’t say I didn’t miss you.”
That only made her angrier. As if missing her was the point. As if missing her answered anything. As if missing her could undo the fact that he had lied to her and withheld an entire structure of his life from her while letting her believe she was making informed choices.
Violet wondered, briefly, if this would be the time her body finally crossed the threshold it never had with him. After all the encounters, all the intensity, all the ways he had learned her and failed to learn her, she still had never had an orgasm with him.
It did not happen. Eventually he rose onto his knees and entered her.
She hated how much she had missed the feel of him.
She hated that too.
When he was close to finishing, he said it roughly.
“Take daddy’s cum.”
And then he finished inside her, the way he always did.
As soon as it was over, he asked to hold her on the bed.
Just like always. As if the conversation had not happened.
As if the disclosure had not happened.
As if the word omission was not still hanging in the room.
As if the entire foundation of whatever Violet thought they had been doing had not just cracked open beneath her.
She felt like a zombie. Still, she let him hold her for a little while.
Then he asked if she wanted to stay the night.
She said she needed to go. Violet disentangled herself from him, gathered her clothes, and left.
On the drive home, she felt numb.
Not calm.
Not resolved.
Just numb.
By the time she got home, the shock had started to turn over inside her, but it had nowhere to go. She could not sleep. Her mind kept replaying the words.
Two regular partners.
Nicole is new.
I didn’t lie. I omitted things.
That’s fair.
It’s ok if it doesn’t work out.
Violet had believed they were finally dealing in the truth.
Instead, she had been handed just enough truth to understand how much had been hidden.
And she knew, even then, that he had not told her everything. She also knew that he never would.