Bed of Thorns (Sample Chapter One)

Bed of Thorns
By
Monique L. Miller

Copyright © 2013 by Monique L. Miller

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

Chapter One

~

Being Human

Breaking up in a hotel, no matter how nice the room was, felt tacky. Mine and Ryan’s on and off, but mostly on, four year relationship had its ups and downs, but it had also had more than its fair share of special moments. Very special. Too special for me to ever forget. Too special to demean by ending what we had in a room that people looked at as a reserve for a high end fuck.
But a hotel room was the hand I’d been dealt and I had to deal with it because this was my last chance. No matter how I looked at it, this ending wasn’t going to be perfect; there was no such thing as a picture perfect breakup.
As soon as I made my way up to the room he had spent his money on for us for an entire weekend as he’d been doing for the past six months since he moved to Charlotte to start his new job, I excused myself, made a beeline for the bathroom, told him I had to pee. It was only a half omission; I did have to pee, but I wanted to look at myself one last time in the mirror before I became my own bonafide monster, the type of girl who was about to tell her boyfriend, her fiancé, a man that had done nothing wrong, that she didn’t want to be with him anymore after he had just asked her to be with him forever.
When I was younger I couldn’t believe the girls who did that, who would hurt someone like that. They weren’t women; they were girls, selfish little girls. I hated them. Now I was one of them. And I felt bad for not truly being able to say that I hated myself.
I smoothed down my windblown hair, surprised that I didn’t look nearly as bad as I felt. I’d expected to see ashen skin, dry lips, red puffy eyes, but instead I looked fresh. Tousled at the most; it was the kind of look Ryan always said he liked. That made me feel worse. He always said it made me look beautiful when I was just off my bike, like a California girl on the wrong side of the country.
That was just one of the things I had always liked about Ryan, he’d never made a big deal about my looks. He told me I was beautiful, gorgeous, and every other word you could imagine a guy telling the girl he loved to convince her that her looks were superior rather than average, reassuring her that she was better than most, his favorite, and all the while he had never made me feel as if I were different like the way I had always felt growing up. The way he looked at me made me feel like the only girl in the universe, the only girl in the universe that he wanted.
The only time he had really mentioned my looks in any detail, and made me at least realize that he wasn’t completely blind, was when he brought up how he thought our kids might look if we had any. With my mixture of Chinese and African American genetics and his Irish Italian ancestry he wondered if the Asian gene would be dominant no matter what. At the mere mention of a future together, the possibility of children tying me to another person as long as I lived, I felt my body go rigid in his arms. I didn’t say anything. The idea of what he’d just said made me go numb, speechless.
Ryan, on the other hand, laughed, and squeezed me tighter. “Don’t freak out, it’s just a hypothetical question. Relax.”
But I could tell it hadn’t been just a hypothetical scenario he’d been throwing at me. He’d been feeling me out, wanting some kind of answer one way or the other. I knew he wanted an answer I couldn’t give, and he proved it by asking me to marry him two years after trying to laugh it off.
I had to be stupid. Most girls would do anything to be with a guy like Ryan. At first, I told myself there was a jitter for everything and that was all there was to it. Engagement jitters. A little cold feet. Ryan was a great guy, husband material, honest, hard working, loyal to a fault. He forgave people when he shouldn’t have and bailed them out of trouble when they didn’t deserve it. He had a promising career in front of him and a clean past behind him--a rarity. He was any woman’s dream man.
But not mine.
What was wrong with me?
The truth was there was no excuse that I could use--not my age, or the fact that my sister I were orphaned when I was still in the single digits-- and all I could admit, in the end, was the truth itself. The truth was, it didn’t feel right. I didn’t want to pledge my forever to Ryan when I had doubts from the beginning. I didn’t want to be his wife. I didn’t want to be anybody’s wife. At least not now. Then again, I wasn’t sure if I ever would.
Commitment. Long term. Marriage. The diamond on my left hand felt like a weight bearing down on that one little finger, like a rock that could take me to the bottom of the ocean. Heavy and damning.
I looked at my reflection in the mirror again, at the girl who’d said yes when she should have politely closed the ring box, pushed it back towards him and told him I would think about it. But there was no real etiquette when turning down a proposal. Not really. No matter what anybody said.
I kept staring at myself reflection, silently trying to convince myself that I was doing both of us a favor. My whole heart wasn’t in it and I was adult enough to admit that and that had to count for something. Yet, no matter what I said, that didn’t stop my heart from beating like a jackhammer in my chest, my palms from sweating, my mind giving me dual instructions--one part telling me to go back in there and get it over with, pull the band-aid off before he started talking about setting a date and sending out invitations, while the other part was trying to get me to chicken out, spare feelings, spare pain, wait and see what happened instead of breaking it off.
