Kiss Me Like You Mean It: A Novel

by J. R. Rogue

  “What is it he gives you that I never could? Is it because he’s an artist? Is it the long hair? Is it because he will hurt you in bed, the way I never could?”

  “He does it because I like it. You never could because you worried too much about hurting me. And that’s what killed us in the end. You never trusted me to safe out. To know my own limits.” I started to want pain. To confess my desires after we got married. I told Connor I couldn't enjoy sex anymore unless I felt like I was fucking someone who didn't love me. Who didn't care to see me again. He told me he could play that game, but he didn't mean it. Not really. How could he keep up? Our sex for years was vibrant, alive. Then I woke to memories of what my stepfather did to me, and I couldn't stand to be touched at all. For years.

  After we got married, I figured I could be honest with him. Vows mean no leaving, right? He couldn't leave me and all my dark? He promised not to. Logan gives me what I need because I will it, I write it.

  “Those games never would have worked with me. You resented me too much.”

  “I didn’t resent you.”

  “The worst part is you never just lied to me. You lied to yourself all the time. You resent me still because I pulled the truth from you. I pulled the truth from you and it made you better. It healed you in so many fucking ways and it led you to him. He gets you. That mother fucker gets the reward. I know, Gwen, I know it’s been a year and I am supposed to be moving on but seeing you here now, I hate him. I hate that bastard because he stole you from me. Even when you came back, you were still his. I’m sure he is a great guy and he makes you happy but to me he is scum. He is a fucking thief.”

  He doesn't know how true his words are to me, to everyone. “You can’t steal what’s already gone.”

  “Nine years together and you could barely talk to me and now you’re this open book. Save the truth now. It’s just a goddamn knife in my gut."

  "Just let me give you the divorce," I say. Isn't that what I'm here for?

  "And you'll go back to your rainy day lovely life with your artist.”

  "Let it go." I'm so tired. So very tired of the years and the worry in my heart.

  “Letting it, you, go is obviously not a skill I have learned to master. Here's the thing. I'm never going to be as broken as you. I can't win that and I don't want to. I don't want you to have been through what you've been through but I've hurt, too. You hurt me and I'm not the same man I was before. I have a darkness in me and you changed me. You never thought I could relate to you before but I can now.”

  "This isn't a contest." My words are biting. I feel the red I always bite down.

  “Why can’t you just comfort me? You never can. You’re so cold. Do you comfort him?” There is more anger than blue in his voice. Sharp angles and hidden edges.

  I still. “He doesn’t need me to comfort him.” He is more made up than man. More everything I want a lover to be.

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’s just…content with me. We move in waves, the same direction.” He is my mirror. I wrote us into existence. All that he is now, all that we were, all that we are. He is a reflection of everything I need. “With you and me, it was always back and forth. You loved me more, then I loved you more. It was never at the same time.”

  “So you don’t hold him?”

  I think of all the times Connor wanted me to touch him. To just reach my hand out, brush his temple, press my lips there. But when I felt that want from him, I froze. “You know that part of me died. It died when I found out the truth. I don’t want to be held at night. I don’t want a kiss on the forehead. I don’t want my hand held. It wasn’t just you, it’s in me, this distance. This is who I am now and it had nothing to do with you.”

  “You weren’t always like that. You loved to hold me, before.”

  I can barely recall those days. It’s only in my notebooks that I catch glimpses of that girl. So fragile and open-hearted, even in her guarded ways. I hate that he always pulls her back up, to the surface. That he doesn’t allow her to drown, as I have. “I know. And you always like to remind me of that. That I was whole once. That I was normal once.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” He speaks more openly now than I do. Less in command of his language. He lets everything out, unafraid of where it will fall.

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s what you do to me. You take this thing that hurts me, this part of me, and you make it about you. You make it about your hurt.”

  “No, that’s what you did to me.”

  I flinch at the truth. “I just wanted to be left alone! I wanted to be left alone and you wouldn’t go away. You made it about you. Like, something had been stolen from you, not me. That my change had ruined your future! You were selfish. You wanted me to stay with you so you could be happy. You didn’t care that I was dying. Trying to be normal and happy and perfect for you. The little suburban housewife. The perfect little woman just like your mother and sister. You stopped seeing what I wanted. If I had never left, would you have let me go so I could be happy? Or would you have watched me wither away in front of you? Watched me change everything about myself so I could be what you wanted?” I think he would have.

  “I wanted you to be happy. That’s why I wanted you to go to therapy.”

  And here we are, transported back in time. “You wanted me to go to therapy so I could be better FOR YOU!”

  “Why do you always say that?”

  I say it because he does not listen. So many years of jokes about my short attention span. About the way I never listened to what he said, and he was doing it, too. “Because that’s how it felt. One more thing to cross off your list for your cookie cutter life.”

  “I just wanted us to be happy.” He looks down at his boots again.

  “Well, we weren’t. You would have lived the rest of your life miserable with me. You would have taken that over being happy.”

  “Happy the way I am now? I’ve had you and I haven’t had you. It’s worse without you.”

