“Everyone does not want kids someday. Your ideas of what is and what isn’t don’t speak for everybody.”
“People change their minds.”
“Not necessarily.” I shook my head, ready to argue my case. “People’s ideas change and relationships tend to change as a result. There’s a difference.”
“Is that what this is? Change? Your own personal evolution that you’re trying to drag me along for?”
“Ryan,” it was my turn to let out a shaky breath, shook my head, not believing he wasn’t getting it. “That’s the point. I’m not trying to drag you along for it. This is about me and what I need and I what I want.”
“What is it that you need?” He stepped closer to me. I hadn’t noticed him walking any closer, hadn’t been listening to his footsteps, my head full of other things. “What is it that you want?”
I hesitated. I’d come to the part I’d wanted to avoid. “I need someone who will listen to me and understand where I’m coming from. You hear me, but I don’t know how much you listen because you’ve proven to me over and over again that you don’t understand me.” I cleared my throat, tried to push the tears back, hold the dam together with every ounce of force in me, but my own saltwater was strong and mounting. There was only so much I could do when the dam had already been weakened. “And it’s not just that we were brought up differently, or our race difference--you know that’s not it, or the fact that you’re a morning person and I’d rather stay up all night. You don’t get me. You know how much that shit hurts? But after four years, I have to accept it.” The dam broke, I felt hot wetness roll down my cheeks as my vision blurred and my voice cracked to the point where the last sentence I spoke was nearly inaudible. But he heard me, for once, Ryan was actually trying to listen. The problem was, it was too late.
“Baby,” he had his hands on my face, trying to draw me in for an embrace that I was resisting. “We can get past this. Whatever it is. You can go to counseling, we can go together, whatever it takes. I don’t want to lose you over things that haven’t even happened yet.”
He still wasn’t getting it. Everything between us that had needed to happen, already had. He’d already lost me. He was holding onto the ghost of a relationship and he didn’t even know it. What he was fighting to save was already dead. I didn’t want to be one of those people holding onto something that should’ve been buried and left behind a long time ago.
“You expect me to move to Charlotte after I graduate from Hawthorn,” it wasn’t a question; now I was just spewing off a long line of assumptions I knew he had. “You expect me to apply for a teaching position at one of the local schools there. You want us to save up our money in a joint savings account, buy some land, build a house, start a family, retire together and then move to Florida when we’re in our seventies.”
“Doesn’t sound bad. Sounds like you have it all figured out,” he said resolutely. “I don’t see one problem in anything you’ve said so far.”
“What if it’s not what I want,” I spoke up, breaking into whatever thoughts he was conjuring up already. “I just told you what you wanted, in a nutshell, and I’m not wrong. The problem is, it’s not what I want. None of it.”
“You have cold feet.”
“This is beyond cold feet and apparently you’re in denial and still not listening to a word I’ve said.” If what I had was cold feet, then I may as well have been standing in a block of ice.
“Because you sound crazy, babe! I was being sarcastic when I said it sounds great. I don’t know the future, you don’t either, and you need to stop acting like you do. We have forever to figure it all out.”
“Nobody has forever.”
My words hung in the air like smoke after a fire. I could almost hear his thoughts. He thought I was thinking of my parents. My parents who had died when I was only five and my sister was thirteen. Apology and regret were all over his face, only I hadn’t been thinking of my parents. I’d been thinking of us, me and him, and how quickly time went by, how one day you’re eight and the next you’re eighteen and then you’re twenty-two. I was thinking of my sister, Shana, and how she was too young to have gotten sick, how after she’d been so good to me, always taken care of me, and how good she was to so many people, she’d been so ill she couldn’t walk or keep food down. She’d been on death’s door and then in remission, but her illness had scared me awake, made me see life for what it really was, made me know that forever didn’t exist to a mortal, to flesh and blood. Seeing my sister with her husband, going through that trying time, made me take a hard look at my own life, and then at me and Ryan.
Shana and Will had been together since high school. Sweethearts. Meant to be. They had one another’s backs, knew secrets about one another that no one else did, would stick by one another through thick and thin. Will had proven himself by staying by Shana’s side through it all. He kept watch at her bedside and in the end probably knew more about her cancer than the doctors who were working on her did. He was living on coffee and energy drinks; sleep was nonexistent in his world. The only thing that mattered was Shana and if she would survive. If she hadn’t, we’d all been worried that maybe he wouldn’t either. They looked as if they breathed the same air at that point, as if one of their hearts beat for both.
Shana and Will’s devotion to one another should have made me want to set a date as soon as the ring was on my finger. After all, Ryan wasn’t just dependable, he loved me. He might have been stubborn and selfish at times, but he’d proven his true feelings for me time and time again. I’m the one he wanted. I could see it in his eyes. The problem was, when I tried to picture Ryan at my bedside should anything happen to me, I couldn’t conjure his image. And if I did, he didn’t fit. It was like a puzzle piece belonging to another puzzle trying to fit in where it didn’t belong.
He was familiar to me, I loved him, but I didn’t want him to be my version of forever while I was still on earth.
