Page 113 of The Boyfriend Experience

I think her mid-life crisis is over too.

Vivi Vaughn started my second tat on my other shoulder. It’s me in a suit, surrounded by a bunch of familiar faces.

That day at the festival is now a local legend. We don’t admit to anything, of course. But rumors fly about how we took down Hanna and saved the Colorado craft beer industry.

I think it was the hipsters who talked.

And that’s fine. Let people talk. Let them turn it into something more than it was if they want.

We don’t care.

We’re too busy planning the Husband Experience.

EPILOGUE - JORDAN

I live in a seven-million-dollar, ten-thousand-square-foot historical mansion next door to the Denver Botanical Gardens. I bought it last fall in foreclosure with the hope of…

What?

What was I hoping?

I live here now because I’m liquidating. I have hopes and dreams too. I need things. It’s all I’ve got left and I don’t want it unless…

There are seven bedrooms, eleven bathrooms, two media rooms, two offices, two kitchens, a game room, a library, and a ballroom.

And I live here alone.

There’s nowhere to drop my keys as I come in the front door because the place is empty. A family lived here before their luck changed. And they left everything behind when they sold it. Even photographs. The happy couple on their wedding day. Pictures of their kids, and I can only assume they did that because they have digitals in Dropbox or some shit, because that part is pretty cold.

Pretty.

Fucking.

Cold.

(But who am I to judge?)

They left everything like it was a holiday home and whatever they kept there was just… extra. Like they went shopping and bought two of everything and so all this was just… the spare set.

Except it wasn’t.

But it’s all gone now. I packed up the photographs in a box and gave them to Lawton. Did he ever return them? I have no idea because I never asked. Then I sold all the furniture in an estate sale last month and bought a desk, a bed, and a couch from IKEA and had it all placed in the fifteen-hundred-square-foot office on the main floor.

I’m pretty sure the IKEA delivery people thought I was crazy, but I don’t care. And anyway, it might be true.

I live in the office. I don’t even bother using the main kitchen because I don’t cook and the office has a wet bar—because all gentlemen who own ten-thousand-square-foot-homes have a wet bar in their office—and it even has a dishwasher to wash the cut-crystal glasses I drink bourbon out of every night before bed, so who cares about the industrial-sized chef’s kitchen on the other side of the house?

On the desk there’s a laptop and on the wall there’s a fifty-five-inch TV, except I don’t have cable, or Netflix, or Hulu, or even Prime, so why I bought the TV, I couldn’t tell you.

If anyone saw me these days I’d get a label.

If I was lucky that label would be… eccentric. But more likely than not, they’d call me…sad.

And that would be accurate.

I am sad. For all the things I lost. For all the ways I’ve tried to make up to the people who matter. For all the things I’ll never have—things that have nothing to do with the size of a TV or the number of bathrooms in a house I don’t even really live in, or a wet bar in the oversized home office.

I feel sorry for that family who lost this house. I really do. Because at least they treated it like a home. At least it was loved.