You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories

and the women he’d dated had seemed to believe him when he told them he wasn’t looking for anything serious—or at least to believe that the fact he’d said this meant they could not accuse him of wrongdoing when it ultimately proved to be true.

What can this mean but that I am spoiled, and selfish, and arrogant, and that I am capable of loving nothing but a distorted reflection of my own twisted heart?

Brave girls, to transmute terror into laughter, to joke instead of cry.

Her entire existence, she sometimes felt, was premised on the idea that pursuing pleasure was less important than avoiding pain. Perhaps the problem with adulthood was that you weighed the consequences of your actions too carefully, in a way that left you with a life you despised.

I hated that girl, and I’m pretty sure she hated me, too. I knew exactly what she was thinking: she’d been on the hunt for some badass dude who’d go down with her into whatever dark place she was trapped in, but instead she’d ended up with this lame-ass coward, a guy who’s too fucked up to tell her to get lost, but also too scared to do what he said he would do.

They sink into a kind of stasis, and David is forced to confront the possibility that this is the new normal, as good as things will ever be.

“If she thinks of marrying this guy as the end to all excitement, maybe she shouldn’t be getting married,” Kath says.

Like, who is this person who made all these choices that I just have to live with? I look back at that person and I hate her, I hate her so much for what she did to me, that person is like my nemesis, my worst enemy, but the problem is, that person is me.”

It was almost existentially unsettling, that two people in such close physical proximity could be experiencing the same moment so differently.

They barricaded themselves inside fortresses of chill politeness, where they hunkered down and waited for as long as it took for him to go away.