Grant’s tire crushed a hypodermic needle as his BMW rolled to a stop at a red light. He was explaining wireless internet to Taylor, the woman riding shotgun (a 7.5, he will later rate her to his buddies). Grant observed his pre-gentrified surroundings with an arrogant ease that relied entirely on being inside of an automobile. They were headed to a pop-up concept in an abandoned warehouse in Denver Arts District that was doing a $250/head tasting menu.

Wireless Fidelity… Radio waves… Would you roll your window up?… Fiber Optics… Because the AC is on… Antennas… Taylor was checking her reflection in the side mirror to ensure her mascara had imprinted onto her eyelids, making her look like a drunk aunt. Scrunching her nose, she gave herself a hyperbolic preview of how she was going to look once the Botox left her system. Taylor was sorry she’d asked how internet works, until she realized that she hadn’t.

Fifteen minutes into their first date, both of them thought it was going well. Grant believed this because it was his understanding that every woman on the planet would commit murder one to be wined and dined by an objectively handsome (if not for a yarmulke-shaped bald spot) gentleman, and taken for a spin in a luxury vehicle with an unimaginative vanity plate: BMRLVR (the utter low-hangingness! Taylor and a woman named Rea will agree, cackling over a shared cigarette several hours later, Rea’s red lipstick like fire on the filter). Grant was certain that Taylor, well-fed and buzzed from French wine she wasn’t educated enough to pronounce, would be riding him with enthusiasm in no time at all.

Taylor’s metric for how the date was going was based solely on the fact that she was detoxing from male attention. Similar to exposure therapy, Taylor had spent all her free time during the last month going out with any man she believed would bring her closer to the edge of the cliff. She was confident in the method’s effectiveness after having used it several years ago to quit drinking alcohol. Fifteen blue raspberry-flavored wine coolers and one stomach pumping later, Taylor had achieved cold turkey sobriety.

In a few short weeks, Taylor, thirty-two, will free fall and be reborn. She’ll commit suicide, so to speak— shave her head, cut off her eyelashes (we get the rest of it, but why did you do that? her otherwise supportive friends will ask), stop waxing her upper lip, quit barre classes or sucking in her stomach, and act in ways that society deems generally feral. In a few short weeks, Taylor will be the happiest she’s ever been in her entire life.

Grant was thirty-eight years old and split his time between New York and Denver (the best of both worlds, he’d say often. And, why not?). He clocked-in an average of nine hours each week for a financial firm owned by his father and started by his grandfather’s father. When Grant wasn’t skiing in Hokkaido or sailing around Martha’s Vineyard, he trolled dating apps, cocktail lounges, and the international aisle at the grocery store in search of grateful women to sleep with. The latter was where he found Taylor, comparing prices on different brands of wasabi paste. (You look like someone who knows how not to burn rice, he’d said, in reference, she guessed, to the fact that her mother is Vietnamese. Would you like my number? Taylor had responded in what Grant felt was record speed.)

Unlike his Ivy League brethren who were engaged to Mary Catherine’s and welcoming their second child into seersucker bassinets with Sayre’s, Grant self-identified as alternative. This belief in his own complexity seeped into all corners of his life. His residences were more Yayoi Kusama than Monet, his shirts more vintage Joy Division than Brooks Brothers. In the romantic sphere, he was invested in the humanitarian act of finding someone to temporarily rescue from the horrors of financial inferiority (someone with student loans and credit card debt who regularly shoved crinkled one-dollar bills into self-checkout machines after ringing organic produce in as regular). He took considerable pleasure bringing insecure blondes with too much eyeliner, nipples shining through their sheer, Rent-the-Runway gowns as his plus-one to high society events. Half-Golden Retriever, half-emotional terrorist, there wasn’t much Grant could do to lose favor in the eyes of his people. To operate with such confidence—the kind informed by unconditional acceptance in the upper echelon—is bound to wreak havoc on anyone’s personality.

Much like Make-A-Wish for relatively healthy and able-bodied women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five (no exceptions here), Grant delighted in watching his dates absorb the exclusive surroundings he may otherwise take for granted. (You’re absolutely correct to note that, Gillian! It is cool that the waiter comes around and washes our hands with a warm towel in between courses, he recently validated an eager Spirit Airlines flight attendant at his favorite foie gras joint in Midtown.)

