Chapter 1: The Jewel
One of the things that baffle me a lot is understanding men… and also understanding women such as myself. How they act, operate, and such which is hard to pinpoint what someone else is thinking or what to do. With this life of mine, I push through and accept the decisions that have happened in my life and be thankful for the good ones. As well as learned from the bad ones. However, it sucks being part of a life where it’s hard to make good decisions because it’s obstructed by moral, humanistic, and selfish choices that’ll praise me, haunt me, or hurt me. My name is Cara and this is my story.
Basically what I’m saying is that my boyfriend, Keith, has been hanging out with this girl who likes him. When I mean like, it’s definitely not in the platonic sense. Ruby, who’s been a friend of Keith for a very long time before he and I got together, drunk-confessed to him. Keith being a good boyfriend and all rejected her, but continues to spend time with her a lot! It’s maddening, but at the same time, I do not want to be a jealous possessive bitch who has a say on who he can hang out with or not.
Still… it hurts like shit pretending to be okay with it. I’m doing my best not to hang out with my guy friends who are CLEARLY interested in me. I know how to maintain boundaries and such. Plus, I don’t want to lead guys on.
There is one guy with whom I hang out quite a lot who Keith doesn’t seem to budge. His name is Wynn, and I knew him from a production company he used to work on. He’s a very funny and kind guy. He’s one of the people who doesn’t have a crush on me per each deep conversation we had.
I don’t know about certain guys, but I hate the fact that a late-night conversation talking about life makes them think I like them. Wynn just treats it normally and doesn’t treat me anyway differently.
Keith has had problems with certain guys that were my close friends in the past. With a moderate decision and deciding who to pick, I choose to pick my boyfriend anytime over a friend who tries to break things between Keith and I. Because it feels like they were only my friends just to try to be in a relationship with me, to begin with. Keith and Wynn get along just fine, so he doesn’t get pressured when I hang out with Wynn a lot even though Wynn and I spent some time alone quite a lot. How do I know he trusts Wynn? He phoned Wynn requesting him to talk and console me when we had an awful argument and he acted as a mediator.
“Shit… not this again,” Wynn explained to me of a similar event that happened to him a month ago. He was the catalyst that fixed the situation that nearly made a couple break up because of one person. He talked to me about it, and it so seems he had some experience with this.
“Well, you see like... I see how Keith and Ruby spend time with one another. It doesn’t seem to show any sort of romantic vibe. I notice you and Keith have been doing separate things which are nice for couples, but you gotta communicate how much time you guys need and needing time for yourselves.”
Now that I think about it, it doesn’t seem like they give off that vibe. But… my idle thoughts eventually get to me and the feeling’s reverse. I have this feeling something is off… and it is hard to shake it off. Talking to Ruby is fun actually, and she doesn’t seem to shrug me off whenever I’m around. Then, I remember it was the time we went to a 1975 concert where Keith and Ruby went missing for a bit. I found Keith emotionally consoling Ruby in a cuddly manner where Ruby was going through something. Keith told me she quit her job due to experiencing sexual harassment from a weirdo and her company wouldn’t do anything to stop it from happening. I cared about her too and so we talked about it as well even though it initially made me anxious.
At this point, it’s difficult to tell if Ruby has any feelings for him, but it bugged me a lot to the point of something that may have caught me off-guard.
