Night before, they'd went to a movie, and this was the first time they'd done that in a long while. It's too expensive nowadays, and people are too shitty. Too rude. Nobody will stop fucking with their smartphones the whole stupid time. You can't concentrate. It's not worthwhile.
It was a Wednesday night when they went so that time worked out better than usual, just on account of the place being mostly deserted. Something to remember in the future ... The flick they picked was a romcom. 'Cause she liked the guy in it a lot. Her boyfriend kept saying he was a douchebag. He only felt that way obviously because he was jealous of her digging the guy so much. As for the actress in the thing, in some stuff she was real good and other times she wasn't. Her boyfriend said she was hot but not convincing in the role they gave her. Hilary had to agree. In the movie she was supposed to be a hardass cop on an undercover assignment. It wasn't particularly believable. The guy was playing a bounty hunter who busts her by mistake. She has to get away from him without blowing her cover, yadda-yadda-yadda ...
There were a couple pretty steamy parts, slightly more explicit than usual in that kind of movie. Bounty hunter has the girl handcuffed to her bedframe in their motel room while he takes a shower (this is after a big chase scene through a train yard during a thunderstorm) and she tries to pick the lock on the cuffs while he's out of sight with a hairpin (could that work in real life?) and of course the guy comes back in wrapped in a towel just as she gets free, so then they have a big tussle smashing up the place that turns into a hump scene after he uses his towel to tie her down again.
Watching a scene like that with her boyfriend in a theatre they had pretty much all to themselves was actually pretty embarrassing and uncomfortable. They hadn't had any sex in almost a month because of conflicting schedules. They had some that night when they got home after the movie. It didn't turn out very good. At least for Hilary it sure didn't. She had a feeling her boyfriend was thinking about the movie star the whole time. He didn't look her in the eye, and he finished real quickâtoo quick for her to get to come. She'd been thinking about the male movie star but not in the same way. She didn't try to pretend she was with him. She'd wanted to but didn't let herself, and even if she had, the fantasy wouldn't have paid off. All it would have done was further highlight the deficiencies of her boyfriend's performance.
No surprise, next day she was not in a happy mood. She didn't confront him directly about what happened. She didn't consciously intend to punish him for it, and yet it seemed that was what she ended up doing. Every time she opened her mouth, something mean came out. She couldn't stop doing it. She got shittier and shittier as the day progressed. Not just with himâwith everybody. She'd turned into the biggest bitch in the world. It made her mad at herself that she couldn't control it, and of course that anger made her behavior get worse.
Finally her boyfriend got fed up enough to stop putting up with her. That was unusual for himâhe'd put up with anything, most of the time. It was hard to fight with him because you couldn't make him fight back. He'd just hunker down and get quiet and look sheepish until you exhausted yourself and laid off of him. Mostly he'd leave you feeling like the guilty one, whether he originally deserved to get screamed at or not. It was an insidious strategy. Probably in the end it was gonna be the thing that made her dump his ass. Probably she should have dumped his ass already a long time back. She still wasn't sure why she hadn't yet.
There really wasn't all that much she liked about the guy. There was nothing terrible about him, looks-wise or personality-wise. He had nothing special going on either. Best you could say, he wasn't as big a doofus as all the other doofuses she'd dated beforehand. A fact which left Hilary with little confidence she could find a better replacement.
That afternoon out of nowhere he suddenly demonstrated a tiny bit of backbone. She was ranting about the stupidity of someone at work and he had the audacity to interrupt her and challenge what she was saying.
"You shouldn't call her a retard. Regardless what she did. It's not cool to use that word anymore."
"You're the Word Police, today? What the fuck difference does it make? She can't hear me anyway. If she could, I'd still tell her she was retardedâ'cause that's how she acts, every single day. Like a fucking retard! You don't like hearing me talk that way? Fine, tough guy. What the fuck you gonna do about it?"
"Well, what I oughta do when you act like thisâlike a goddamn spoiled stuck up bratâis put you across my knee."
She'd snorted coffee out her nose. "Like in your wildest dreams you had half the balls to try some shit like that! Honestly, now you're the retard!"
She was still laughing when he grabbed her arm and pulled her around from the kitchen counter, while with his other hand, he moved a chair from under the dining room table behind him, so he had a place to sit down. The chair legs scraped brutally across the kitchen tileâthey left marks.
She didn't stop laughing when he pulled her down over his lap. "Gimme a break," she told him, and went to lift up again. He didn't let her. And to her surprise, she wasn't able to pull loose from his grip. "You better let go of my arm right now, buster. I'm not gonna tell you again."
He didn't respond. Actually he did, just not with words. His response was to pull her pants down. She was wearing khaki capri's, and they were a pair that fit her fairly snug. He made the button bust off them when he forced them off her butt.