But like any non-profit, this wasn’t some kind of handout. After much data collection, it was Grant’s understanding that this type of woman was more attentive to his needs (i.e. gave more/better head than rich girls), and was less likely to give him a hard time for ghosting. Furthermore, she wouldn’t deign to throw a 9-pound bronze paper weight at his temple if they were to discover he’d been stepping out, protected by their wealthy father’s attorney. (Like a tennis ball, Grant’s short-lived go at monogamy had been derailed when he got distracted by an attractive mother-of-four, the night shift clerk at his local bodega in Chelsea.) And even if these women did push back on his lack of follow through or diminished post-coital interest, who cared? That’s what doormen and the block function on iPhones were created for.

As far as Grant was concerned, “she” could be any one, so long as she was struggling financially, met his age and hotness criteria, and didn’t have vocal fry. (It’s triggering, reminds me of my dad’s third wife—nagging lady, terrible cook, he’ll later unearth during a productive EMDR session.) “If you have, Really-Good-Nurse vibes, it’s a maaaajor plus,” read the seeking: section on Grant’s Bumble profile just beneath a photograph of him lending a hand in the somber disposal of a beached whale.

“Sometimes I wonder,” Grant released a barely audible nose-laugh that was intended to make Taylor believe at once in both his profundity and humility, “I mean, this is crazy, but—I think, that person could be God.”

A bad actor watching the rain, decided Taylor, her date looking just beyond his window with performative compassion that made the bile in her stomach churn.

Grant was referring to a man in the midst of a psychotic meltdown at the intersection who was violently waving around the remnants of a shattered High Life forty and hissing obscenities at passing bicyclists. A cardboard sign that read: BEEF CURTAINS rested amongst his scattered belongings—a water damaged copy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, Herland (most of the pages torn out), a broken-in-half Blu-ray of Ex Machina, a pair of dull shears he’d used to give himself blunt bangs of the deranged variety minutes earlier.

Grant lurched forward only to brake again at the very next red light. Taylor glanced up briefly before taking out her cracked iPhone to study the pop-up menu. A bone-in grilled sea bass atop a bed of micro greens doused in a creamy eggplant sauce. Beef tongue and liver pate on freshly baked bread. Wires crossing or synapses firing, she smiled to herself at the idea of beef curtains existing on a menu somewhere—a chef pushing the envelope to compete with those places where you can pay thousands of dollars to eat an endangered ortolan, your face hidden beneath a napkin to shield the decadent act from God. (Decidedly a bad look to chow down on a $1,000 bird while famine strikes on a global level, but such judgments weren’t stopping people like Grant from indulging.)

“What if God was one of us…” Grant’s singing voice was nasally; more assault than serenade, thought Taylor. And, perhaps operating with base level self-awareness, Grant was picking up on Taylor’s standoffishness. Grant, for a brief time, was determined to remedy this perceived glitch in Taylor’s lack of affection. Pay attention to me, two layers beneath his consciousness was sputtering, find me out of your league and irresistible. Want what I have, demanded his programming.

“Can I smoke in here?” Taylor asked without looking up from her phone. In response, Grant would’ve had you thinking she’d asked if she could fuck his dad.

As a defense mechanism, Taylor, impervious to his charm, registered to Grant as a broken toy. Work, thing, he thought, why aren’t you working? And finally, eventually: broken, Grant will declare, easing the sting of this unexpected rejection.

For Taylor, stomaching Grant was important. This was all part of the plan. And while it was difficult in the same way climbing a 14er without water, sunscreen, or shoes whilst suffering a traumatic brain injury might be, she knew the view from the top would be worth it. In the meantime, brined beef tongue on homemade sourdough. Exhausting work. Undeniable perks with brief shelf-lives. (Sound familiar?)

Taylor realized she’d been biting her tongue so hard, tiny pinpricks of blood had formed in an imperfect, semicircle formation. She swallowed, returning to studying the menu and fantasizing about oversized labias.

“Another part of me thinks they should just be rounded up and taken out to pasture,” Grant said, testing the waters. Perhaps this was the way to Taylor’s black heart. But alas, she found this more deplorable than the Chicken Soup for the Soul shit that succeeded it.

Grant’s arm was now situated behind her head rest in an act of unearned familiarity.

These were the longest red lights in the history of red—

“Just a slob like one of us…”

Every second with this guy sucked more than the one before it. He was perfect. Not dangerous, just terrible. A heavily concentrated dose of ick. And this was saying something because before this, Taylor’d been having coffee with a guy named Drew, a mechanic who chewed his ice, spoke mostly of feline aids, and shushed her mid-sentence so he could pick up a non-emergency FaceTime call from his mother in the middle of their date.

