The Last Adam (Romance Books on Kindle)

by Olivia Wild

  I still recall Mommy’s sheepish and embarrassed grin when she saw me appear in the doorway, having raced down the stairs from the second floor, where my sister Emerald and I stayed. I was too worried about the overflowing toilet upstairs to worry then about what I’d walked in on, but it does stand out in my memory as one of the only times I saw them “making sexy time,” or at least Mommy attempting to take the body that was rightfully hers.

  Alas, before long, the temporary back spare second floor bedroom where Daddy would retreat as a home office eventually became his permanent abode, and the full second floor became his living quarters well after Mommy died in her sleep in that same room I caught them being affectionate within when she was a young 68 years old. Daddy’s tenure on this earth would last till he was 90, but on this night, when Mommy is still alive and only slightly surprised by my middle-of-the-night presence in her bedroom, I am so glad to have a safe haven to call my home.

  “AC and I had a fight,” I explain, slipping into her bed, leaving out the part about the remote control having sailed into the bones of the back of my hand – and the fact that AC had followed it up with a tossing of his fountain Sprite drink toward my face, liquid that mostly missed me and landed in a sticky splash on the “Cool Like Jazz” blue framed print that hung on the wall behind the couch.

  I slide my aching hand under her pillow and pray the pain will subside, letting the tears silently stream onto one of Mommy’s pillows. This seems to hurt worse than when AC threw that cordless phone handset into my thigh, causing a big bruise to appear on my right leg, one that threw me for such loops that I took two of my closest female coworkers to the bathroom at our office and showed them the evidence – as, what? – proof?

  Both of them stood slack-mouthed, unsure of what to say about the huge bruise of physical abuse evidence staring them back in the face. What was I expecting them to say that I didn’t already know? That I should leave AC right away? Part of me already knew that, and yet, I still hadn’t gathered the strength to tell him once and for all that I wanted a divorce.

  I’ve long ago let go of the notion that my love can save AC and make him better. At first I naively thought that me treating him well would show AC that there are people out there who can be kinder to him than the way his mother treated him growing up, when she’d beat him awake from sleep to tell him to take out the garbage, and make him hide in the back room when her dates arrived, so her suitors wouldn’t know she had a son as old as him.

  “If you keep treating me this way, I’m going to leave,” I say calmly and matter-of-factly to AC, as he sits on our black and white compact Jennifer Convertibles couch, a sofa bed that’s the perfect petite size for this small space.

  He looks up and away from his food and his Star Trek: The Next Generation watching long enough to pause and consider me, a curious spectacle, perhaps one who is actually serious this time.

  “We know all her suicides are fake,” The Police sang of some mother figure, but unlike the times my mother threatened to “walk out that door and keep on walking” whilst we were growing up – scaring me – when the pressures of wifehood and motherhood got the best of her, she never did. She never left us until she left us and left this life, leaving her body at the time that wasn’t her choosing.

  No, I’ve met Adam, so I have something more interesting to look forward to – a better outcome and future that has provided me with the impetus to put this abusive AC in my past, if I can escape with my life.

  I’ve told AC this news as a warning, and I’ve learned to do it at a distance, from across the room, so he can’t – like he did when we were still in that college town – flip the heated bowl of spaghetti and red sauce that I’m holding back up onto my naked body, surprising me with the levels of humiliation he’s put me through in the short three years we’ve been together.

  The bad news I’ve delivered has come during one of those factual, calm moments, where he’s least likely to blow his stack and outright punch me – something, interestingly, despite all the other abuse, that he’s never done.

  “I’ll give up all this,” I said internally one day, looking down at all the furniture we bought together (most likely more on my dime than his) from the higher stance of my Stairmaster.

  If AC wants to fight me for the saltwater fish tank and furniture, he can have it, I surmise. It’s worth it to be away from him. Besides, I hate the little and major things about him that bespeak such selfish evil: like the way he smokes away like a chimney when I’m working out on the stair stepper, with my lungs open and thirsty for oxygen – only to receive his poisonous second-hand nicotine-filled smoke.

  Or the way he slathers his French fries in ketchup, or greedily sops up the bulk of the sauce accompanying whatever appetizer we’ve ordered to share in restaurants, wiping his bread or mozzarella cheese stick around the bowl to gain the lion’s share of the sauce.

  “We can ask for more,” he said once.

  “That’s not the point,” I answered.

  These things have worn me thin, one by one, weakening any love I had left for him. My actions and plans lately have more so involved how to delicately get away from AC without provoking a life-ending incident – one that abuse counselors warn us can come during the volatile time when a woman decides to leave her abuser for good.

  When we’re able to talk about it quietly, more rationally – or so I think – I try to reason with AC.

  “I don’t want you to hurt me anymore,” I said to him gently one dark night, lying quietly next to him in bed as the nighttime sky beyond our window, which served as the scenic headboard to our marital bed, painted the room a foreboding color.

  “Fine, I’ll hurt myself,” AC said all of a sudden, then pulled an unseen hard object out from under his pillow to use to repeatedly strike himself over the head with. I immediately bolted up and went into the living room, only steps away in that compact apartment – one that felt so small the last time I smoked weed with AC and his friend, who watched Predator with him on TV, a movie I felt I had to escape from. But when I’d go back in our bedroom, I didn’t want to be alone.

