CHASE rolls around on the now-flat air mattress that he’s been sleeping on all night; it was gifted to him by my parents. That’s right. My parents actually like him; he’s the first guy I’ve brought to them that they like. As a cybersecurity major, he makes up for my mom’s poor Internet skills and my dad’s gulibility when it comes to scammers, and I guess they like that.

​

He's super cute when he’s sleeping, and even though every time he gives me permission to wake him up, I can never get myself to do it. Instead, I wait on the couch next to the air mattress. It’s blue, the one color that could never match my emotions when I’m around him. It’s old too; there’s cotton stuffing leaking out of its arms.

​

I’ve only lost my phone in it twenty times, so that’s why it’s on the end table where he now makes sure I put it. I think the whole thing is funny; I still have an accidental voicemail on my phone when we called my number to find it and we’re arguing in the background from how hard it is to move the couch of bricks.

​

He hugs his pillow tightly like I’m going to steal it from underneath him. He has short, flat brown hair but it spikes at the very top; it’s a schoolboy haircut that becomes new again each year. He has brown eyes that contrast my blue ones, and he’s super tall and skinny; he’s 6’ 4” to be exact and has the metabolism of my 16-year-old brother who can eat chocolate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and still stay in shape. Unlike the couch, he’s young, cleanly shaven, and three years my senior.

​

His height sticks out like my red hair. My pink striped PJs read, “Too Cute To Care,” and I know that if it came in his size, that it would fit him more than me. I move over to cuddle him after a half-hour passes.

​

We’re in the basement of my childhood home. It’s summer, so it’s not like we have anywhere else to go. We both live with our parents. This is his room whenever he comes over. We sleep in different rooms, but I kind of like it that way. I can’t express how amazing it feels to wake up in my own bed, forget that he’s in my house, and then get to see him all over again.​

​

The basement is a boring tan, but so is the rest of my house. There’s a foosball table behind the couch, and a treadmill and an at-home office for my mother to the left of the air mattress. Directly in front of us is a huge TV where we binge-watched Breaking Bad together. We’re watching Manifest now. They weren't my kind of shows before I started dating him, but now they were. 

​

It’s cold down here, so he’s wrapped in ten layers. I start to pull all the blankets off him, or else he’ll never wake up. I’m the rooster in the relationship and he’s the raccoon.

​

“Babe,” I say in a soft voice, kissing his cheek, “It’s 11 am already, you gotta wake up.” I lightly kiss him up and down his face, holding my arms behind my back so I don’t accidentally elbow him like last time. 

​

He wakes up easily with a smile. “Today’s the day,” I remind him.

​

Stifling a yawn, he replies, “What day? It’s not your birthday, is it? It can’t be.”

​

“You know it isn’t my birthday,” I joke, “Hint, I move in a week from today.”

​

“Ohhh, it’s the concert. How could I forget, I get to finally meet your friends. The friends you’ve been hiding from me since May.”

 

“They’re excited to meet you,” I say. I’m laying down next to him now on the air mattress, sharing his tiny, scrunched-up pillow.

 

“I’m excited to meet them too. I hope they like me.”

 

“They will.” I know I shouldn’t be shaking so much about entering the next chapter of our relationship, but there’s always a what if dangling from my tongue. I know he’s amazing, and my parents like him, but I’m living with my friends next year on campus. If they don’t like him, I’m absolutely screwed.

 

I distract my thoughts by watching him scroll through Facebook Marketplace for cars. My passion is writing and his is cars, two completely different things; it’s the intensity we share, not the subject. He rarely asks me about my writing, but it's just because it's not really his thing. I don’t see it as a red flag.

​

A huge reason why I’m so uncharacteristically shaky is partly because I’ve never been in a long-term relationship before. Having grown up a romantic, it’s something that’s hard for me to openly admit. They’ve all ended right around this point at the fourth-month mark, and I’m terrified history will repeat itself for the fifth time. I just really want it to work out. He's told me it would. He's talked to me about our future, telling me how much he loves me, so I know he feels the same way. 

​

He taps me gently on the shoulder, closing out of his precious Facebook Marketplace to tell me, “Hey, it’ll be fine.”

 

“You’re so different from my friends and me.”

​

“We balance out our differences though. I’m sure it’ll work with them too,” he assures me. And as if he is made of nothing but magic, my mind clears and I start playing with his hair. He loves the massages I give him. I can hear the scratch sounds my long nails make on his scalp. “Find any good cars?”