Taylor was far more bothered by these men than she ever could be by the folks who collected an eclectic assortment of trash in stolen shopping carts, lived in tents, and lit trashcans on fire in the downtown area. Mostly, they were harmless, kept to themselves. Plus, she figured she was about one missed paycheck away from joining them, and thus wasn’t about to cast judgment on those who may soon be her neighbors. All this said, she did not believe that the woman who broke into her apartment building to take a dump in the only functioning community washing machine last Tuesday was God disguised in a methed-out skin suit. And besides, Taylor was a practicing atheist.

“You seemed way less shy when I met you,” Grant said, with a hint of irritation at having to do the conversational heavy-lifting.

A month ago, Taylor may have apologized, tailored a response that would alleviate his discomfort. If she liked the guy, she might’ve whispered an erotic defense: I’m just thinking about all the things I’m going to do to you after dinner. But those days were behind her. Taylor was done explaining herself. She was done bending over backwards to please and she was done catastrophizing over signs of her aging and pretending she enjoyed getting choked out in the middle of sex. Taylor was even done with having fantastic eyelashes because of their ability to distract from the truth that her eyes told.

“It’s green,” said Taylor flatly.

Grant was unimpressed by Taylor’s knee-jerk reaction to the High Life bottle making violent contact with his rear windshield.

“What the fuck is funny? What is funny about any of this?”

It was in this instant that her initial attractiveness rating of 9 plummeted to a 7.5. It was at this very moment that he classified her as: an ungrateful woman, a total bitch.

Taylor thought it excellent how Grant, like a power-tripping father, threatened to cancel their dinner reservation (the awkward first date equivalent of: I will pull this goddamn car over). This would have been more than fine with Taylor. She’d gotten what she needed from Grant and then some. The assault on his prized vehicle was on par with any joy she’d have received from feasting on egregiously-priced culinary goodness.

But the reservations were non-refundable. Taylor had always found this curious— rich people’s unwillingness to cut their financial losses. Grant spent the remaining twelve minutes of the drive over to the restaurant on speaker phone screaming at a customer service representative after being placed on a brief hold. There was something so pedestrian about it—Grant’s aversion to his own inescapable humanity. Taylor marveled at this; how Grant, too, had to get emissions tests and deal with his balding hair and wrinkling skin, vomiting nonstop if he were to ingest Listeria (which he would in approximately thirty minutes, along with the other guests at the pop-up who ordered the beef tongue). It was Grant’s aggressive pushback on the fact that he shouldn’t have to—that he was somehow above waiting in lines or having his head stuck in a toilet—that made the whole thing such a delight to witness.

“Sir, I understand you’re upset. Did you happen to get the ID of the person who threw the bottle at your car?”

“No, Meredith, was it?”

“Meagan,” Taylor corrected.

“Meagan,” the woman on the other line confirmed.

“I didn’t catch the name of THE CRACK HEAD WHO WAS TRYING TO TAKE MY LIFE.”

It was in this same way Grant had shifted his view on “God” that Taylor’s understanding of the patriarchy had shifted. A wake-up call, subtle as a jackhammer. A light switched on to illuminate the grotesque creature that she’d spent her entire life accommodating. Taylor had simply snapped out of it as though hit over the head by a glass bottle. She had spent the majority of her days blinded by this idea that romance was the anecdote to her profound loneliness. How could she not? It was sold to her in just about every ad and Blockbuster hit, by every single love-drugged couple she encountered on the streets. This was suddenly comical to her. To answer Grant’s question, everything about it was funny. Everything.

Grant’s evisceration of the customer service rep faded into the background as Taylor got lost in thought. The way her labia minora hung beyond-the-lips in an objectively dumb manner reminded her of a dog panting. This was an observation that supplied her with endless pangs of amusement ever since she first named it. Taylor was just about always horny, something she’d read in a Christian Nationalist magazine from the 90s that her mother religiously subscribed to meant that your brain was made of, “rotten porridge”. Taylor thought that if there were any truth to this, she must be quite stupid since thoughts of getting laid had infiltrated her head near constantly since she was a teenager. How could she possibly make sense of it all? Her heteronormativity, sex drive, and hatred for men who showed any sign of not-getting-it?

Her attention shifted to memories of an ex, Paxton, who she’d once told the panting-dog-thing to while he was going down on her after they’d already broken up. (Twice.) He’d resurfaced from beneath the sheets briefly, wiping sweat from his forehead and her from his red beard with the back of his hand, to confirm that her genitals did indeed give panting dog vibes, said he, wouldn’t be able to unsee it now. When he’d returned to work, Taylor, grinning sideways said, hey, you’re not supposed to agree with me, squeezing his head with her thighs a little to indicate her wish for him to come back to eye level. She wasn’t actually bothered (oppositely, she was happy for this intimate confirmation), but Pax wasn’t doing it right and she felt the need to redirect without offending. This was how it so often went. Eating pussy is an art form. Some were master painters. Others competent in the world of stocks and bonds or international policy. Pax was super handy—not a duct-tape fixer like his predecessor who couldn’t so much as change a lightbulb or remove a leaking trash bag from the receptacle without groaning, though incidentally gave great head. (What on earth then, Taylor demanded, is the point of us living together?)  

