“I'm sorry, hi. May I help you?” I was stunned by the sight of her.
“My name is Diana. I just – You looked bored. I got dragged here by a friend. Not exactly my kind of thing, I think racing is kind of stupid,” Diana said. I loved her honesty. Of course I also loved racing, but I wanted someone who could be up front and honest with me after Mary-Margaret kept so many things hidden.
“I'm actually the guy who owns the winning car. I also drove 12 hours of the race. Ryan Sumpter,” I said as I extended my hand.
“Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't expect... I just, I didn't think the most stunningly handsome man I'd ever seen would be a race car driver.”
“What did you think I was? A groupie?” Perhaps I shouldn't have been so harsh, but she seemed to take it better than I thought she would.
“No, I don't know. I thought race car drivers were like red neck crazy people,” Diana said.
“Well, I can be crazy. I drive around in circles for twenty-four hours straight. That's kinda crazy,” I told her.
Diana glanced at the hauler, almost as if she completely ignored what I said. “Is anybody in there?”
“No, everyone is too busy partying. Why?”
“Do you have any energy left after that long of a race?” Diana asked. I knew what she was asking. I'd never done anything like... That... So quickly... With someone I'd just met... Before... I kinda felt like Ayrton.
But she was tall. And platinum blonde. And sexy as hell. We went into the hauler and locked the door behind us. I tossed her against the fridge and we went at it for almost an hour. At one point in the middle of the fun, she blurted out “Oh my God! Somebody knows what he's doing!” It was spectacular. Afterward, my conscience kicked in. We were lying under a blanket in the conference area at the back of the hauler.
“So, are you still going to be around tomorrow or was this a one time thing?” I asked her.
“After that? My God yes, I'll be around!” she responded. I never expected for a sexual encounter to keep a beautiful girl around in my life... But hell, I'll take it.
“So what brought you to Belgium?” I asked. Probably a question I should have asked before I had sex with her. Didn't have a chance to debrief with Ayrton, he knows more about this stuff than I do.
“This was my graduation trip,” Diana responded.
“Oh, from what college?”
“High school, actually.”
Oh fuck.
“Please tell me you're...”
“18, yes. I turned 18 in April,” Diana told me. Holy. Shit. Thank God. I would have never guessed she was only 18. She was hot, that's all I knew. She was taller than I would normally go for. She weighed about 165, which was perfect as I saw her. Wasn't anywhere near the smallest girl I'd been with. But she was beautiful. When the team left, she came with. She acted almost like I was forcing her to stay with us. It seemed like she was under the impression that I wanted her to come with, no questions asked. Her reaction caught me off-guard. I asked her to come with us, but I gave her a choice. We had just hooked up, I didn't want her to feel obligated. I don't know, it was confusing. Her reaction was very strange. I didn’t think much of it at the time.
The coolest part of my early relationship with Diana... My entire life had been a whirlwind, especially the first half of the year. It finally calmed when I laid eyes on her and we woke up together to welcome the morning sunshine for the first time.
When we got back to SoCal, Diana took me to her hometown of Mira Monte. What a ritzy little town, and her parents were one of the more wealthy couples there even though you couldn't tell by looking at them. They didn't spend any of their money. I'm all for investing for the future, but when your house is falling apart because you choose to completely neglect routine maintenance, that's just ridiculous.
Late in the afternoon during our time in Mira Monte, she gave me this look. It seemed as though she was getting brave or something like that, like she was about to show me a side of her that nobody else has ever gotten to see.
We got in my truck and I followed the instructions she gave me. She took me to this remote little water access stream that was at the edge of the town. I watched her as she skipped across a couple of rocks and finally sat down on a rock near the middle of the stream. She wrapped her arms around her legs and welcomed me to join her. Before I did, I made sure I took a good note of what she looked like that day. She was wearing this sexy red shirt with jeans and boots. Her hair looked as perfect as ever and her smile was that of a very happy young lady. It seemed like it had been years since I saw Mary-Margaret smile at me like that.
It was from that experience with Diana that I figured out the word for her. The adventures she took me on throughout our relationship were always interesting, always different. I was into sports and racing. She was into hiking and canoeing and excavating rocks from walls. Off kilter stuff that I had never been interested in. But I took interest in all of it and honestly, I loved it. I loved spending the time with her, learning more about her. The word for her was easy to figure out.
Unique. Diana was the most unique person I'd ever met.
A few weeks later came a day I would come to regret. The day I went to meet Diana's parents was a day I wasn't looking forward to. She wasn't a fan of either of them. She constantly criticized them both. She billed her father as the stupidest person she'd ever met and her mother as not much smarter. She billed her mother as ridiculously manipulative and condescending. She told me how they were both very cheap and invest every dime they have instead of enjoying their lives. Most of all, she told me how they can't ever make up their mind on anything.
I wasn't at her parents’ house for very long before I realized she had them all wrong. Her father was brilliant, but her mother was a nightmare. Her mother was manipulative, sure, but also backstabbing, coercive, and downright nasty. I spent all of six hours with her family before I called up Ayrton and came up with a reason to get the hell out of there.