“Are you saying these past four years have just been a waste of both our time?” He sounded more angry than hurt.
“No,” I sighed, wiping my face, swiping at the tears, trying to keep my voice steady enough to be heard. “I’m not saying that at all.”
“If you mean what you just said, put my ring back on your finger.”
“I can’t, Ryan. I can’t do this anymore.”
Ryan began pacing again as silence settled between us, as I thought back to the week before he proposed. The fighting between us had gotten so bad I thought we were going to break up then. We’d fought before about various things: our majors, career plans, his exes, my exes, his excessive drinking when he got with his friends, the fact that I didn’t drink as much as he did and he always ended up calling me a wet blanket because of it, and then there was the thing we fought about most often in the past two years--sex. Whether it was the lack thereof or the way we did it, it was the elephant in the room at this point, everything else we fought about was beginning to take a backseat when it came to our sex life. But that last fight was about his plans in Charlotte. I didn’t want to continue living in the south. I’d grown up in the south, but I’d traveled to other cities within the States, had used my passport more than once venturing to other countries. I wanted to see more of the world, experience life and other cultures and other people before I resigned myself to the simple life with one person. He felt me pulling away then; the engagement had been a way to reel me back in, make me ‘come to my senses’ so to speak, come back down to earth as Ryan always called it. He sounded more like a father trying to discipline me when he did that instead of a boyfriend and I hated it.
Regardless, I’d tried. I just couldn’t be who he, or everyone else, seemed to want me to be.
“It’s another guy, isn’t it?” His gaze was piercing. He wanted an answer.
“No,” I said forcefully. “It’s not that.” It honestly wasn’t. “It’s about me.”
“Now that,” he said, his voice dangerously low. “I don’t believe.”
>
“Why can’t you believe it? You don’t trust me?”
“Whether I trust you or not is irrelevant since you don’t want to be with me, don’t you think?”
“It matters to me what you think of me,” I almost hated myself for admitting it, but it was true. “I don’t want you to think of me as a horrible person.”
“I don’t think you’re a horrible person, Le,” he started. “I just think you should think before you do something you regret. And I need you to be honest with me. Just tell me the truth. Is there someone else?”
“There’s no one else.”
“None of those guys you were with when we were on a break decided to come back into your life? You sure?”
“You make it sound like there were so many,” I shook my head, annoyed that this was coming up again. “There were only two.”
“Two too many.”
“You make those guys sound like I was with the entire football team or something.”
“The way you sound sometimes you make me think that you wouldn’t exactly mind that sort of thing.”
I brushed off his last comment that was meant to insult me, trying to make my healthy sexual appetite into something I should be ashamed of. I was determined not to let him do that to me, but it ended up happening every time when we had these kinds of arguments.
“There were only two.” I replied in a voice smaller than my own, one devoid of my usual self confidence. I hated that he could make me feel small and ashamed about something that I wasn’t normally ashamed about.
“Last time I checked, the word ‘guys’ was plural, and you were with more than one guy when we took a break,” Ryan said. “I’ve covered my bases.”
“If we’re covering all our bases let’s get one thing straight: we broke up more than once in case you forgot. We took about seven breaks over the past four years. Seven. And out of those seven breaks I was with two guys over two separate breakups, and I came clean to you about them,” I was being defensive instead of diplomatic as I’d planned. Things were spiraling out of control. I could feel it. “Doesn’t that count for something?”
“It counts towards the fact that I’m right,” his voice was rising, his face getting redder and redder. Anger. Ryan’s words cut when he got angry. “I was right when I told you the last time that you won’t take your head out of your ass long enough to get your mind off the other hole between your legs.”
“You called me a slut the last time.” Just remembering it hurt; saying it out loud stung.
“You exhibit slut-like behavior.”
“I am not a slut.” My voice was smaller than I ever thought I could get, barely above a whisper.
I hated these moments when I reduced to a person I didn’t even recognize by voice or thoughts. Ryan made me feel this way. It was just one of the reasons why I knew I couldn’t stay with him. I knew as time went on things would probably get worse rather than better when we fought. People deserved to amend their actions, to have some faith be put into them, that there was the possibility for improvement. I just didn’t want to spend the energy it would take on someone I wasn’t willing to invest my whole heart into.
“And you call me selfish,” he said incredulously. “Look at you. I know what this is about. It’s about me not wanting to try all that depraved shit you’re into.”
“It’s about having an open mind,” I was trying to reason with the unreasonable all over again. “It’s about respecting my needs and wants, what pleasures me. What’s wrong with that?”
“What about respecting my needs and wants? What about what pleasures me? What about what I’m comfortable with? What the hell is wrong with that?”
Ryan’s needs and wants began and ended with missionary, doggy style, and me on top. Kinky to him meant giving and receiving oral sex. He could watch porn with his friends while they were smoking weed or by himself, but he felt uncomfortable watching it with me, letting other people’s acts of pleasure turn us both on together. Toys were an abomination in any bedroom we shared, he made that much clear at the mere suggestion. He tried going backdoor and said that even though it felt good, it didn’t feel right. He didn’t think it was normal or natural for me to pleasure myself, for me to orgasm with just my right hand on my clit, feeling myself get wetter and wetter until I came. If he didn’t approve of it, it was forbidden.