  “If it were right, you would say it was right with me and without me it was wrong. Instead, you’re saying without me it’s wrong and with me it’s a little less wrong. We are both still young-ish. You struck out with me, but there’s someone out there who will make you wish you had never met me.”

  “Most days I do wish I had never met you. I was happy, healthy, before you.”

  “And that’s not what love is.”

  “Love is pain, sacrifice.”

  “It has to be more than that.” I’m not sure what it is, but there must be more.

  “Do you have that now?”

  “Close enough. It’s not in the cards for me, that perfect thing. The kind you think exists.”

  “What about your version of perfect?”

  I laugh, no song there, no smile in my eyes. “I have no version of perfect. It’s all shit.”

  77

  My Perfect Lie

  I wonder if Connor would have had enough warmth to sustain all of us. Me and a child and himself. He is stronger than I could ever imagine, more in tune with his heart, so changed and grown up. I look back at the cold years of our relationship when we were more like roommates than lovers.

  He told me he would get off in the shower, and that was fine. I would get off under the covers after he left for work.

  We couldn't find anything in each other worth desiring. I hate telling people that, writing it.

  I kept the secrets of us, our relationship and our marriage, under wraps. Best not to let anyone see the cracks, the fissures.

  I live my life like a beautiful painting, a beautiful lie. I put the pretty on social media, hide the ugliest of truths.

  What good is all of this thick skin if all I do is hide from the world? Can't I walk into the sunlight and hold my head high? Mean it when I say that I don't care what other people think of me? Put my money where my mouth is?

  I look at Connor's hands on the chain of the swing. I need Connor to hold my hand. I am not too proud to
feel that.

  He was a crutch, a warm place to land and it’s so strange to me that we can go through so many waves, so many changes, with another soul.

  So many truths and questions have been answered here in the dark, in this park.

  We are not what we once were and our history is riddled with lies, deceit.

  "Are you ready to tell the truth?" he asks me, because he knows I am. He knows why I came here, why I confess, why I write. He knows even when I tell him he doesn't. My rage and rebellion from love can't change his truth.

  "How do we make this clean now? How do we make this our own version of perfect?" I want to be the wife I always hoped I would be. With him, the constant, unwavering husband I never thought I would get. The other men who got close, they wouldn't be able to hold me the way he does. Hold me up and keep me from drowning. One of the hardest things to live through is knowing someone doesn't want you anymore after you've shown them every ugly crack in your soul. Avery, years ago, saw mine and left me. Logan saw them and lied the way I lied. I was young and foolish then, to think I could spend my lives with them. Maybe that's why I cringe when young people say they want to get married. I want them to get out there and live their lives. To take the time and care to find someone who will change with them. I know it happens early for some, but it didn’t for me. I was a different woman then and we couldn't have grown together, those men and I. I was twenty-five when I met Connor and still so raw and unlearned, so foolish and naïve about the world. I have never seen someone transform themselves completely.

  Maybe I can? I have I guess, just not in the right direction.

  I've regressed since I learned about my abuse. I opened up and I told the world, yet it placed more bars on my heart. Each level of secrets revealed has built more walls. I was failing. That's why I have to tell it this way.

  I look down at my hand, at the truth. “I brought everything here. The pictures and the notebooks and this pain in my chest. I want to bury it, to burn it, for you to take it, I don't care. Whatever you think is best. Whatever you want me to do with it, I'll do it."

  He finally stands, moved by the change in my voice. He knows what it means. He knows me.

  "I want to move on from this, from this beginning and ending and the middle. All of it.” My voice cracks and I clench my eyes. Everything is gone, the things I made up and the lies. Logan, my perfect life, my perfect lie. "I want to know something beautiful can grow from this. That opening up doesn't have to be the end of everything. That someone will see all of this ugly in me, and tell me where the beauty is."

  When he reaches me, he kisses me like he means it, and he always has. Even when he hated me, he kissed me with the kind of honesty I let die in my throat.

  He is beauty and life and I am alive because he believes in me, for some reason.

  The fairytales don't compare to the work he does. To the day in and the day out.

  He endures.

  My love is poison. His kisses are mine. They always have been. He doesn't steal life from me, he breathes it back into me.

  How does anyone survive without this kind of love? How does he see me the same way, every day? I know he loved me even when he hated me. Even when I was killing him. When I left him. When I lost myself. We’re more than this story or the way people see it. When he pulls away, he stares into my eyes. He always said they looked nearly black in the night, my dark blue melted away.

  "I'll pick you up when you're done."

  I feel a dissolve, the slow melt of my story, our story. I blink and I am not alone, I am looking into warm eyes.

  78

  Exhume

  I stare at my phone. The vibration has pulled me from the story.

  Connor: I'll pick you up when you're done.

  “Sorry,” I say, looking at the clock on the wall, and she follows my eyes. I take another drink. It’s water, not the clear poison I wanted for this.

  “Yes. Our time today is almost up.” The illusion is gone. The airport is gone. It’s as it is. A room of creams and whites. I do not sit on the couch, this hasn’t been the cliché I worked it up to be, back when I rejected it all.

