The front door of the apartment creaked open, awaking me from a dream about Ex (my second since learning about Sven). Ex knew I'd discovered his secret. I'd found a receipt for the hotel booking in his e-mail and called the hotel. Ex and Sven had not yet checked in, but I asked the man on the telephone to leave a note for Ex: "Call Steve. Emergency." The next morning I checked my phone and saw one missed call from Ex at 7:15 that morning. He hadn't left a message. Part of me assumed (hoped?) the concierge had forgotten about me by the time Sven and Ex showed up.

He hadn't.

I called Ex's name when I heard the door close. He said, "it's me," then walked quickly to the bathroom and shut the door. I hoisted myself up from the air mattress and waited. I heard the flush of the toilet; he opened the door. Aiming his eyes directly at mine, he said in a hard voice, "Well, we have a lot to talk about, don't we?"

My plan was simple. If the concierge had indeed delivered my message, I would wait for Ex to confront me, then silence him (perhaps with a grand gesture?) and speak this line: "Now that I know what you've done, I never want to see you again."

This line (or a slightly less theatrical version thereof) had been scripted for me by one of my best friends, "Mark." Mark understood what I was going through: a few years ago, his girlfriend of eight years had cheated on him. Not unlike myself (or most of the country, apparently), he learned of the infidelity by reading her e-mails. I remember speaking to him on the phone while he was still fresh from the breakup. The experience had reduced him to a heartbroken mess.

Mark listened as I poured out the details of Ex's romance with Sven, then offered new details about his own breakup. "You don't know the half of it," he began. "I smashed up her stuff with a baseball bat. I got in her face and shouted at her until she was scared of me. I found out the address of the guy she was with and seriously thought I was going to kill him." Somehow it hadn't crossed my mind to kill Sven (or Ex), but I'd certainly thought about destroying some furniture; the only problem was, most of our furniture belonged to me. "Listen," Mark continued. "No one could console me. I was inconsolable. But if there's one thing I wish I'd done, it was just walk away. Tell him you know, then make a clean break. Don't call him; don't speak to him. Just walk away."

I managed to follow this last part of the plan, declining Ex's invitation to talk about Sven and exiting, stage-right, to the kitchen. But talk about Sven we did. I can't recall which one of us spoke first, but the next thing I remember is Ex insisting that I didn't know the whole story. He and Sven had waited to have sex until after he broke up with me. (I'd concluded as much on my own, but hearing it from him still didn't make me feel any better about it). Ex spoke gently, his initial hardness giving way to something between an adult delivering bad news and a child fearing punishment.

ME: But you flirted with him before we broke up, right?

EX (pause, squinting deliberately and looking off to the side to show me he was thinking): It started around November.

ME: And you love him.

EX (pause): I might.

ME: How many times have you had sex with him?

EX (again, squinting): Four?

ME: The first time was in the swimming pool.

EX: The swimming pool? How did you know about that?

ME: Your e-mails.

EX: The other day when I was having trouble signing in and you helped me, you were watching me enter my password, weren't you.

ME: I installed spyware on your computer. It kept a log all your keystrokes; I got your passwords from there.

Ex smiled, sucking at his tongue.

EX: I'm impressed. I can't believe I'm saying it, but I'm impressed.

I smiled, too. For a moment, we were friends, enjoying each other's company and surprising each other as only best friends can do.

A few hours later we shared another "friendship moment" over two slices of pizza and a calzone at the neighborhood pizzeria. I asked if Sven had recently broken up with his own partner (I recall Ex saying that Sven was in a relationship when Sven's name - and semi-nude photos - first make their appearance in our relationship several weeks ago). Ex replied that Sven had been in a five-year relationship with an Argentinian tango-dancer who beat him. I was surprised, but also concerned. Ex, too, had suffered through several abusive relationships. The first was with his biological father (Ex and his two brothers were removed from the house and eventually adopted by the same family). Others relationships followed, in high school and college, where Ex lived in fear of his boyfriends' tempers. I'm not sure why, but I was worried by Ex's and Sven's shared history of abuse. "Be careful," I said. A curious Ex looked up at me from his calzone. I struggled to explain my concern - I'm still not sure how to explain it. The best I could do was to say, "both of you have been abused. Just be aware of your histories and what you're both bringing to the relationship."

At the same time I've been reconnecting with Ex as a friend, I am still a heartbroken mess of ex-boyfriend - more so than ever since learning about Sven. Against my better judgement, I asked Ex about his sex-life with Sven. How did they do it?

EX: MJO.

ME: What?

EX: Mutual jerking off, rubbing.

ME: Have you had anal sex?

EX (pause; answering, perhaps, despite his own better judgement): Yes. Once. I penetrated him.

