Although, most of the time, he was “game” to go out, in more recent months, Irina couldn’t help but often feel like she was carting along a dead body with her. Someone whose soul, whose “essence” had left their earthly carapace. In short, someone who fundamentally didn’t want to be there. Of course, when they had first started seeing each other, this hadn’t been the case. Lars had been only too willing to go out all the time, to do whatever Irina had wanted, really. And then, over time—as time is the ruiner (not the healer) of all things—he began to express less and less enthusiasm for what he would eventually call “indulging her.”

“Oh, is that what you’re doing?” she would hit back. “Because I could say the same about having sex with you.”

She knew it was a bad sign that she was now trying to wield the prospect of withholding sex as a means to get him to act the way he used to. Which is to say, to accompany her wherever she wanted, whenever she wanted. Why couldn’t that particular part of the “honeymoon phase” have lasted? Just gone on and on and on? Irina had been subjected to this form of “fervor waning” before—what girl hadn’t? But with Lars, the shift was harder for her to accept. Not just because she loved him more than she had loved all the others, but because he had sustained his level of ardor for much longer than the others. Therefore, she had been led into a false sense of security—made to believe that he wasn’t ultimately a carbon copy of the ones who came before. That his passion for and interest in her could sustain itself. Wouldn’t simply “fizzle out” because of that evil bastard: Time.

The thing—nay, the monster—that rendered everything and everyone suddenly “boring.” “Stale.” “Day-old bread.” Especially from the perspective of a man looking at a woman. Even one who was as objectively “cum-in-your-pants-on-sight” as Irina. And Irina knew this about herself, too. The effect she had on men. Indeed, there were many moments now when she wanted to remind Lars of that reality by dressing a certain way in public and letting him see the jaws drop as they went out together. Maybe that would remind him to get himself in check. To reinstate some of that same lust he once had for her as well. The uncontrollable sense of desire he expressed toward her at the beginning, just like these strangers gawking at her as she walked down the street with him. And no, it didn’t even seem to matter that she patently had a boyfriend; the attire she had selected to showcase her body to its full effect was too “mouthwatering” not to pay attention to.

Unfortunately, rather than Lars once again seeing Irina through the same eyes as these ogling men, he would instead get irritated. Threaten to leave her on her own with comments like, “Well, it seems like you have enough company and attention, what do you need me for? Think I can just go home now, which is where I fucking want to be anyway.” This was where she had to bite her tongue about reminding him that it was her home, the one she had let him move into.

What’s more, that he had to ask, “What do you need me for?” is perhaps what stung her the most. She didn’t need him, per se. But she wanted him. And, in turn, wanted him to want to be with her. Not to do it out of some forced sense of obligation or notions of “boyfriendly duty.” Yet that’s where they had arrived. Just two and a half years into the relationship. Sure, it had taken “lesser” men less time to become disengaged, but, again, Irina really believed that it was different this time around because of how much longer Lars had waited to reveal his apparently true colors. Colors that made Irina’s own mood turn black as she could feel herself, increasingly, dragging him to places. Restaurants, clubs, museums, water parks, amusement parks, birthday parties, the beach, the movie theater. Wherever they went, there he didn’t want to be. It was becoming a huge embarrassment to her. The lifelessness in his body was starting to make people—mainly her friends—ask questions. Is he okay? Is he on something? Did he just inject heroin (and does he have any more)? Stuff like that.

This was around the period when Irina began to question why she kept trying to drag him along like motherfucking Bernie Lomax. Not that Lars would even get that reference. Since, for whatever reason, he was extremely unversed in campy or cult classic 90s movies, which, from the outset, had been a major tick in the con column for her. Fortunately for Lars, Irina was quickly able to overlook this flaw once he proved his sexual acumen to her, and any cons she had noted about him seemed to fall by the wayside. Particularly during those first few months of essentially nonstop fucking.

However, now that he was acting like Bernie, that corpse of a man, his previously overlooked faults were bubbling up to the surface for her again. And that he couldn’t even pick up on a seminal allusion such as the one to Robert Klane’s masterpiece was more significantly weighing on her. To make matters worse, Lars was even kind of performing like a dead man in bed lately. Just lying there with a stiff dick and letting her do to it what she would. It was hardly sexy, romantic or even titillating. Though maybe it would be if she were a necrophiliac. But no, the extent of any “necrophilia,” for her, was loving Weekend at Bernie’s. Until her boyfriend turned into Bernie.

And so, to “liven” Lars up one day, Irina decided to break up with him. That’s when he appeared to finally be “brought back from the dead,” demanding to know why, to know what he had done wrong. As she tossed his shit out the door in a cool, collected manner, her only reply was, “I’m not looking for a Bernie Lomax boyfriend. But I would settle for a Larry Wilson one.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means: you’re finally dead to me after acting so dead for this long.”

With that, she shoved him out the door, never to let him back in again. For he had put the final nail in the coffin of their relationship with his pulseless behavior.