On My Knees by Periel Aschenbrand Page A

and I know it isn’t because I’m not into new age garbage. These are just facts. Have some fucking self-respect. Have a little faith in yourself. Have a little self-esteem.
    And for the love of God, know that you’re not going to find a boyfriend in the Casual Encounters section of fucking Craigslist. Or shit, I don’t know. Maybe you are, but it seems unlikely at best. I don’t know what to tell you. That’s been my experience at least. You find things in the most unexpected places. Specifically, when you’re not looking for them. And sometimes, dare I say most of the time, things don’t work out how you think they will.
    If only I could have taken this advice myself, I would have been golden. But hindsight is always twenty-twenty. At the time, I was blind as a fucking bat.

6
    Off the Deep End
    A s though my debacle with Steve weren’t bad enough, it was child’s play compared to what happened next. I took self-destructive to a whole new level. There is a reason they say that the quickest way to end a friendship is with sex—because it is.
    Nico was, well, everything. He was my best friend, my closest confidant, and technically he was even sort of my boss. We had been attracted to each other from the moment we met, but I was still with Noam and nothing had happened. But from the moment we started to work together we pretty much became inseparable.
    Nico, among other mogulesque things, owned a major ad agency. He had offices in New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. He was born in South Africa and grew up between Johannesburg and London and was now based in New York and Paris. He had convinced me to do some freelance consulting, which was kind of a dream come true. I was writing copy and designing for major ad campaigns without any of the commitment that usually accompanies working for a major corporation. And because it was Nico’s company, he could do whatever he wanted. And what he wanted was me.
    This went on for three years until Noam and I broke up—at which point Nico almost immediately made his move. Maybe, if the timing and circumstances had been different, we would have stood a chance and things would have worked out, but that’s not what happened. We were kind of doomed from the get-go. Nico adored me as much as I adored him, but he just wanted to have a good time. I, being in a deep, dark depression, was looking for someone to save me. And I was hoping it would be him. This, of course, was a recipe for disaster. And the harder I tried, the more of a mess it became.
    I’d be just as happy, if not happier, if I could forget that any of this ever happened, because quite frankly it was fucking mortifying. In short order, I was crazy, I was depressed, and I was obsessed. For all intents and purposes, I was also sleeping with my boss. Nico, for his part, was trying to temper my insanity by distancing himself from me whenever he could but it wasn’t working. In fact, it was entirely possible that he was making it worse. He made it abundantly clear from the beginning that he was not interested in getting into a relationship, but he was also sending me mixed messages.
    I nevertheless adored him. He was smart and funny and successful and stylish and he knew what I was about to say before I said it and we cracked each other up. And we drank together and we partied together and we just had fun together. He knew everyone and he traveled all the time and each day was a new adventure. And while sometimes that’s awesome, sometimes it’s not.
    When everything else in your life is up in the air, taking one of your most stable relationships and turning it into a hot mess is not the best move. And I may have been a disaster, but Nico wasn’t helping. One minute he was all over me and the next minute he was telling me he didn’t want to be accountable to me. Any normal person would have headed for the hills, but I had some deluded notion that he would eventually come around and his actions weren’t helping, so I