That short trip scared me, honestly. Diana had her problems, no doubt. But I saw her mother, and she was turning into her. Looking back on it now, I should have broken up with her as soon as I looked at her mother. I learned a long time ago that most women turn into their mother. While this isn't a given in every situation, I could see a lot of parallels between who Diana was growing to be and who her mother was.
I should have listened to my smarter half on that day.
A month later, Diana and I spent a day out hiking in Montana. It was my turn to cook dinner that night. We went to the local supermarket to figure out what we wanted. Diana said something I never expected her to say.
“You're not cooking tonight. I want you to enjoy watching the baseball game and I'll cook. This is my night to repay you for everything you've done for me these past few months,” she said. I was very surprised honestly. It wasn't like her to do something so... Thoughtful. I realize that sounds really bad, but she had a lot going on and I didn't expect her to do much for me.
I was more than okay with it. The Yankees/BoSox game from the night before was postponed and it promised to be a good one. Yanks were looking to go up 3-nil on the Sox in their playoff series. We all know how that series turned out.
So I watched the game while Diana cooked. It was shaping up to be a pretty great night. Diana brought the food to the living room so we could both watch the game together. The food was great, Diana was great. Was... Great...
“Hey, can I talk to you?” Diana asked after we finished dinner.
“Sure, what's up?” I responded thinking very little of it.
“I'm worried about how much you rely on gender roles in your life. I mean, I don't want to be the housewife who is in the kitchen all the time while the man watches the game. I don't like gender roles like that.”
Hold. The. Fuck. Up.
“Diana, this was your idea,” I said in shock.
“Yeah, but you just seem so comfortable with it.”
“I was comfortable with it! I thought
you were doing it to be a good girlfriend, not to hold some shit about gender roles over my head.”
“It just seems like you want a prissy little housewife. I'm not that kind of person,” Diana said.
What should have been a great night turned into a pretty nasty argument. Gender roles? I mean, what the fuck is that? The arguments Diana and I had were getting ridiculous. Many of them I haven't mentioned. The types of things she complained about were givens in relationships. She bitched at me because I wanted her to hold my hand in public and act like she gave a shit about me. She bitched when I called her out for flirting with another guy right in front of me. She bitched about my calling her out on a lie (I so wish I was kidding). The fights that this girl picked were out of this world.
That argument stuck with me the most. It was yet another sign I should have paid better attention to. It was my night to cook dinner and I had no problem with that. She chose to cook dinner and told me to watch the game. And then I got yelled at for supporting gender roles? I mean... Seriously? You've got to be kidding me. It made no sense, and honestly most of the struggles Diana and I ever had made no sense whatsoever. Nobody else in the world would have seen the problems she had with things in our relationship. But she was always in her own little world. It was known as Diana reality. I preferred actual reality.
The last good experience I had with Diana happened in early November. She had a lot coming up soon. She was going to be working abroad for eight weeks in Prague, something to do with her job. The stress was starting to get to her. She was having a very rough day and I was determined to do something about it. I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do... But Ayrton helped me come up with something interesting. All I wanted to do was make Diana smile. What I ended up doing is figuring out how to make Diana laugh.
Ayrton and Chase were part of the deal. I asked Diana to meet me at the diner on the pier. Adjacent to that pier was another dock. An older guy had his yacht parked there. We rented his yacht from him for the afternoon. Diana was waiting near the diner, and it was on.
Ayrton, Chase, and I were all dressed up as members of a Mariachi band. We had an actual Mariachi band with us to play while the three of us were dancing like idiots. It took Diana a minute or two to notice us making complete asses of ourselves. At the end of the song, the sight of her laughing was so welcoming. Oh yeah, and you sure as hell know I walked all the way to the diner still dressed like a Mariachi band member. I even ate dinner with her like that. I think it was one of the more special things I had done for her that she really appreciated, no matter how small or insignificant it was. And I'll never forget that smile and laugh.
Just a week later, things really started to head downhill. Diana was preparing for her trip to Prague. She was leaving the following Monday. I wasn't expecting anything special to happen. The day started out great, but turned nasty pretty quickly. What changed things?
She got a text.
“Hey Ryan, can you get that? Read it to me?” she asked me. I obliged, thinking nothing of it. I was writing a couple of emails trying to waste some time. I got her phone, flipped it open and looked at it. It was from her friend Matt. Matt was a long story. From early in our relationship, Diana always called Matt her brother. He wasn't. He was simply a neighbor she grew up next to. I was frequently caught off-guard by how often he came up in conversation. I wondered if she was lying about him, but I had no proof. I gave her the benefit of the doubt, but those thoughts of whether or not she was telling the truth never ceased. She had billed him as the guy that had the least chance to ever get with her. On that day, I found out that was far from the truth.
The text was long. Matt went on and on about the make out sessions they used to have and how they used to cuddle all the time and how she said she wanted him to be the only man in her life.
