Stuttered sobs through the phone line: “He’s sleeping with someone else. Can you come here now?” A hot flush slops over me. “Of course,” I cringe. “Be right there.” The relentless Portland drizzle mists me but offers no absolution as I duck into my 1975 Hornet and back out of Dad’s driveway during a weekend home from college.

Jennifer is standing on step six of the 29 steps to Josh’s apartment in a dilapidated Victorian, holding something limp in her outstretched hand. Even from a half block away, my 20-year-old brain computes that on the pad of her hand, presented like a found salamander, is a used condom. She has plucked it lifeless from a mess of Q-tips and tissues from Josh’s bathroom wastebasket.

What kind of idiot has an affair and then throws the condom in the bathroom wastebasket of the apartment frequently occupied by his girlfriend? Oh yeah, my friend’s idiot boyfriend whom I had slept with a few weeks before. No, wait: my friend’s slovenly idiot boyfriend whom I had slept with a few weeks before.

Jennifer lets the condom slip onto the steps, but keeps her now-contaminated hand outstretched while she bearhugs me with the other. She is tall and blond, with perky breasts, lovely in a wholesome bike-riding-grad-student sort of way. I am short with dyed-black hair, oversized breasts, and the look of a remorseful dog after chewing your favorite lovey. Luckily Jennifer is blind through her thick glasses and sheets of tears.

This is the moment when I imagine myself uttering: “You’re right. He’s a schmuck. And so am I. I had sex with him. (At least we used a condom?) I’m sorry. I’ll go now.”

Instead I say: “I’m so sorry he’s a schmuck. Who do you think it is?”

Meanwhile I’m flashing on the origins of the indiscretion. Josh was sort of a Jewish Che Guevara—or as close as I could get. It was 1988 and he was the director of a local organization fueled by caffeinated, Camel-smoking volunteers in Birkenstocks who wanted to stop U.S. atrocities in Central America. He smoked menthols and played the bass.

Josh taught me the art of clipboarding and the use of the golden triangle: your eyes, their eyes, the clipboard. Use the pen to draw their eyes to the petition. Hand them the clipboard. Sign them up.

But something besides clipboards percolated between us.

Josh lived in Portland and his girlfriend, Jennifer, and I were at the university in Eugene—two hours away. On the phone one morning, Josh and I discussed the best wording for a phone-bank rap (“Can you give $10 right now to stop the U.S. war in El Salvador?”), but we lingered on the call. He wondered if it might be more efficient to discuss the rap in person.

I got in my Hornet and sped north on I-5. The electricity of the audacity nearly felled me. I traced my finger around the outline of his big hands, then kissed his fingertips. He scooped me up like a bride and set me down on his avocado-colored corduroy couch. We eventually found our way to the nearby city park where we spent two hours necking on a bench and swinging on swings, all set to my internal soundtrack of Free to Be . . . You and Me.

In a pathological twist on my part, Jennifer and I became better friends. She was working toward a Ph.D. in anthropology and I toward a B.A. in political science with a minor in blowing off class to organize protests. We spent time at cafes—herbal tea for her, iced mochas for me—cramming for exams, and lamenting male dominance in an era of third-wave feminism.

My fling with Josh went on for months—all without intercourse. To him, cheating wasn’t really cheating until consummated in actual copulation (a Clintonian definition of sexual relations, I suppose). But, well, we did everything else—and everything else coalesced in a period of unparalleled foreplay.

I loved the double dates when we flirted with discovery. Jennifer and Josh and me and Kevin—my own sweet, loving, loyal, clueless boyfriend—would go out for breakfast at the IHOP or take home Chinese for dinner. Josh would pass a menu and brush a hand against my breast or touch my thigh under the table. We’d snatch moments in a kitchen nook, pressed up against the counter.

Josh and Jennifer became more domestic. They acquired a cat they called “Zapato” who lived with Jennifer in Eugene but was officially “parented” by both. They discussed laundry.

Clearly, the train would be derailed in some kind of ugly wreck.

Jennifer was safely tucked in Eugene the evening we finally decided to have sexual relations. Be it irony or the predictable letdown of all that foreplay, the sex was flat, awkward, and uninspired. Pretty much a strikeout in the ninth with the bases loaded.

The condom was little more than a stocking cap on a sunny day. Yet, there it was, cast in the bathroom wastebasket where it languished for weeks. Evidence A.

On the steps with Jennifer wrapped around me—she a loving friend finding solace in sisterhood—I had that moment of utter self-loathing. In my mind, I scrambled for the youth card. I was just beyond my teenage years, for God’s sake; could this really exist on my permanent character record?

That day marked a carnal epiphany—a glacial shift toward fidelity and honesty. It wasn’t about morality—in Jerry Falwell’s heyday, I wasn’t about to dwell in that guilt. Rather, it was a crashing disappointment in my choice of a man over a female friendship, all derived from the superficial thrill of duplicity. And in that final moment of truth, the felony was not the fellatio. It was my inability to ’fess up.

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Demetra Tsigaris is a writer and editor who lives with her husband and three children in Berkeley. She doesn’t lie much anymore, except about her age and weight, and to her kids about whether we can reverse global warming (“Of course, we can”), and to her husband about enjoying Warriors games.

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