  That marijuana freak-out spelled my last venture with the ill weed, but this incident with AC striking himself really freaked me out when he joined me in the living room after his self-inflicted rampage.

  “Olivia,” he called, walking in the room to get my attention like a devil-ridden child of horror movies.

  When the light made by the tower lamp in our living room revealed AC’s face streaked with blood leaking from a wound on his head, I realized that the mysterious hard object he’d used to hit himself repeatedly was his .380 handgun, the all-silver pistol that most likely was loaded with hollow point bullets at the time.

  I stared in disbelief and trepidation, knowing that this crazy, troubled man had just pistol whipped himself violently right beside me in bed, striking himself with such force that it could’ve set off the gun and caused a tragedy.

  Yes, it was seriously time to leave.

  “We don’t have to get divorced, we could just try a separation,” I would tell AC a short while later, both of us sitting on the edge of the bed in our room.

  A divorce is exactly what I want, but there’s no way I’m telling this man that news.

  “Maybe it would help us get better,” I say, keeping Adam’s name totally out of the conversation.

  “You guys act funny around each other,” AC had once mentioned about my interaction with Adam – or more rightly, the way Adam and I ignored each other too much, a telltale sign of a connection, when I invited AC out for drinks with a few coworkers that included Adam.

  After that astute observation, I stopped inviting AC out for drinks with us, and instead endured his growing anger every time I’d come back to our apartment later and later at night, having lost time enjoying Adam’s unfettered and non-abusive company at various locales around the metropolis.

  “My dad doesn’t want to buy me a place,” AC says after I show him anoth
er classified ad of a potential brownstone he can move into on the near north side of Chicago. “He’s afraid if we get divorced, you’ll try and take part of the property.”

  “Tell him I’ll sign anything he wants me to sign,” I respond with pleading urgency.

  AC’s dad is probably using this as a stalling tactic, not wanting to really buy his grown-ass son property from his gynecologist’s salary, but passing the blame off on me. I’m serious, I’ll sign any papers they put in front of me to be rid of this nuisance of a husband and to move onto my real life with Adam, because I get the feeling he’d really marry me and be the best husband ever.

  “I’ll tell him,” AC answers.

  He’s stalling, too, perhaps using this little snag in the move-out, separation plans to stay together longer. I have wrong imaginations when I try and luxuriate in the bathtub that AC will use that opened wire hanger to pick the flimsy closed lock – like he’s done before when I’ve sought a little privacy and he’s come right in, not willing to give me that modicum of “me” time – or simply kick down the door altogether and use that same unregistered-to-him gun that we shot off into the woods in Florida to parts unknown to shoot me right in the temple.

  I wonder if he will let me go…

  Chapter Four:

  Drowning People Sometimes Die Fighting Their Rescuers

  Rod and I are joking around, in that sexy way we do when it’s mainly just the two of us around.

  Adam is somewhere, off in the distance – I can feel his presence nearby. If he isn’t in earshot, at least he is probably at the laser printer grabbing his print job, ready to rush back to a client call or off to another task.

  “I’ll make you forget all about your man,” Rod says with chutzpah. “He ain’t got nothing on this.”

  “You can’t handle this bootyliciousness,” I laugh back.

  We are both sitting, talking over our cube walls, which are diagonal to one another. It is a verbal volley – a game of flirting that both of us probably realize isn’t serious at all. It’s like we’re practicing our “come up” skills on one another simply because we’re nearby, out of sheer boredom. A “proximity crush,” writer Cameron Crowe would term my relationship with Rod.

  He’s a beautiful mahogany-skinned man indeed, with super smart legal skills and a perfectly clean smile to match his brilliant intelligence and wit, all topped off by a bush of curly hair that’s tightly packed upon his head.

  But he is short and I am tall, one of those relationships that, if taken to the next level, would make for all sorts of awkward existing together.

  Besides, my laser like focus has been on Adam ever since I first laid eyes upon him – even though we don’t “make sexy talk” like me and Rod. No, Adam is more of a gentleman, like one of those salt and earth type of guys you start matching their last name to yours and envisioning a life in a suburban manse with two or three kids that favor the best mixture of you both.

  Joseph, a goofily grinning Polish man is getting a great kick out of my back and forth verbal foreplay with Rod, as if he’s enthralled by the latest Wimbledon match.

  It really is only a sport; all of us know that I’m more closely aligned with Adam that any other man in our work foursome of friends. The fact that Rod questioned my silly flirtations one night as a group of colleagues went out for drinks evidenced that fact.

  “Are you saying that only to get back at Adam?” Rod asked me plainly, when alcohol-fueled jealousy caused me to turn away from Adam – who was surrounded by a fawning group of other girls from the job – over to say some unforgotten things to Rod, in hopes that Adam would notice me once more from beyond the pressing crowd.

  “No,” I may have answered – (my drunken mind has forgotten) – only to spare Rod’s feelings. But my face gave away the fact that his attorney skills were dead on, and had unveiled the true selfish motives of the witness on the stand before him.