I was shocked. I was stunned. I couldn't speak. I could barely breathe as I silently read through the text. Matt was the only guy in the world who ever had a chance with her. And like a fool, I believed her ruse about how he was the guy who had the least chance to get with her.
“Ryan? Is everything okay?” Diana sounded worried.
“Is there something you'd like to tell me about you and Matt?” I sternly asked her. I looked straight at her. She was caught. She knew she was caught. “You've been lying to me since our first conversation.”
“I'm sorry.”
“You're not sorry. You never felt bad about this once, did you? You're only sorry because you got caught! You've been lying to me our entire relationship and you had no problem with it! And now you expect me to believe you're sorry?”
That conversation lasted over two hours. She didn't really have much to say. The only nice thing about what happened was finally all the lies came out. She had lied about a bunch of things. She lied about who she slept with, how many times she slept with different guys. Here I was building a relationship on trust and honesty, and she was literally lying from day one. At least she came clean, finally.
The next day, Diana tried to break up with me when we woke up in the morning. I spent almost five hours trying to talk her out of it. The things she said... She got so nasty, so mean. But I didn't think she actually wanted to break up. She thought she was doing me a favor. I was able to talk her out of it, but the thought never left my mind... She manipulated that situation so the spotlight was back on her. I knew she was selfish and arrogant and always wanted the spotlight. She was an only child after all. But this was a new side of her I didn't expect to see.
Still, Diana and I found a way to have a great weekend before her sendoff. On the following Monday, I dropped her off at the airport for her trip to Prague. The first three weeks she was out of the country were tough. We were trying to find our long distance groove, ya know? We were trying to figure out the best way to make sure we maximized our quality time together while getting everything else done as well. She spent a remarkable amount of time talking to me though. I urged her to contact her family and friends more, but I never knew if she did.
I made my way over to Prague to meet her for a vacation we had planned a couple of weeks later. We had a great week together. I mean, sure we argued a couple times, and one of the arguments escalated much higher than it should have been with her pompous, selfish attitude and my frustration with her. This wasn't abnormal for us though, it happened on a regular basis and we still worked through it.
We were at the airport ready to say goodbye after the week we spent together. Diana was due back end of January. Just being cutesy, I looked at her and said “How 'bout you come back to me in January?”
Her response? “I don't know. I'm 95% sure I'm coming back.”
Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me.
Diana proceeded to get upset with me for not being happy about what she said. She told me nobody deserves a sendoff like that, and there I was thinking no boyfriend deserved to hear his girlfriend might not be coming back after her work around the world was finished. It got worse, though. I dropped her at her plane and went to mine. I took off two hours later and got home the next day. She was silent the entire time. I tried to contact her multiple times, she simply ignored me.
By sheer luck, I caught her online the next morning and got to talk to her.
“Ryan, I think you know what's going on here,” Diana said.
“What're you talking about?”
“You're just so emotionally manipulative. I don't even know who I am anymore. You keep fighting me to change everything about myself,” she said. I was blown away. I hadn't a clue where this was coming from and equally it didn't match reality at all. I always supported her, even on things I wasn't a fan of.
“If being honest and accepting you exactly as you are is not good enough for you, I'm sorry Diana but I don't know what else I could have done.”
“You were manipulating me from the start. You went out of your way to get me to do everything you wanted. I don't even know who I am anymore.”
She broke up with me.
&
nbsp; Minimal communication. Fictitious reasons. I was left wondering what the hell happened. During our large argument in Prague, I gave it to her pretty hard. I really let her have it. But it didn't make sense. Our last day in Prague, everything was great. We had a great day, we made sure she got everything she wanted. We made plans for when she got back. Hell, we even had great sex. And apparently not twelve hours later, she hated me.
On our last night together, she told me how much she appreciated how safe she always felt around me, how safe I made her feel. And then, twelve hours later, she was afraid to see me as if I would hurt her.
I still remember the last thing I said to her before she hung up on me. “My number one wish for you is that into the future, your star will shine brighter every day. Even as I'm not there to care for you, even after you left so soon, I wish for you to touch many hearts. The world needs you.”
I don't remember much of the rest of December. I stayed in my bed through all of Christmas. I had lost my angel. I pushed away the best thing that had ever happened to me. I was lost, alone, and having everything blamed on me. She called me so many things I had never heard before. Emotionally manipulative. Abusive. Emotionally off the wall. Sure, I tend to have a spirited personality... But off the wall?
I spent weeks in silence with her ignoring my emails as I asked her to help me understand what happened. I was going over things in my head hundreds of times. It got me nowhere. I originally blamed it all on myself, but after a while, all the signs lined up. I was in love with who Diana should have been, not who she really was.
Late in December, I finally pulled myself together and got back to living life. I was at the grocery store, just a little local place in SoCal that I liked to support because the owners were chill, hard working people. Apparently I looked pretty pissed off, as evidence showed me while I was searching for the jumbo sized eggs.
The Legend: The Love of Ryan Sumpter Page 9