I live under my boyfriend’s bed. It’s not the most ideal living arrangement. He thought it would be the most cost effective way for us to live together and still have our own personal space since Chicago has been getting more expensive lately. We’re both in law school and neither of us wanted to take out more loans than we needed to, so he came up with this. I’ve actually grown to quite like it. I like that even when I’m alone, I can still listen in. It makes me feel closer to him.
When I’m scrolling on my phone before I go to sleep, my boyfriend brings his girlfriend over. It’s not like the three of us are all dating each other. He is dating me and he is also dating her. She seems really nice and I actually laugh at the jokes she makes when they’re having sex. I’ve never seen her before but I hope she’s pretty. It would be bad for my reputation if my boyfriend’s girlfriend was ugly. She also thinks that she and my boyfriend are going to be together forever. Last week, she told him so when they were getting ready for bed. He didn’t respond at first. But after he came back from the bathroom, he told her that he thinks so too. Sometimes, I think my boyfriend forgets that I live under his bed.
This is strange because most of the time, he knows that I’m listening. When he gets up for water, he’ll get a glass and put it on the ground, instead of the nightstand, so I can have a sip too. In the middle of the night, after his girlfriend has already gone to sleep, he’ll kick off one of the blankets over the side so I don’t get too cold on his wooden floor. Whenever I crawl down there after a long day of studying, I find a little handwritten note that says I love you. I know it’s a new one everyday because there are little doodles of us together, usually holding hands or cooking in the kitchen, designated by the frying pan floating mid air over my head.
We live across from my favorite Korean restaurant. This side of town is getting a bit too gentrified for my liking so it’s a bonus that my friend’s parents own the place. This is actually where my boyfriend and I went on our first date. He tried tteokbokki for the first time and I made fun of him for eating with a fork but I don’t even hold my chopsticks right. Whenever my friend’s dad would come by and ask if the food was okay, I’d request a new song for him to play. My boyfriend says he was humiliated but I know he secretly liked it because under the table he was bouncing his foot to all the songs. Now he’s a regular just as much as I am. My friend’s dad loves my boyfriend and thinks he’s way nicer than the assholes I used to bring around their restaurant because he doesn’t yell at me and seems engaged in our conversations.
After a few months of dating, we were walking home from the restaurant and we made a pact. We pinky promised to never introduce each other to our parents. I didn’t like my family and he didn’t like his. Families are complicated, and he was my first boyfriend to really get this. We aren’t exactly low contact, but we’re close to it. My last boyfriend, James, always wanted to hang out at my parent’s house with me but then would get mad at me when I didn’t want to pay for his gas. He was a bit of a bum. I don’t have trivial problems like this anymore. Me and my boyfriend are peas in a pod.
The truth is my mother is distant, but she never would’ve wanted me to live under someone’s bed.
“It’s shameful. Do you not feel weird about this?” She asked. I held my breath. She used to feel pride that he’s the president of the Space Law Society. This was my chance to marry up, since we all knew that my righteous goal of saving the earth wasn’t going to make me any money.
“When you and grandpa and grandma came over here, you lived in a one bedroom apartment,” I shrugged. “I don’t see how this is that different.”
I am not an idiot.
“We didn’t have any money. We didn’t speak English. It was just different for us,” she responded. I could almost hear her grimace at my words. I had to stop myself from shouting that she still didn’t have any money. My dad was on the call too. He didn’t say much. He never does. Whenever it came to disputes between my mother and I, he just sat and listened. I would never want to throw something like that in his face.
“We can send you money,” my dad finally said solemnly. “It’s no problem anymore.”
“You know I never ask for money.” A ball was starting to well up in the back of my throat.
“But you could.”
“I really have to go, I have a lot of homework to do tonight.” We exchanged I love yous and I hung up.
On the first of October, I started to stalk my boyfriend. It just sort of happened. I follow him from around the corner in the hallways in the law building and down onto the concrete by the lake and down back alleys where he takes his walks and up onto rooftops where he smokes with his friends from undergrad and then back into our apartment where we pay equal shares of the rent.
He never notices me. Or maybe he does. When he picks up his pace, I get worried that he sees me so I step into a store briefly or turn a corner. As the week passes, he never mentions it. I return home at the end of each night, maybe twenty minutes or so after he had taken his jacket off and put his backpack down, and he never says a word. We invent a new routine for ourselves: He cooks and I study torts and we start exchanging small talk. The small talk evolves into laughing so hard that we start crying. The crying stops being from laughter and starts coming from a place of love. I think about how he treated me like I was brand new when we started seeing each other. We then have sex and right before I’m about to fall asleep, he pokes me and I remember that my pillow is underneath his bed. I yawn and crawl from the bed, down to the wooden floor, limb by limb. I cover my naked chest with my hand because the night light is still on and even though he’s seen every part of me, it just feels embarrassing now. When I wake up, I can see his girlfriend’s feet dangling off the side of the bed. They look nice, I suppose. I can hear her chewing. I wonder if she also goes to law school and I also wonder how soon after I fall asleep do they start having sex with each other. It makes me feel better that she’s probably having our leftovers for breakfast.
On the seventh of October, my boyfriend starts walking faster than usual. And I mean, even faster than his usual running-away-from-me pace. He was actually running away from me this time. So, I speed up too. We turn onto Damen Ave and I realize he is taking a different route than he normally does. I feel the adrenaline kick in and I run faster than I have since being out of high school. I start running like I want to kill him, and like wanting to kill him was the only thing in this life that could ever make me happy. Was he afraid? I duck around pedestrians and ignore the lights at busy intersections. He is the only thing I can see. As I get closer to him, I swear I can hear him laughing.