But I knew I couldn’t stay in the bathroom forever.
I took one last look at the girl looking back at me in the mirror, at the face of betrayal, and realized that in being with Ryan I’d betrayed myself as well. I remembered some of the things I’d loved about myself that I’d changed just to suit him, make him comfortable and happy. It didn’t feel fair anymore. I was no longer rationalizing, I was stating facts, and facing those facts gave me a certain amount of courage.
I opened the door and he was already lying on the bed, his arms folded, his head resting on them as he flipped through the channels and finally rested on one, the remote poised near his ear. He was comfortable in my presence in nearly every way. We had been together long enough that we only got excited with one another about certain things at certain times, nothing was really new anymore. We had grown together and the discovery period was over, and once the discovery was over, there was a nonchalance people tended to share.
I was about to turn twenty-two in a couple of months and he was twenty-three and the passion was already dying. It hadn’t been completely snuffed out, but I could feel that it was on its way. I didn’t blame Ryan, or me, just our circumstances, lives, changes and the lack thereof. Besides, I was beyond blame. I just needed him to hear me.
“Can we talk?” I asked him as I moved tentatively over to the bed, watching him as he watched me make my way over to him.
“Lay down beside me,” he had already turned his attention back to the TV screen. “We can talk after I watch this play.”
Something was on, some game or another. Sports had never been my thing of interest and I hadn’t even pretended for Ryan’s sake. I heard the uproar of a crowd, possibly a whistle blowing, announcers droning on and on, at least to my ears it was droning. They could have been happy or angry for all I knew or cared. It was noise and nonsense to me, but Ryan was engrossed.
“Now, Ryan.” I felt like the nagging girlfriend, the nagging fiancée, the nagging wife-to-be. Just thinking of all the titles that anyone could use, and had used since we’d gotten engaged to describe me, were making my head hurt.
He sighed heavily, glanced at me, annoyance written all over on his face, as he reached over and muted the volume then made a huge show of just how much he was being inconvenienced by the way he sat up from where he’d been so comfortable.
“What’s so important that it can’t wait about five more minutes?” His eyes were going from my face to the TV screen, darting back and forth like it was a game itself.
Ripping it off was the best approach in spite of the fact that I dreaded it.
Ryan saw it somehow on my face, in my eyes, before I did anything at all. I knew because whatever he’d wanted to watch so badly became less of a priority and I was no longer on the backburner of his attention.
The rehearsal of my words in my head hadn’t meant a thing when it came right down to it since an aching lump had already formed in my throat and I couldn’t talk.
I lowered my eyes, slid the ring off my finger without looking back up at him, but I could feel him staring at me as my eyes filled with tears. I hadn’t expected myself to cry, I hadn’t wanted to either. Tears from me at this point just felt manipulative. Malevolent. I was the villain in this story, and villains didn’t deserve to shed tears.
I tried to hand him the ring, but he didn’t take it. Still, I couldn’t look up into his eyes. I laid the ring on the bed in the space between us.
“But why?” He asked me in a small voice. It was too small a voice for a six foot tall solidly built lacrosse player that wasn’t afraid of snakes, that came to my rescue when I saw a rat, that could lift me off the ground and carry me across the campus grounds or farther. I was reminded of the time I sprained my ankle and he’d carried me all the way to the emergency room. He never slowed down; he’d remained steady the entire way there.
I looked down at the ring, all the excuses I could spew on the tip of my tongue, but I didn’t want to hurt him anymore than needed. There was no point in anything of the sort.
“I’m not ready, Ry,” I told him, surprised at the pain in my own voice. I’d never heard my own feelings echo so acutely. It made me uncomfortable. “I can’t.”
“Is that what this is about?” He sounded relieved. “Allie, baby, we haven’t even set a date yet. There’s no rush, nobody’s pressuring you.”
Pressure. After he proposed to me in a roomful of family and friends-- both his parents, his stepparents, his brothers, my sister, my uncle and aunt, my roommate--he tells me there is no pressure when that was all that I felt the moment he got down on one knee in front of all of those familiar faces. I would have laughed at the irony of his statement, but I couldn’t even muster an ounce of sarcasm or even mock humor.
“It’s not that,” I tried to explain but the words were like glue in my mouth. Calling everything off was harder than I thought. “Not how you think it is. I can’t do this.”
“Do what?” He threw up both his arms and let out a humorless laugh. “Look, we’re the same as we’ve always been. It’s still you and me. Nothing’s changed.”
