Confrontation, Doubt, and Farewells

Finally,after four or five days at Scott’s, I returned to my apartment. The first night back, I went into my room and ignored Daniel, but then Emily message me to say that he was talking to her and making her feel horrible. He was upset and HE felt betrayed. I wanted to storm into his room and punch him in the face. He felt betrayed?

Emily didn’t want me to march over and confront him, though. I waited and dealt with it on her end for maybe thirty minutes before she gave up and I finally went next door. For the first time since the incident, I did something I used to do all the time: I sat on his bed and talked to him.

He was upset and felt betrayed by her. She had been the one who didn’t want to tell me when they were first talking about dating. He wanted to tell me, especially on the night we went to the bar, but she was against it. She didn’t know what she was doing. She’s crazy. I tried to reason with him. I mean, as I said before, he’s not the type of person to ‘just let things happen.’ But still, there had to be two sides to the story.

I was still angry at him, but we did a shot together and tried to reconcile things. Nonetheless, the seed of doubt had been planted in my mind.

I went to bed that night and slept alright, telling Emily that Dan and I had talked and were feeling a bit better about everything. I felt ok, but in the morning my anger started to gnaw at me. This must have been Tuesday, because Dan was at work. When he returned, I confronted him again. Now I was doubting Emily, but I knew he wasn’t anywhere near absolved of guilt. “How could you things being the rebound guy wasn’t a bad idea? It’s common sense. And dating your best friend’s ex?”

“I didn’t even start talking to her about it until November,” he said. “Way after you broke up.”

“We broke up half way through October. No one would say this is a good idea.”

We argued back and forth. Dan, it came out, had told Emily that he loved her. Loved her? Had he met her family? Her pets? Been to her house? No! But I didn’t bring that up. She, he claimed, had reciprocated his feelings.

“Dude, you always commit too soon. You try too hard and girls feel sorry for you and try not to hurt your feelings. I warned you about that with Mary.”

He wasn’t having any of it. She lied to him, he said, and said she wasn’t going to see either of us anymore after what happened. Then, behind His back, started hanging out with me and seeing me again. He had seen a photo from Scott’s place on facebook, apparently.

“How could you not expect her to be confused, to feel conflicted, if she started dating her ex-boyfriend’s roommate?” I retorted. It still wasn’t ok for her to lie, he said.

Lies, lies? Did I have the whole story from anyone? Could I trust Emily? Did she really not know what she was doing? Dan was crying by the time we stopped talking and I know he felt genuinely upset, but the whole thing still left a bad taste in my mouth. Now he was playing the victim? On the one hands, he’s saying that they’re both adults and had the right to date each other if they wanted, but on the other hand he’s outraged that, after a couple of dates with him in December, she decided to hang out with me again in January. It all felt so hypocritical, so self-centered.

He was immersed in his own, Dan-centered world from day one. He never came to speak to me about Emily. Hell, he has literally never come into my room, sat down on my bed, and just started talking to me. He never makes any effort so how could he know my feelings? I can’t know what Emily was feeling, but I know that Dan always goes overboard when he’s in the early stages of dating someone. I saw the texting, the IMs, the messages being sent even when he was having dinner with me during break at work. He knew exactly what he was doing, or he rationalized things to such a degree that he was living in a fantasy world, one where he even convinced friends and family that dating Emily would be a good idea. I’m not sure about everything else, but I am sure about that.

I spent a lot of time with Emily over the next week. We played Skyrim at her parents place, got high with Jess, played Ticket to Ride with she and her dad, went out for Pho with her college friends, and just generally tried to be sociable together. Things, somehow, miraculously, were working out. The terrible events, though they had left me feeling angry and distrustful toward my friend, had brought me back together with this person that I cared about so much. The messed up thing is that I’m not sure it would have happened if things hadn’t gone so wrong. Only one issues remained: Emily would be returning to College Park soon, to her classes and her life down there. What would happen next?