He really starts to slow down, but I can’t. I want to break his entire body in front of the employees of his favorite record store, and then have his “party funeral” that he would always fantasize about right there so the cashier with the bad mullet and bootleg Vampire Weekend merch could bless his soul. I need to catch up with him. A part of me started to wonder if this whole issue could have been resolved if I had just come out to him as monogamous when we first started dating.
He comes to a full stop and I almost run him right over before catching myself on his right shoulder. We looked at each other in silence. His face is illuminated by the purple neon sign that only reads KBBQ. I hadn’t realized where we were. Without saying a word, he nods before slipping inside.
The only worse place to be than under your boyfriend’s bed is the parking lot of a Sam’s Club in the backseat of a dusty hatchback, in the same way that the only age more miserable than twenty four is twelve.
“You’re not making enough money right now,” my mother said. The midwest heat was putting her on edge.
“And what are you going to do about that?” My father asked. He loved to taunt her with rhetorical questions.
“Get out.”
“Yeah, alright.” We conveniently reached a red light.
“I’m being serious,” she responded. Her voice was getting louder. I continued to eat my hot dog in the back seat. I turned the volume up on Adam Lambert’s Whataya Want From Me. It was one of ten songs on my iPod, and my favorite as of late because he had blue hair on the cover art and my mother had blue hair right now. I remember feeling self conscious about having a young mom, for no good reason except for the most basic eccentricities like dyed hair or visible tattoos.
“I’m sure you are,” he said, tapping his fingers on the wheel as if he was bored of her presence. It should be noted my father was not a young dad.
“I’m going to kill myself,” she groaned. I saw my father’s eyes dart to the rearview mirror, making eye contact with me. I quickly averted my gaze.
“Don’t say that,” he rolled the windows to the car up.
“You’re going to wish you believed me,” her voice was calm as she unbuckled her seatbelt. I thought about how our trunk was packed with tons of meat and treats all in bulk, even though my mother had insisted on being a vegetarian as of late. She was bad at shopping.
My father immediately unlocked the car door and got up out of the vehicle. This is so humiliating, I thought to myself. My mother followed suit, slamming the door behind her. I slouched down lower in the seat so the people in the cars wouldn’t be able to see that there was a child in the backseat witnessing this. She walked around the front of the car, and he went around the back. They switched seats and she ended up behind the wheel. She did not bother to adjust the seat or the mirrors. The light turned green.
Growing up, I always thought my father was the God of conflict de-escalation. He was the only person who knew how to handle me and my mother. He was the one who bought me the iPod. In hindsight, he was another man sent straight from hell, or maybe he was just born in the 70s.
The rest of the car ride was silent. We arrived home and I helped unload the groceries while my mother went upstairs to paint her nails. My father and I didn’t acknowledge each other as we heard her talking on the phone to her friends. I boiled a hotdog since they didn’t let me one while we were shopping. Neither of us knew what she was saying because my Khmer skills resembled that of a three year old and my father never bothered to put in any effort but I figured it could not be good. She was a bit melodramatic like that.
By the time my hotdog was done, I could hear them laughing in their bedroom. We had spaghetti for dinner that night, and then I got sent to my room so they could watch Million Dollar Baby together.
The only thing you need to know about my boyfriend’s girlfriend is that she is irrevocably beautiful, whatever that looks like these days. She is so beautiful that my stomach twists inside out just getting a glance at her. I move over to a book stand outside the bookstore across the street. My boyfriend’s back is facing me so I can only see that between bouts of laughter and forkfuls of rice, his girlfriend is solemn. I know that feeling all too well. I still watch them talk for an hour. I don’t really know what I’m thinking about. I might be mad or confused. The worst part of me knows that I’m not confused at all.
My boyfriend and his girlfriend come outside and they hug, swaying side to side for a moment, before parting ways. I continue to pretend to browse for books, as I watch my boyfriend jog across to meet me. I can feel his eyes on me. He starts to fake browse as well. We stand there in silence for a few moments until he finally breaks.
“I love that one,” he says. “I read it in high school.” I am holding a copy of The Grapes of Wrath that looked like it had been read by a thousand different people and wouldn’t make it to another reader before falling apart.
“I’ve never read it,” I shrug. “How was dinner?”
“It was good,” he replies. “I ordered the tteokbokki for the first time in a while. It made me think of us and that one time you tried it.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” I can’t stop myself from smiling. “That was so embarrassing.”
“You’ve been in more embarrassing situations,” he slips his hand in mine.
We walk and talk all the way back to our apartment. There are a few moments where I think about killing him again, preferably by pushing him straight into traffic. But I never do. By the time we reach our block, my negative thoughts fade out so much that I begin to walk with a pep in my step.
At home, we go through the usual motions. He still cooks for me despite just eating dinner. I guess it’s a labor of love. I even find a little “I love you” note earlier in the night than I usually do. It’s stuck to my toothbrush holder instead of under the bed. After we have sex, I push the blanket off myself to begin my typical crawl to the bottom. Except this time, he pulls me back and moves the blanket back on. He holds on for dear life. I freeze until his breath falls into a rhythm. He’s asleep.
Out of habit, I lean over the side of the bed to drink out of my water cup. To my surprise, it is actually still there, filled to the brim, despite me no longer living under my boyfriend’s bed. As my fingers graze the top of the cup, a manicured hand reaches out from underneath the bed. She is so silly. I am faster. I drink about half the cup, set it on the nightstand, and fall asleep content.
Meredith Riggs is a writer from Illinois. She holds a B.A. from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in Political Science. She also studied creative writing and previously worked as an editorial assistant for Ninth Letter, the university’s literary arts journal. Her literary interests include themes of Asian diaspora and class relations. She currently resides in Chicago and enjoys live music in her free time.
Euphony Journal 