 

“Not really,” he says, “I just wish I could poop money so I could get my mustang back.”

 

“You will,” I tell him. And I don’t doubt it. He has a grey BMW now, but he used to have a bright blue mustang. He had to sell it for school, and that’s his dream is to have the mustang again to race around with his friends.

 

“I’m lowkey jealous. Here you are with your dream job at a publishing agency, and look at me!” He pauses, overthinking his own words, before adding, “But you know I’m proud of you.”

​

“I know,” I flirt with my eyes.

​

“It’s a good thing you’re good at writing because wow do we need to work on your driving.” It’s his go-to joke. It’s at least his sixth time saying it. He acts like I’m going to kill him every time I drive him someplace. 

​

Once we get all ready and everything, we drive to the concert. We’re coming from the East Lansing area and the Pine Knob theatre is near Detroit so we have a ways to go, plus we want good seats. Michigan usually means cold, but it’s still summer so it’s a good 80 degrees out and sunny. We’re meeting my friends there, two of them. They’re my roommates for the next school year.

 

We sing some hardcore rock country on the way there, and he makes all his usual comments about how everyone on the road drives worse than him. He always makes a comment about how foreign drivers suck at driving. His stereotypes make me want to hit a reverse button so he can take back what he said; but I’m attached to him and I don’t want to start a fight for nothing, so I remain silent and put an invisible zipper on my lips. Everyone has flaws. Everyone. This is his minor flaw; it’s nothing in comparison to all the good things, like how he holds the door open for me and sends me morning texts consistently.

 

We get there and pick up my friends from the Culver’s parking lot so we can all park together. There’s bumper-to-bumper traffic all the way to the parking area. I’m glad my friend, Ally, takes over driving, let’s just say that. We’re all crunched inside my tiny Impala with the radio on mute, and I think it makes Chase’s voice even louder and more magnified as he introduces himself.

 

At first, the greeting goes well between both parties. Ally and Skylar say hi and tell him what they’re studying (English like me) and he tells them he’s into Cybersecurity. They’re all amazed by that. “Ooo you should totally help us set up our router,” Skylar begs while showing off her new blue hair (it’s a new color every few months or so), “We totally suck at technology. I speak on behalf of all of us.”

 

I laugh until he responds. We’re going 1 mile per hour at this point. There’s napkins all over the ground on the passenger side, and the back is full of clothes I’ve been meaning to return for three months now. Plus it still smells like the strawberry smoothie I accidentally spilled on the seat one evening.

 

“I got you guys covered,” he replies, “Let’s hope I can get it done by Friday, cuz let’s be honest, you guys won’t be able to get it all set up on your own.”

 

Chase, why would you say that out loud??

 

My friends look away from Chase, and so do I. “Look, there’s some nice cars here, aren’t there?” I ask him to give him a second chance at a good first impression. It was weird seeing him from a different perspective than I was used to. I'd only see him one-on-one, but I've never seen him in engage with other people until now. And to be honest, I didn't fully recognize him. 

​

“Hell yes,” he says, “If I had a motorcycle here, I’d be flying past all these lazy people.”

​

He’s nervous. He’s got to be. The real Chase wouldn’t be saying all these things.

​

I carry the same thought process with me for the rest of the night.

​

The concert is the best concert I’ve ever seen. Macklemore opens up and the Imagine Dragons perform all the songs I love. I belt it out with my friends, while Chase bobs his head a little bit here and there while sipping his beer that only he can have since we’re all under 21. He reminds us of how we’re underage three times.

​

I’m trying to jam it out to all the songs as fire comes on the stage and as everyone waves the white flashlight on their phones on the slow parts. Pine Knob is huge; there are people in lawn chairs and people standing over every last inch of the grass. I feel bad for the little girl behind us because her mom is piggy-backing her, her back dying while trying to peek over Chase’s head. I smell alcohol all over the place, that and sweat, lots of it.

​

 I try so hard to enjoy it but I can’t because the whole time in the back of my mind I already know that Ally and Skylar hate the man who is probably going to marry me someday. He talks about it all the time, what our life will be like. 

​

It gets even worse when Skylar fan-girls over a guy standing in front of us that she says looks like Post Malone. “He’s the one with all the tattoo’s right?” I say to make conversation.

​

But when Chase adds, “Yeah, he’s the fat one,” I have to literally look down at the ground to avoid my friends’ eyes.