My heart caught fire.

Ex and I rarely had anal sex. The few times we did I usually bottomed. I never quite enjoyed it, but I wanted it. It forced me into a kind of transcendental state where my nerve-endings died and were born anew into a separate language of sensation - wonderful, hypnotic, painful, and completely alien.

Because we had anal sex so infrequently, the preparation took forever. Ex would urge me to relax, whispering x-rated, sweet-nothings into my ear. I would relax a little, then tighten, then relax a little more, then become distracted and force us to begin the process all over again. This game of relax-and-tighten could last as long as twenty minutes. Then in he went - though not all at once. No matter how much relaxation I could muster, no matter how many fingers I could accommodate, I was never prepared for the big entry. So again - relax and tighten. Fast-forward another five minutes - more if the dog started barking or an ambulance with blaring siren happened to pass by our window - and then - finally - we were making love. It may have taken a ridiculous amount of time to get there, but once the love-making began, my circuits would short and my body would slide into a foreign land.

Being that he's a dancer, Sven is probably a more limber bottom than I. He might be a more seasoned one, too, but it doesn't matter: the fact that Ex would enter him, would share with him such an intimate and otherworldly experience, turned my blood to lava. At the same time, I was also suddenly, perversely attracted to him. I had never loved Ex more, nor wanted him more feverishly to fuck me.

Following Ex's revelation about penetrating Sven, I began having "Sven flashes" - blazing, mental cinematic images of lips curling, eyes rolling beneath closed eyelids; close-ups of Sven's beautiful face as Ex pleasures him off-camera. I have only a tenuous memory of Sven face. (He looks a bit like Taylor Lautner, so I tend to think of Lautner's face, particularly his snub nose, when I try to conjure a mental picture of Sven.) But the exact appearance of his face matters little. It's the pleasure on that face that haunts me, that suddenly ignites in my brain like one of my intrusive thoughts from years ago.

I have some control over my Sven flashes. Whereas my thought disorder robbed me of control, I can snuff out a flash in progress, demand my brain to extinguish it. But I can't prevent it from starting. On Day 24, the flashes came suddenly as I lay in bed - a moan escaping his lips; his nostrils flaring. I squeezed my eyes closed, putting out the fires, then opened my eyes again, staring dully at the object directly in front of me - the circular play/pause toggle on my DVD player. For the next ten minutes I attempted to will my own death. I stared, concentrated, pictured my blood slowing and my heartbeat coming to a rest. But my heart refused to stop.

II. My new home - the apartment into which I've invested nearly every hour of the last three days - is an absolute disaster.

I may have been a hippie in college, but it takes more than a bundle of burning sage to make me feel at home in a new space.

III. Ex's presence makes it impossible for me to focus on anything besides how much I still love him, and how furiously jealous I am of his new boyfriend.

Two days have passed since my breakdown. Ex saw to it the floors were stripped, sanded, and resealed; they are now drying properly and should be ready for heavy traffic in 24 hours. I don't hate the apartment. I hate that it will need to be wiped down from top to bottom (again!), as every square inch is now coated in dust from the floor-sanding, but I don't hate the apartment. The foot of snow is already melting. My catastrophe scale has recalibrated itself. The breakup and Ex's "new man" are now a respectable 4 rather than a panic-inducing 10.

My therapist used to say that panic, by its very nature, cannot sustain itself. The rushing adrenaline, the hypersensitivity to one's every internal sensation, the continuous thunder claps of one's brain and nerves crashing against themselves - panic overloads the body, leaves you spent, then sneaks away in the night like a shame-faced lover before you wake up the next morning. The panic is now gone, though I need to take precautions against another explosion. I must continually "decatastrophize" my thinking, recalibrate my scale, take deep breathes, and keep my xanax handy. Above all, I must get out of the old apartment.

Living with Ex is impossible. Every time I see him, I think of how much I love him. Monday night, after my breakdown, I asked him to kiss me. I'd assumed Monday would be my last night sleeping at the old apartment. (This may have contributed to the panic attack.) He kissed me - a sort of "goodbye" kiss. The instant our lips touched, blood rushed to my groin and my cheeks burned. I can't risk catastrophizing my feelings for him, and the feelings are less immediate when we're apart.

By this time tomorrow, my hope is for most of my furniture to be at the new apartment. My books, DVDs, files, and knick-knacks are already there in boxes along with the kitchen table and chairs. This leaves my two metal bookcases, my desk and filing cabinet, the "love seat" (which, from now on, I'll refer to as a "compact sofa"), my desk chair, my mattress and box spring, the air filter, and my electronics. Over the weekend I'll collect any leftover items, and then, voila! For the first time in my life, I will be living on my own.