Through the Hole by Kendall Newman Page B

that he threw his clothes there at some point, possibly to portray dominance over her. Yeah, how did that work out for you, slick?
    She started the slow process of cleaning—starting with the kitchen—when she got a call from one of her best friends. Jessica…Jessica Decker. The girl was a fucking firecracker to say the least, but she was the one Marissa trusted the most because, like Mar (her nick name), she also slept with men in ‘booty call’ fashion. She understood the premise behind ‘nothing personal’, even though it always seemed as if guys had more ego to scar than girls when finding out they were a one-night stand.
    “Hey gurl , how you ‘doin?” she quipped with a wry grin, and dropped the scrub brush as she went back to the porch.
    Mar spent the remainder of her morning/afternoon regaling her ‘antics’ with her quickly dismissed boy toy in vivid detail. Funny as it may seem, it still only placated to the real underlying issue that was her vastly diminishing romantic life. While Marissa wanted something that was longer than a quick night—or even a quick three months—she still couldn’t break free from the cycle that she had gone down.
    It was one thing to talk about true love, but it was another entirely to try and break from old habits, and the only thing Mar had going for her was her old habits, regardless of how hard they died down.
    In the end it was all the same…including Jessica’s ‘ This time around will be different, you’ll see. We’ll hit the town again and try out that new place — you know the one…’   blah-blah-blah. The woman was a broken record, but she was sweet. She was about the closest thing Mar had to a BFF in this life without the ever-present desire to put a bullet in her brain.
    Despite popular belief, girl talk could be very…boring. Incredibly boring—with vivid details and imagery created and crafted behind the placated ego that what kind of sandwich one had for lunch while sitting at the Bistro on Fifth Avenue and Liverspot somewhere was remotely related to the rude cabby trying to look up one’s skirt while also contemplating what to do with the latest fling, of which it was ‘speculated’ that so-and-such had a thing with you-know-who, who was also conspiring with life’s-favorite-person in a sordid attempt to— SPLOCH! That was the sound of the bullet going off.
    What made it worse was that Mar was no different from the others; she laid out her life like a carefully plotted journal, writing out the affairs of a whole day and somehow fitting it in only twelve measly little pages.
    So maybe the only reason Mar was bored was because she had to listen to Jessica talk about her fling the night before when all Mar really wanted to do was bash the ever-loving hell out of her own man. I’m especially proud of the way I kicked his ass to the curb, thinks he can lie to me when he hasn’t a freaking clue what he did wrong.
    Oh it was back to the same night in bed, just last night. An endless, tawdry affair of love-making and drunken sex that Mar learned to take in stride. All of it, every last shred… interrupted at the single moment when that smoke and booze-laced breath groaned out ‘Oh Bev!’ for the whole world plus Apartment C to hear.
    …BAM! Magic dead, and it was just meaningless sex all over again.
    “Oh I know right?!—you won’t believe this though, while we were at it he had the nerve to call me Bev!” Apparently Mar did get her day in court after all.
    Still, Marissa had a rule with this kind of shit: she never took on meaningless—or maybe somewhat meaningful—sex while it was a workweek, and she never went home with someone unless her girlfriends (at least one of them) could hook up with a guy too. It was like the girl version of ‘Bro’s before hoe’s’. Most of the time it was Jessica leading the pack, but it was Mar’s turn in the coin-toss among her small circle, as went their game which had no rules except who was playing