You Know You Want This: Cat Person and Other Stories by Kristen Roupenian

Author:Kristen Roupenian [Roupenian, Kristen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Short Stories (Single Author), Fiction, Short, Stories, (Single, Author), Women, Horror, Literary
ISBN: 9781473560307
Google: 8xhEDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2019-02-06T22:00:00+00:00

Looking back, Ted thought Rachel was the first woman he could truly be said to have treated badly. Yeah, he’d inadvertently creeped out some of his crushes, but he’d been a kid, and he’d wrestled mightily to keep himself under control. And there was probably an argument to be made about the way he’d acted around Anna when they’d been in school together—that he should have been honest with her about his feelings instead of skulking around in the friend zone—but while he might have been cowardly with Anna, he’d also done his best to be kind. Rachel, though . . . if there was a hell, and he ended up in it, he was pretty sure the devil would hold up a picture of Rachel, shake it in his face, and say, “Hey, buddy, what was the deal with this one?”

But he didn’t know! He really, truly didn’t.

In the four months they were together, he never started liking Rachel any more than he did on their first date. Everything about her bugged him: her stupid hair, her nasal voice, her habit of bossing him around. The thought of people saying, “There goes Rachel, Ted’s girlfriend!” made him cringe. He saw, in her, all the parts of himself he tried so hard to repress: her sycophantic overtures to people who treated her like shit, her faux-patrician condescension toward the handful of people below her on the popularity ladder, the sarcastic jabs she used to distance herself from all the other losers on her social plane.

Like him, she was prone to embarrassing bodily mishaps—period stains, bad breath, sitting in ways that inadvertently exposed her underwear—but, unlike him, these episodes didn’t seem to cause her inordinate shame. He was the one who felt ashamed: when he caught sight of her in the hallway ahead of him, sauntering on with a rusty patch on the back of her jean skirt, or when Jennifer Roberts fanned the air in disgust after Rachel, who’d been standing much too close, finally turned away. In these moments, Ted didn’t just dislike Rachel: he hated her, more than he’d ever hated anyone else in his life.

So why didn’t he break up with her?

At home, alone, Ted knew he did not like Rachel and that he did not want to date her, and so breaking up with her seemed straightforward, the right thing to do. But then they would meet up, and as soon as Rachel saw him, if he hesitated, or pulled away, or signaled with even the tiniest of expressions that something was wrong, then her face would darken. At the first hint of her anger, he would feel an onrush of guilt and cold fear. He’d get swept up in a current of conviction that he was a total garbage asshole jerk, his sins stretching in an unbroken chain back to his original decision to agree to go on even one date with her when he’d been in love with Anna the whole time. Skewered by

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