No Punch Girl

Rachel S.
Rachel S.
Aug 28, 2017 · 6 min read
CCO

The girlfriend reclined further on the couch and sunk further into the soft arm of the boyfriend. Girls was on the television before them in the small apartment that they shared together.

The choice in show tonight was hers, and about halfway through, she was progressively experiencing qualms about suggesting to her boyfriend that they watch the show. More often than not, the boyfriend chose the show because it was the only way that the girlfriend could ensure that he would be enjoying himself during their times that they spent together. Tonight, it was her choice, and she couldn’t help but feel exceedingly guilty about picking such a girly, emotional show.

In this episode, the main character, Hannah, is having a mental breakdown to the point where she cut her hair in the shape of an early 70s gradeschooler’s bowl cut. He wasn’t relating to this, she thought, there is no way that he could be enjoying this. She peered side-eyed at his movements closely, waiting to catch just a glimpse of disinterest or boredom or even indifference at the funny parts, but his face remained calm, content and neutral. Even though this was the girlfriend’s favorite show, she spent the entire half-hour episode consumed with the feeling that she was turning into one of THOSE girlfriends that boyfriends complain about on Reddit — boys with usernames like burritobust6969, who’d carefully type “havng a gf is just sitting thru hours of Friday nite lights. U gotta do ur time before u get to da pussy.”

The girlfriend’s mind began to spin, wondering what he says to his best friend, Tyler, about her, or if they even talk about her at all. Was her boyfriend a Reddit fool, who talked just about her pussy and her tits online to a bunch of other snapback-wearing strangers in their basement before a One Punch Man poster? Her boyfriend did have a One Punch Man poster on the other side of his bed, a chiseled Mr. Clean-like figure always glared her down while she was on all fours and the boyfriend was fucking her from behind, because that’s the way he preferred it.

She had a dream one night that they had spent twenty minutes fucking like this, her fists grasped firmly onto the sheets, and he kept thrusting until he went soft and he didn’t cum and she woke up with a shriek. This shriek woke up the boyfriend and he saw how distraught he was, and he held her gently without saying a word until she fell back asleep. From then on out, every time they had sex, she often craned her neck around to look at the face of the boyfriend, to be sure he had that drooly expression he always had when he was aroused, but she began to worry that maybe the boyfriend preferred fucking her from behind so that she didn’t see his expression. Maybe he was truly bored the whole time, and only did this just to please her. This set her mind in a state of panic, and she began to analyze the expressions of the boyfriend when she thought that he thought she wasn’t looking.

She began to make a mental list in her mind of all of his different expressions and what they mean. Lowered eyebrows and a soft mouth meant aroused, scrunch eyebrows and raised lower lip meant confused, raised eyebrows and a smirk with the right corner of his mouth raised meant he was impressed*[i], etc. After a while, the list got to be very, very long that she thought it may be a good idea to write all of these expressions down. So, she took out her computer and made a special word document “Surreptitious Smiles” and kept it password protected, just in case. In this document, the girlfriend made an exhaustive list of the boyfriend’s quirks, mannerisms, and habits. Such entries included things like:

When brushing teeth, K will spend a longer amount of time when brushing if by himself, brushing alone, rather than with me, and he will spend a longer time looking in the mirror, specifically at his stomach with a look of embarrassment — his embarrassed look is one of self-derision, like a dog who knows he’s been bad yet acts disappointed at the fact that he was scolded. His eyes will stay on his stomach for about 2 seconds, then he’ll look down, and then he’ll look back up, placing his left hand gently on his stomach and then swiftly back down, and he’ll repeat this for about 4 minutes[ii]

The girlfriend started this documentation about a month after they moved in together, and oftentimes, when noting such observations, she felt like Jane Goodall amidst her beloved apes. This image of Jane Goodall and the apes recurred almost every time she wrote these entries, and she immediately felt guilty for making this metaphor because that would mean that the boyfriend was analogous to an ape, and that was a terrible thing for the girlfriend to think about the boyfriend. Instead, every time this image would recur in her mind she would try to swap roles — her as the ape and the boyfriend as Jane Goodall — so that the boyfriend was the one who was in such an admirable position that she’d be on the cover of National Geographic, tending to the apes she loved so much. In fact, it was the tenderness Jane Goodall had towards the apes that made this metaphor a such a good one, thought the girlfriend, because she liked the idea of being so loved and so cared for by someone who had dedicated their life to your well-being. After a while, the girlfriend loved this metaphor so much that she often thought of it during sex because it aroused her to think that the boyfriend loved her as much as Jane Goodall loved the apes.

On the couch, that Friday night with the Girls episode playing, the girlfriend became so exceedingly self-conscious of her choice in show, this display of the girlfriend’s interest that felt so vulnerable, so exposed that she felt so exceedingly embarrassed for showing a side of herself to the boyfriend that the boyfriend could not possibly understand.

Even though the boyfriend was beginning to chuckle at Hannah’s neuroses, as if on cue, the way Lena Dunham must have intended, the girlfriend could not help but begin to cry quietly and helplessly on the couch. This cry was so quiet at first that the boyfriend did not even notice, and this made the girlfriend even more upset and only cry more.

The boyfriend saw this breakdown unfold, paused the show, and began to ask what was wrong, what happened, what did he say. But the girlfriend could not put into words what it was that made her so upset. She sat there and thought about how much she loved him, she loved him so much that she could not possibly make herself out to be Reddit girlfriend. The boyfriend deserved so much better than to have to sit with her that night and watch something he would not like at all. She cried as she thought of those 31 times within the last month that he had given her his look of indifference and how this must mean they were surely breaking up soon after just moving in together — a thought than made her think of her incapability as a lover and as an adult.

With the boyfriend’s arm around her, she suddenly became so worried, so concerned that they were going to break up that she thought she should create another word document to write down all of these salient episodes in which the girlfriend broke down because she thought she was a bad girlfriend. She thought that if she began to document the frequency of such episodes that she’d be able to calculate when they will break up, why and how. The more the sobbing girlfriend thought about this while in the arm of the boyfriend, she began to feel better, and her tears stopped flowing.

“Let’s turn on One Punch Man,” she said.

_________________________________________________________________

[i] He did not give her this look often.

[ii] One thing that is worth noting is that the boyfriend was extremely conscious of his looks in a way that he felt most other young men were not self-conscious. He was 30 pounds overweight and hated the gym. He hated how he looked and thought that the girlfriend would eventually leave him for someone more in shape. He hated working out and he hated most healthy food, so after such episodes of insecurity he usually shrugged it off with an uncanny amount of indifference, and internally declared “this is just how I am.”

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Rachel S.

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Rachel S.

Welcome to the Hotel Internet. Twitter: @nocertainlynot

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