He walked in on me watching a little girl on girl action on a free porn site early in our relationship, my legs spread in front of the computer screen as I took a vibrator to myself. He watched as it went in and out, humming a steady tune as I moaned along with the women onscreen, writhing with my eyes shut, my head thrown back against the chair, in my own realm of ecstasy. I remember I came screaming that day, came so hard I dropped the vibrator on the floor and then proceeded to rub myself, tried to calm my sex, my orgasm tapering off but still giving me remnants of the damage it had done with the residual spasms throughout my body; the sensitivity I felt in and on every part of my pussy you could name begging for a breather, a time out so it could recover.
I didn’t notice him right away. I was breathing hard, jagged breaths that took effort, the sounds of my breathing commingling with the girls still going at it on the screen in front of me. There were five women total, four of them being rough with one main girl, the prettiest one, as they rammed huge jelly dildos and vibrators inside of her mouth and her pussy as she begged for more. I’d just cum and I was still jealous of the main girl; I already wanted to cum again. In my fantasy world, I wanted what was being done to her to be done to me and I didn’t care who did it, not at that moment, not as I was basking in my own little world where I was the only one that mattered. My pleasure, my orgasms, my pussy, my needs and my wants were all met in my fantasy world, no questions asked. But I felt as if I was being watched, that feeling that you always hear people talk about but you don’t know it until you experience it for yourself; and when I turned around there he was, tight lipped and scarlet in the face. Angry. And later I would find out that he’d been confused as well, but right then, I couldn’t have known anything of the sort.
“You’re a lesbian?” It sounded like a question, but it came out more as an accusation. “I didn’t have a clue.”
“What?” I was post coital. I felt slow. Ryan was hardly real at the moment since the blood hadn’t gone back up to my brain just yet. In the end, us girls weren’t that different from the male species after all.
“I didn’t know you were into girls.”
I wasn’t embarrassed by what he caught me doing, I wasn’t embarrassed that I was partially nude, only a wife beater covering the top half of my body, my nipples hard and perking, pushing at the fabric. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen me completely naked before. I was baffled by the outrage on his face. I thought any guy who walked in on their girlfriend pleasing herself would’ve been ecstatic, I thought that seeing it would’ve turned them on, make them want to please her more, double what she’d just done for and to herself. Ryan’s reaction had been the total opposite.
I had just enough sense to reach over and close the window on the screen I had open, shutting the video off, audio and visual out of sight, but apparently not out of mind. Not out of Ryan’s mind, that much was clear.
“I’m not into girls, not like that,” I glanced back at the screen as if the girls were still there going at it. “I was just…watching them.” It seemed like a sufficient enough response to me.
“If you walked in on me watching gay porn I doubt you’d dismiss that as me just watching something.”
I ignored his seriousness, the sarcasm in his tone, tried to lighten the mood a little. “What? You trying to tell me something?” I asked him, laughing a little.
My muscles were spent, I was convinced my bones were jelly and if I attempted to get up I’d fall right back down. I was tired. I’d cum so hard I knew if I laid down on his bed and shut my eyes I’d be in dreamland for at least an hour, but I knew if he dropped his jeans and exposed a massive hard
on right then and there I’d be game. I’d welcome it. I’d welcome him with open arms and spread legs. But his mood hadn’t seemed to be letting up.
“What if one of my housemates had come back here instead of me and heard you doing…what you were just doing…huh? What if one of them had walked in and seen you?”
That was back during the time when he’d been staying in an off campus three bedroom apartment, sharing it with two other guys in his graduating class, splitting the rent three ways. None of the others minded that I had a key to the place, none of them minded that I sometimes spent the night. I didn’t understand his complaint, especially since he knew they were gone for the entire weekend to South Beach and they were hardly going to turn around because anyone forgot their keys since they’d left the night before.
“Baby,” I started cautiously because obviously he was upset and I was in no mood to argue right then. “They’re gone. Remember? Besides, it’s not like they haven’t heard us having sex before.”
“You don’t sound like that when you’re having sex with me.”
“Yes I do.”
“If you have, I haven’t noticed it, and trust me, I would’ve noticed hearing something like that.”
“Well, get over on the bed and we’ll see how I sound today.” I sounded seductive to my own ears as I tried to entice him.
It was during late spring when the time had just changed and the days were stretching. It was seven in the evening but the sun was still high in the sky. The sunlight was coming through the open window in his bedroom strong and I was just noticing the heat from it as I felt it on myself, gripping me, pulling me into familiar territory as I felt the tiredness evaporating from my body and being replaced with something else. Something primal. Arousal. Arousal was primal, raw. I wanted sex. I wanted to cum. Again. I wondered if every girl felt the same way I did and they just weren’t talking about it since I’d never heard those conversations.
“Get dressed,” was all he said. “I can’t even look at you right now.”
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