“We accept the love we think we deserve”
– Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower –
There’s a thin line between hope and foolishness. I’ve been on this path before. I knew, and I stayed anyway.
The first month since my official move to Santa Clara has been nothing short of delightful. I learned the city’s rhythms slowly. The Caltrain schedule. The pho lady who assumed I spoke Vietnamese before I’d opened my mouth. The aggressively beige drive down El Camino Real to Santana Row for my regular Pinkberry fro-yo run (RIP to a real one). None of it was glamorous. None of it was what I’d imagined for myself. And yet there I was — an Indonesian twink in a white sedan, falling in love with a city that looked like a PowerPoint template.
Despite feeling woefully underqualified for my job, I managed to shine in the office, relying on my ability to lie on the spot and charm my colleagues into believing I had my shit together. Everyone in the office bought the corporate fantasy I was selling. When my first paycheck arrived, I genuinely believed I had earned it. In reality, I was keeping critical healthcare infrastructure alive on the strength of Google searches. The patients had no idea. My colleagues had no idea. And I had no idea what was going on either.
To make things even better, my relationship with the 6’2” Adonis continued to flourish. We established a sweet daily ritual of checking in on one another, sharing details about our workdays, and planning weekend getaways. We even celebrated his birthday with a cozy dinner at a fancy restaurant California Pizza Kitchen near his home.
And our sex lives. My God. To this day, those are still some of my very best.
Unlike Los Del Rio’s “Macarena”, sex with my 6’2” Adonis was far from a one-hit wonder. With him, things kept getting better. He treated my body like his most treasured antique — gentle, unhurried, fluent in exactly what I needed. With familiarity came an elevated sense of pleasure. I was completely at the mercy of this man, and I had absolutely no complaints.
Looking back, the sex wasn’t just good — it was adventurous in a way I hadn’t experienced before, and that’s rich coming from me. He had this particular talent for turning the most mundane situations into something illicit. We once pulled over on the side of the road on our drive back from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk because neither of us could wait. There was also the spin class studio bathroom incident, which I will simply describe as a significantly more enjoyable workout than the forty-five minutes we had just suffered through.
But Half Moon Bay was something else entirely. We had driven up on one of my days off, to allegedly sit on the beach and be normal people. The coastline stretched endlessly, all dramatic cliffs and vast open water meeting a sky that was, against all Bay Area expectations, impossibly blue. The sand was warm and fine beneath our feet as we laid out our beach towel and watched the waves roll in with the easy contentment of a newlywed couple.
Fortunately for you, readers, we lasted maybe twenty minutes of being normal people. It started with a glance that traveled south before either of us had consciously decided anything. One look. Then another, this time with full acknowledgment and a mischievous smirk. And at that moment, I knew naughty shit was gonna go down. To this day I don’t know how this man had the foresight to bring lube to a casual beach day — optimism, preparation, or premeditation, you decide. He turned me onto my side, pulled the beach towel over us, and fucked me slowly while watching our surroundings to make sure we wouldn’t get caught. I cannot fathom how we didn’t end up in jail.
But because I have always been a paranoid bitch, I noticed that something was off.
I’m not shy to say that I have somewhat mastered the delicate art of creeping on other people. If anything, people need to be better at sharing information online, especially if you have shit to hide. And my 6’2” Adonis made everything so easy for me. The first red flag was the constant texts from unknown numbers. If you’re a busy corporate executive fielding pushy sales calls, sure — that makes sense. But my 6’2” Adonis was not a highly successful businessman. So the only explanation was that he was at the body shop, doing something unholy. And honey, I had not douched and driven forty-five minutes on the 237 every weekend to be somebody’s backup plan.
The second red flag required a little more detective work.
Here’s something blessedly fortunate souls non-queer people may not know about Grindr: the app tells you exactly how far away someone is and whether they’re online. Just a distance, half a mile, two miles, four miles, and a green dot that never lies. Basically, it has everything you need to estimate someone’s promiscuity. And when you’re sleeping with someone whose apartment you’ve driven to enough times to know the exact mileage, a sudden jump in distance at eleven on a Wednesday night is not a network glitch. That’s a clue.
I noticed the irony of all this. I was also on Grindr. Also online. Also, technically, talking to people. We had never once used the word exclusive. We had never defined what we were. So was I entitled to feel betrayed? Probably not, on paper. Did I feel betrayed anyway? Absolutely. Without a single doubt in my body. My heart does not give a shit about terms and conditions.
I told myself it was nothing. I put my phone down with the deliberate calm of someone who was absolutely not about to pick it up again in four minutes. I picked it up again in four minutes. I went to the kitchen and finished half a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. I came back. He was moving. This went on for weeks — the distance changing on nights he’d told me he was staying in, resetting by morning like nothing had happened. I kept a mental log without meaning to. I fed myself reasonable explanations each time. Network issues. Late errands. Drinks with coworkers.
I almost believed it.
Almost.
Weeks passed. The explanations got thinner. And then one night, fresh off yet another round of spectacular sex, I did something I had been unconsciously preparing for the entire time.
Here’s the thing about me: I am an excellent student when sufficiently motivated. Over the weeks prior, I had quietly memorized the movement of his fingers every time he unlocked his phone. The pattern. The sequence. Every. Single. Digit.
Didn’t I tell you I am a creepy bitch?
He got up to use the bathroom. His phone was sitting on the nightstand, screen down, the way people leave their phones when they have something to hide. I picked it up. Typed in his passcode. Went straight to his messages like a twink on a mission, which I was. There was a name I didn’t recognize. Underneath it:
“last night was fun”
“we should meet again”
“are you free tonight”
The timestamps told the rest. The night before, while I was in Santa Clara losing my fucking mind, he was at another man’s house.
I put the phone back exactly where I found it, screen down. My 6’2” Adonis came back to the room, wearing a wrinkly white tee with his hair all wet. He noticed my silence and the particular look on my face that meant nothing good. He asked me what was wrong. I remained silent. The silence lasted maybe sixty seconds before I couldn’t help myself:
“Who’s Alex?”
He looked at me, shock fully apparent on his face. I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t cry. I just looked at him with the steady unblinking energy of an FBI agent. I asked him calmly who Alex was. I asked him calmly what they did. I asked him calmly how many times. Every question delivered at the same temperature. Every answer making it worse. He apologized. I do not know why I kept asking questions, as if knowing was going to unbreak my heart and make it better.
Reader, it did not make it better.
And then, just as the apology was settling, he pivoted.
“You went through my phone.”
Suddenly we weren’t talking about Alex anymore. A classic deflection strategy — something I am somewhat a master of myself. And I ain’t got no time for that. I put my clothes on with the focused efficiency of someone who had nothing left to say, and walked out. He followed me onto the quiet Saratoga street and got into my passenger seat, uninvited, like a man running purely on audacity and zero sense.
I let him talk. He apologized again, the real kind this time. Or something along those lines… (I don’t know laaa. I was still in blackout mode, I couldn’t remember shit). I stared at the steering wheel and let the words metaphorically fuck me in the ass, and I took it like the good boy I am. When he was done, I told him I needed to go.
And just like that, I was back in a storyline I had been trying to write myself out of for years. Different guy. Same plot twist. Same stupid bitch aka me.
I drove back to Santa Clara alone. Priuses passing by on the 237. The aux playing random energetic EDM on full blast, the musical equivalent of screaming into a void, which felt strangely calming at the time. Just the road, the dark, and someone who had been right about something they desperately wished they’d been wrong about.
To be continued…
SquirtTale 