Feb 02 2009
Not all bad
I think the last post was heavy on the bad things. I feel I should stop and mention some of the good things so I don’t look completely pathetic for staying with him so long. Like, sex outdoors. Once an outside romp got interrupted by the angry ant nest we had been laying on. I was covered in horrible bites for a long time, many in horrible places. Once we were in the soft grass during a lightning storm, no less. It was wild and passionate and liberating. Sex in public. Once at a mall and a few trips to a couple of major theme parks I won’t name for fear of lawyers. That got the adrenaline going! He introduced me to various classic rock bands I didn’t know much about. He made a real effort to get along with my family, even after they forbid us to be together.
Yes, that happened. At one point I was cornered into admitting I had been having sex. They were furious. For a while they tried to deny us contact entirely, and then reduced it to supervised meetings. They never managed to stop us from anything. We’d often manage quickies in my room with the door open. We even arranged it a few times so he’d go out to ’smoke’ and I’d go to the bathroom for ‘number two.’ Only, there was a door to the backyard and he’d come in and screw me. I admit that after one incident my parents had good reason to hate him and be upset with me. I’m still so upset by it that I won’t even tell you here in this blog. Yes, there’s at least one secret I still have. Not many. My family took him with us on a trip to visit relatives for the weekend. My one-legged great-grandfather offered to shoot him for me. At the time I was horrified. Now I wish I’d taken him up on it.
Jay also was the one who helped me aquire a good deal of the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles. My mom and aunt had read them when I was young, but I’d never actually gotten to read them myself. The movie came out, I fell in love with it, and got the first book. He had most of the others and happily handed them over. Books are a big deal to me. This was really nice.
We would spend time together not having sex, too. Sometimes. We’d go for walks in a local park. We’d hang out with his friends and listen to music. We would watch movies together. We did normal relationship things. But mostly there was the sex.
It was my longest relationship and it was completely wrapped up in the fact that he was my first. Leaving him would make me just another girl who’d had sex. Would anyone else even want me? After all, now I was used merchandise. And what would happen to him? He depended on me. He was possessive of me. He loved me. I was afraid he’d lose himself completely in all his destructive addictions and not come out again. It would be my fault. At this point he and his friends weren’t at the school anymore so I didn’t have to worry about running into them in the halls. But there were a lot of mutual friends. And as I’ve said, I had done a lot of bragging about how great it all was. How could I explain to people why it was suddenly over? How could I admit how completely foolish I had been? Do I dare rat him out to everyone as the lying lowlife I knew him to be? I didn’t want to make him angry.
He was a lot like the Hulk. When he got angry he became another person. He would break things. Storm about. Get real quiet and real scary. He had told me stories of things he’d done to people who made him angry. Once we were joking around and he said something I didn’t like, so I play smacked him on the face. Not hard. Not seriously. He went from laughing to Hulk in an instant. Warned me to never, ever do it again. He didn’t say what would happen if I did, but I wasn’t going to tempt fate. I knew he was capable of things. I had seen his temper in action.
And I was no dummy. For all my blindness through my relationship, I was not ignorant to what abuse was. I was a rights activist already. I watched Lifetime movies and payed attention in classes and learned all about what kinds of abuse there were. How many women end up in destructive cycles. How men become stalkers and attackers. How the law is flawed and unable to protect women until it was just about too late. I also learned how easily women were made out to be liars and whores. I didn’t want to go through all that. And because he had never actually hit me, I didn’t feel I had any sort of case against him. I had no proof of anything, while there was plenty of proof to the contrary. No, I would just settle for a clean break. I think the problem stalking exs have is that when the woman leaves they feel like they’re not good enough. This hurts their childish pride. Jay had lots of pride. I needed to find a way to make him want to leave me. Make it his idea.
The only way I could see that happening was if I made him believe I cheated on him. I remembered how offended Randy had been. I knew it would work. And thankfully, I had met someone who was going to help me out.