  Right now, however, our little game of tit-for-tat becomes interrupted when Joseph’s phone rings.

  “Hello?” he answers, then cuts a pausing glance over to me. “Okay, I’ll be right there,” he says, and hangs up. Joseph trots away from his cube like a six-foot-tall, 250-pound kid at Christmas going to pick up the biggest gift under the tree.

  Rod and I shrug at one another, but don’t have much time to continue our salacious quips before Regina shows up behind him, sidling silently up to his cube like a woman in hiding.

  “Girl,” Rod says, holding his heart, in an admonishing tone. “Don’t be sneaking up on me like that. You could get jacked.”

  “You gonna jack me?” Regina says, laughing. Then turning to me, with a louder and harsher tone, she adds, “Hey, Olivia.”

  “Hey Regina,” I say, then try and busy myself with work, which is really the Microsoft Word document I’m typing in a seriously small window, to make it look like the Excel spreadsheet that takes up the bulk of my computer screen is really what I’m so hyper-focused on, instead of my latest romance novel, The Last Adam.

  “You got a new iPhone 5?” I hear her ask Rod quietly, leaning over his desk to inspect the purple sparkling slim phone resting on his large calendar pad.

  “Naw that’s Olivia’s,” Rod says. “She wanted me to listen to this song.”

  I take that as my cue to jump up and explain. “Yeah, it’s on my playlist called ‘Fast Stuff’ – the first song. You should listen.”

  I feel kind of busted that Regina will get to hear the house-music themed “I Wanna F U in the Boom Boom” song that I intended for Rod to hear, but at the same time, I’m kind of interested in her response. She gingerly places my headphones in her ears, then grows a little wide-eyed at the lyrics, a repeated ode to anal sex.

  “Olivia, I need to take you to church with me,” Regina says like a schoolmarm as she slips the white headphones out of her ears before the song is over.

  “Wait a minute, Regina – didn’t Rod tell me you just flashed your boobs to him at work the other day when nobody else was looking? Is that what they teach you to do at church?”

  Those are the questions I want to ask this pretty little light-skinned judgmental “Christian” woman before me, but instead, I simply smile. First off, I don’t want to break Rod’s trust and bust Regina out like that, so that she would discover that he has revealed her secret to someone else.

  Secondly, I tend not to confront other people too harshly when they’re acting all holier-than-thou than me. Usually I fall back and allow them to walk right into the trap they’re trying to set for me.

  If that’s what it means to be some “church girl” – a woman who looks down her nice nose at me because of my playlists songs but feels free to expose her breasts to her boyfriend at his desk just because she thinks nobody is looking – well, I don’t want any parts of that hypocritical mess.

  “Look who came to see you,” Joseph’s voice calls from behind me, breaking my religious rhetoric reverie, as he steps aside to reveal the dark shadow behind him.

  It is AC, standing there in his ripped cargo pants, with his wild hair sticking in black fingers out the top of his head – the part that’s not shaved low on the sides to allow his mop of a Mohawk to stand up in diverse directions, looking as if he has recently stuck his hand in a light socket.

  He is smiling so weirdly, as if I should be happy to see that he has suddenly appeared at my place of employment. I can barely hide my unhappiness, though, because if I thought AC’s bohemian style clashed with my business-minded career when we hung out in bars around the downtown Chicago area, well he sticks out like a sore thumb here under these bright fluorescent lights, surrounded by all my colleagues in the financial sector.

  My coworkers are dressed – on average – nice and dapper, like Adam tends to dress, with polished oxford shirts in varying shades of purple strips against white, tucked neatly into clean jeans or even slacks.

  AC looks like a homeless clown has wandered in from off the street to approach my cubicle to beg for spare change.
I am embarrassed to the hilt, and I want him gone.

  “What are you doing here?” I stand up and ask AC, looking around in a desperate hope that most of my workmates are off at lunch or anywhere other that witnessing the spectacle that is my husband.

  “I wanted to surprise you and take you to lunch,” he grins, holding a small bouquet of flowers clinched tightly in his left fist.

  “With what money? And where did you steal those carnations?” I want to ask, but I don’t. Instead, I grab my purse from a lower drawer and begin walking him down the short hallway to the nearest exit.

  I get it.

  AC has done this before, when he knew I was ready to give up on the marriage. It was during the time of our first anniversary, when we still lived miles apart while I was waiting for him to graduate from college. We’d both admitted we’d cheated on one another during the long-distance marriage – so in a calm manner we’d practically decided that divorce was the best option.

  Instead of following through on that decision, AC jumped in his black car and drove 16 hours straight from Florida to Chicago, just to take me out to The Olive Garden in Ford City to celebrate our first year of marriage, and to ask me to give it another try.

  He was all about those grand gestures of so-called love, impetuous and impromptu actions that were designed to win my heart and reconsider the good times we’d had together. The stuff movies were made of, sure, but AC’s wild-donkey-of-a-man behaviors were wearing thin, along with the culmination of mistreatment that made me want to seriously complete those forms I’d already picked up to create my own “Dissolution of Marriage” documents.