Taylor hadn’t wanted to train anyone. She just wanted to make the dog happy and have broken things fixed. She craved reciprocity, someone delightful to share the rising cost of groceries and responsibility of disposing of the garbage. Taylor (finally) realized that the most efficient route to this was: Task Rabbit, a roommate, and solo play.

“Let’s start over, shall we?” Grant asked as he expertly parallel-parked his damaged vehicle. His smile revealed a jarringly straight set of printer-paper white teeth, an observation Taylor regarded with mild disgust.

“Do you still wear a retainer?”

He did, he sure did. Consistently wearing a retainer in your late 30s felt, at best, pure vanity, at worst, sociopathic behavior (thought the woman with endearingly crooked teeth who lost her own retainer two days after it was made). Taylor got a front row seat to Grant’s dark side that he was now trying to cover up with the behavioral equivalent of a Nixon mask. This to say, his attempted pivot back to “charming” was unsettling.

Once inside the derelict brick building, a hostess who looked like Sydney Sweeney sister led Grant and Taylor to a folding card table disguised by a starchy cloth. Taylor noticed Grant drooling over what Grant’s mother would refer to as, “the help,” and felt briefly aroused in an unfeminist, early-2000s-Porn-Hub kind of way. What could she say? The programming ran deep.

The dining room that once functioned as a ballpoint pen manufacturing factory (before China won) was lit by a sea of glittering tea candles. The darkness almost succeeded in shielding the naked eye from the fact that the building was on the brink of collapse, the whole place brimming with safety code violations. Taylor tripped on a rogue extension cord, and while it was too dark to make out her facial expression, she sensed the freshly objectified hostess was less than thrilled to be used by her as a human crutch.

Several moments later, their server came over to greet them, likely finding her way to the table by Grant’s abnormally bright teeth that shone like a Lighthouse from a horror movie. In obligatory fashion, she introduced herself, Rea, asked about dietary restrictions, and would they like to get started with the wine pairing for an additional $400 each?

“Absolutely,” Taylor said. No longer a drinker but many years a server, she planned to leave the wine glasses untouched as a bonus tip for their waitress.

“You too?” Rea asked in the direction of Grant who seemed to be hiding his face—yes, who was definitely hiding his face. From Taylor? From God?

If Grant were unhappy with Taylor’s reaction to the High Life bottle, he was even less so with her response to Rea returning to the table to pour a full bottle of Chateau Haut-Riot over his bald spot. Her manager’s hands were tied, Rea had to go. But not before she announced to the entire dining room that half the menu was bought directly from Costco’s prepared food section.

Taylor, mesmerized by Rea, followed her outside and all the way to her shitty Prius parked three blocks away. A bumper sticker that promised in all caps: IF YOU HONK AT ME, I WILL KILL MYSELF was peeling off the hatchback. Taylor had exited the pop-up just as the hostess had rushed over to Grant with a linen, damp with soda water, to apply directly to his soiled groin.

“Shit,” Rea said. She had bills piling up, hadn’t thought this through. She had only seen red as she recalled how the jackass at table 7 had knocked her up three months earlier. When she’d told Grant about their mutually unwanted child (then the size of a green pea), Grant had blocked her, but not before he’d called her a liar in response to her $150 Venmo request that would cover less than half the abortion fees.

“Hey, Rea? Can I come with you?” Taylor asked while Rea paced the street, kicking a rock that ricocheted in the air and landed with great force on the ancient Prius’ windshield.

“FUCK.”

“That was incredible, what you did back there.”

“Your boyfriend’s a psychopath,” Rea said, procuring a pack of American Spirits from her canvas bag.

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

Rea looked at Taylor unconvinced, fishing around for a lighter. Taylor produced one, daring to come closer with a flame.

“I was going to kill him tonight,” Taylor said, unsmiling.

Rea accepted the fire with a nod, and speaking through grit teeth asked, “Are you a crazy person? I have enough problems right now.”

Taylor said there was a massive chance she was crazy, though probably not in a harmful way.

Rea unlocked her car, pleased by this honesty.

“Me too. Get in,” she said.

————

Susannah Shepherd is a writer of feminist smut. She currently resides in Denver. Contact: susannahkshepherd@gmail.com