“Maybe that’s a part of the problem.” There, I said it. But I still couldn’t look him directly in the eye. I didn’t feel brave, I felt like a coward. I never should have accepted his ring, never should have said yes. This conversation should have taken place weeks ago. Guilt and sorrow weighed on my heart, pressing down my thoughts. Any courage I’d gained in the bathroom was trying to elude me now, but I held onto it. I needed it.
“What do you mean by that?” His tone was accusatory. I took that as my cue to look up, look him in the eye, be a woman and speak my peace, be a woman and do what I had to do. Get it over with, pull the band-aid off, rip off skin if I had to. Make both of us bleed if that was what it took.
“What I mean is I shouldn’t have said yes when I said it, that’s what I mean.”
“What the hell is this about, Allie?” He stood up, agitated, pacing in a small circle. I watched him fall apart slowly as I pulled myself together bit by bit.
“I thought about doing this over the phone, save you the time and the money, but I didn’t want to cheapen what we had.”
“Had.” He stopped pacing, we faced each other. He wasn’t asking a question, he heard the finality in my voice.
“I still love you,” I told him.
“Then what’s the problem? And don’t tell me that bullshit about you love me, but you’re not in love with me. This isn’t a movie or some stupid book. If you love me, you love me, that’s all I need to know.” He ran his hand over his chestnut hair, shut his eyes, squeezed them tight. When he opened them they no longer looked their usual shade of gray. It was a color I didn’t recognize at all. “You know where I stand.”
“Do I?” I felt the frown on my face, squirmed and decided not to think too much anymore. I was over thinking the situation when I should have just been doing what I’d come to do in the first place. “Do I really know where you stand? Do you know where I stand? Not just about tomorrow, or next week, or next year even, but on what kind of life we’d have together in the long run.”
“We’ll figure it out!” He inhaled a shaky breath, trying not to be so frustrated, trying to even his tone, bring his voice down a decibel or two. I could see his struggle on the inside rising. One of his bad qualities was surfacing; he wanted what he wanted, damn anyone else. That was just one of his selfish points. “Put the ring back on your finger, tell me this was all cold feet, and we’ll have the rest of our lives to figure out whatever it is you want to figure out in the long run.”
“That would be childish.”
“No, that’s life.”
“Then I don’t want that kind of life,” I said. “I want to know what I’m getting into, don’t you?”
“You know me, Allie,” his tone was pleading. “You know I love you, you’ve known me since you were seventeen years old. Your sister introduced us. Your sister trusts me with you more than she trusts anyone else.”
“Don’t bring my sister into this, it’s not fair.”
“You don’t want me to mention Shana because you know she won’t agree with what you’re doing.” He sounded as if he’d found the chink in my armor and he intended to use the wiggle room it allowed. “Shana knows you better than anyone on earth, you and I both know that, and she knows that you and I are meant to be together. If I bring her up, you have to face that and you know it.”
“Shana wouldn’t be the one marrying you.” I told him.
“Wow,” he took two steps back, away from me, as if I’d just slapped him across the face and he hadn’t seen it coming. “We’ve been together four years, you’ve been wearing my ring, claiming to be my fiancée for the past two months, and now you’re repulsed at the idea of being my wife.”
“Don’t be overdramatic.”
“You’re calling off our engagement, telling me you don’t want to marry me, and you’re calling me overdramatic?”
“Do you want kids?”
“What?”
“You heard me,” I had no intention of backing down just because he seemed intent on dodging questions. “Do you want children? Eventually? Some time in the future?”
“Of course I do.” He said it without hesitation.
“Well, I don’t.”
“You’re just saying that,” he waved his hand in my direction, dismissing my declaration as if it were nothing at all. “You will one day. Everybody does.”
“Everybody does not want kids someday. Your idea of what is and what is not, doesn’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 as I 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 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 the heat of my tears as they rolled down my cheeks wetting my face, 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 give in and apply for a teaching position at one of the local schools there, or attend the law school they have there and join one of their local firms. 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 were both dead by the time I was 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-one. 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 then-boyfriend, going through that trying time, made me take a hard look at my own life, along with a closer one at my relationship with 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 treating her. He had been living on coffee and energy drinks; sleep had been 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. I knew that. It was the kind of love that a person could count on, that I could count on for as long as he was around. 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, not to you or to myself.”