  “It always goes this way. Time slips by too quickly.” I start to gather my things, my therapist’s words still me.

  “Will you write it differently? How much truth is in that story?”

  “A lot, a lot of lies, too.”

  “I think that’s just called fiction, no?”

  “Yes,” I pause, “fiction.”

  “Was Logan real?”

  We will rehash this, go back to the beginning. I hope I’m ready then. “Yes. For a fleeting moment.”

  “Do you know where Logan is these days?”

  “No.” And it’s the truth. I had to exhume him for his, but I will bury him again.

  “Do you ever think about him?”

  “Rarely. What once burned so brightly in my heart, died out. I thought he would always be close to my mind. But he isn’t.” It hurts to know that love can fade so fully. “It’s only when I hear his name, or see someone who looks like him. When I remember him, it is a dull ache. A sadness at what could have been, of what I would have eventually run from. You cannot love a lie, and a liar, as fully as you hope to. He was more a phantom than a man. I hope he is still lying. So I‘ll always know I was right about him.”

  “Is that a healthy way to look back at it?”

  “No. But that’s why I come here, right? To fix myself?” I clutch my purse in my lap.

  “Was Penny real?”

  “In the beginning. She didn’t last in our lives past that summer.”

  “So there was no other woman?”

  “No, it was always me for him. Always.”

  “Then why write her into the story in that way?”

  “I needed someone else to blame. Someone other than myself. I needed a villain. I couldn’t let it be me. I couldn’t face that.”

  “You see the truth in your tale though, right? In the end, he wanted you. The same way he wants you now, the same way he chooses you every day. Why write yourself apart?”

  “I guess I don’t know him any other way. I only know him searching for me, reaching for me as I pull.”

  “Why did you put yourself with Logan?”

  “Because I wouldn’t have been happy with him. I wrote me running back to Connor because that’s what I’ll always do. I wrote me betraying both, because that’s what I did. I had to punish myself.”

  “I hope you know, what matters now, is what you choose to do going forward. Do you think you’ll leave and betray Connor again?”

  “Never. I’ll never do that again.”

  “Then you need to stop punishing yourself. The past is done, over. We can only learn from it. Move forward and choose more wisely with the information we have gathered from all we have done and all the ways we have stumbled.”

  “How do I break the cycle? How do I stop nailing myself to the cross?”

  “That’s why we’re here, now. To talk it out. To let our wounds breathe and heal.”

  “I’ve always been a walking wound. I can see why people sometimes choose to just fade away. It’s easier than facing all we have done and all we have hurt. I wanted to do that, for so many years. Connor even said he felt that way once. I made the smiling, laughing man cry, I made him wish he wasn’t alive. I don’t understand it. He has more forgiveness in him than anyone I know.”

  “He chose you. You wrote it yourself. If you choose him back, like you say you do, it’s time to accept the fact that you can be happy. That the past doesn’t matter. You were not given a dark mark when you were a child. You can rise above and have the life you want.”

  I look into her eyes, feel more stretching, more bricks falling.

  “What’s more important than him choosing you though,” she stands, I mirror her, “is that you choose yourself.”

  79

  Like I Mean It

  When I walk out into the spring March air, I shiver.

&
nbsp; I see my husband standing outside, talking on the phone. He ends the conversation as I walk to him.

  He opens his arms and pulls me into a hug. I want to cry, so I do. I don’t hide my heart with as much vehemence, not as I used to. It’s still black and bloody, but we are healing it.

  I have been going to therapy for a year. I started after I tried to leave him before our first wedding anniversary. I thought marriage could fix me, but that’s not the way the world works.

  My red rage has lessened in ways I never knew it could. It is not perfect, this life we have, not by a long shot, but I am climbing out of this hole.

  A pink letter falls out of the notebook tucked under my arm. It blows in the wind and Connor catches it by stepping on it. He dusts it off and smiles at me when he comes back to me.

  “This old letter. Damn.”

  Three years ago, when I left Connor, he sent me flowers every Wednesday for a month. Finally, I had to tell him to stop. To let him know the flowers hurt me. It was a reminder of how I broke us. His last delivery of roses had a letter stuffed inside the envelope. The small white thing bulged with the words.

  Connor starts reading the letter in front of me, he turns so I can follow along.

  Gwen,

  Wow, what a crazy couple of weeks we have had. For that matter, what a crazy seven years since we met. We've had ups, we've had downs, we've been through so fucking much together. Memories I will cherish forever.

  Firstly, I want you to know my silence toward you over the next few months is not me ignoring you and I hope it will not come across as disinterest, it's exactly the opposite. I love you so much and whether it's with me or without me, I truly want you to be happy in life. If a clean break and solid time apart is what you need to feel happy right now, then I am going to give you that.

  I'm going to listen to you and respect your wishes. I don't want to smother you like I did before you moved out. I'm sorry for that. I just wanted to spend all the time I could with you before you left. I think this letter and giving you space is the only way I can show you that I realize if you gave me another chance it would be different for us and I would be committed to changing the things you need from me and would need from me in the future.