​

I never remember him making a comment like that before. He never called me fat. If I were to gain weight, would he? Would he care? He already knew about my past battle with anorexia, so I didn't understand why he would say something like that.

​​​

To try to forget his hurtful words, I belt out the words to “Natural” and “Radioactive.” I’ve never been so grateful that Imagine Dragons don’t write a ton of love songs. The raging tones make my feet vibrate.

​

When it’s time to go, I ask Ally via text message if she likes him. She says yes, and I know it’s crap because she always sends me a paragraph at least.

​

I wait until we drop him off at his house before asking my friends about him. I kiss and hug him goodbye first. And they still beat me to the punch.

​

Ally speaks up first, probably because she’s sitting right across from me in the very front of the car. She has on a full face of makeup, bright lipstick making her look like Taylor Swift during her Red era. She’s in a skirt and tights; because it would be the end of the world if she matched either of us, I’m in leggings and Skylar is in black jeggings. We planned it.

​

“Taylor,” she says, flipping the question back on me, "We could sit here and tell you what we think, and it may sway you one way or the other, but you're the one in the relationship. It's not our job to tell you what to do. How did you think today went? Honestly." 

​

Despite knowing how awful it went, I find my instinct automatically rushing to defend Chase. "He had a bad day," I reply, "He's not usually like that—" It isn't until I hear myself defending him out loud that the pieces of the puzzle start connecting. It's like I had puzzle pieces fall underneath the table that were lost until this very moment; I'm finally looking in the right places to see what's been in front of me all along. Somehow, I had told myself that Chase was this perfect human being and I ignored all the things he'd said and done to me that I didn't like. It's easy to dismiss hurtful things when they happen to you, but when they happen to my friends or other people, they're more noticeable. 

​

Ally is reading my mind as she's watching everything hit me all at once. She can see the stress in my face when I put my head in my palms, as I rethink every memory I've had with Chase. "It's called lovebombing, what he did to you," Ally informs me, from her own experience, "He showers you with all this affection early on to get you to trust him so that no matter what he did, you'd be on his side. It's all manipulation."

​

She's right. I don't want her to be right, but she is. 

​

I find myself thinking back to the tickle wars. Going to Texas Roadhouse twenty minutes before it closed and having the waitresses draw straws for who had to take our table. His BMW parked outside next to my mailbox. Our first date and the awkward silence before the first kiss. Him playing with my dog, who somehow loved him more than me. Him crying in my arms for the first time. 

​

These are all the parts of him I love so much, but I can't help but ask myself if they're even really him? 

​

Now, as I look back, the memories are like butterflies turning to the dark side and biting and attacking me, the last creatures you would ever expect to hurt you. 

​

It's like Ally knows, like she's been through this before. She puts her hand on my shoulder, and Skylar joins her. "You don't have to hate him. You just have to walk away. That's it. Don't give him the control." She corrects herself. "And I don't mean to make it sound like it's easy, because it isn't. I went back to my love bomber three separate times." She pauses. "You're in the earlier stages. As your friend, I advise you to get out before it gets deeper, but I also don't want you to do it unless you truly believe it's the right thing."

​

I don't know if it's what I believe until a week later. ​

​

***

I find myself on Chase's porch. I ring the doorbell and​​​​​​​​​​ he comes outside to meet with me. He has a tiny house with a fenced-in backyard. There’s this huge white dog named Hunter that looks more like a polar bear with his size, and through the window, I can see him slobbering all over the glass, watching us.

​

There’s a few lights dangling from the porch ceiling, but other than that, it’s pretty bare. “What’s up?” he asks, “I wasn't expecting you."

​

We sit on the porch stairs because there’s no chairs to sit on. It hurts my tailbone. I've never broken up with someone before. I don't know how I'm supposed to this. How does this usually go? The whole "it's not me it's you" is not an approach that's going to fly for me. 

​

I'm going to wing this. "Look," I tell him, forcing myself to give him eye contact, "I don't think this is working anymore."

​

The second he senses me pulling away, he starts showering me yet again with reasons why he loves me and can't live without me. It's just a confirmation of what Ally taught me. Little does he know, this time I'm educated about it, and this time I can see through him. "I love you," he goes on, "We were gonna move in together, remember? What about all our plans?"

​

I prepared for this, I expected him to try to reel me back in. 

​

I start to get up. He motions for me to sit back down, but I push his hand out of my way.