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 ex, 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 five breaks over the past four years. Five. And out of those five 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 it could get when I was defending myself, 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, and 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 some girl on girl action on a porn site earlier 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 lost control and 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. My mind had been somewhere else completely. 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, we girls weren’t that different from the male species after all.
“I didn’t know you were into girls.” He said staring at me in disbelief.
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 desktop 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 also 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 disgustedly. “I can’t even look at you right now.”
I felt my eyebrows knit. I was thoroughly confused, couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong.
I got up and put on my clothes, my overnight bag which had been transformed into my weekend tote since I’d been intending to stay with him from that Saturday up until Sunday. I’d imagined two days of being naked, having the place to ourselves, all that was on my mind was the many ways and places we could make love with the others out of the apartment. To say I was disappointed by his reaction would’ve been an understatement. On my way out I found him in the kitchen, leaning against one of the countertops, his hands on the surface, his head down, face hung in a way where I couldn’t make out his expression in the dim light of the space he was in with the lights off. He hadn’t been saying a word; there was no drink in front of him, no food. He was simply waiting for my departure in a space where he didn’t have to look at me, where he could pretend I didn’t exist.
I stepped closer to him in an attempt to try and make some kind of amends before I walked out of the door.
“Just go, Allie,” he told me before I could make my way over to him.
I left that day and didn’t hear from him for a week. I’d called him over and over again. At one point it rang until it went to voicemail, but eventually his voicemail was all I got. I didn’t hear anything from him until the following Saturday morning when he asked me out to breakfast.
I’d been prepared to be in charge then, state my case and ask him what his issue was, but he blindsided me before the waitress came back with our coffees.
“I think we need to take a break,” he said matter-of-factly.
“What?” My mouth had instantly gone dry along with my throat, my heart fell to the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“I don’t understand what it is that you’re into, but I won’t be in a relationship with someone who’s bisexual.”
“I’m not bisexual.”
“What do you call what I walked in on the other day?” He practically spat the words at me. “You weren’t watching women having sex? You weren’t turned on by seeing other women having sex with one another? Because that’s what it looked like to me. Then you offered to have sex with me right after. Those are bisexual tendencies.”
I wanted to ask him what he knew about bisexual tendencies at all, but I sucked in my breath, held my tongue. I was offended, hurt that he hadn’t let me explain myself days ago, hurt that he obviously didn’t care about me defending myself until he passed judgment and made decisions that I didn’t agree with.
“I don’t want,” I was frustrated and trying to choose my words carefully since he obviously had the wrong impression. “To be with a woman. Not like that. It’s just…a fantasy…like a game in my head.”
“People act on fantasies.”
“Not everybody. Not everyone wants to do everything they think about in their private thoughts in real life; not everyone wants to make their fantasies a reality. What you walked in on was…sort of private. But it was the kind of private I didn’t think you’d mind. I thought you’d enjoy seeing me…like that. You know? Why wouldn’t you?”
I wasn’t entirely sure if anything I said had come out right, and he didn’t look satisfied.
“Those are the kinds of private thoughts you have? Sex fantasies with other women?” His expression was nearly unreadable, impassive, but it was also one that spoke of confusion. Maybe he wanted to understand and just didn’t know how.
I took that as an opening.
“Those aren’t the only fantasies I have, you know.” I let go of a sly smile, hoping that the air was clearing, that he understood me. My tone was bordering more on the teasing side of things. “How about this? You tell me your fantasies and I’ll tell you more of mine. Deal?”
It was an intimate invitation that I was looking forward to, that I wanted to engage in. It was another side to us as a couple, as lovers, as adults in an adult relationship.
Ryan shook his head, dropped some money on the table, pushed his chair back and stood up.
“I can’t do this. I can’t be a part of something like this,” he looked at me, sorrow in his eyes as my mouth dropped open but no words came out. “It’s over. Don’t call me.”
He walked out and I called him immediately as he was right outside in front of the coffee shop, but still visible in front of the windows. I saw him look down at his phone and end my call without looking back at me as he walked away from the coffee shop.
That was our first breakup. The first of many; the first of five. My first real taste of his flaws, his closed mindedness when it came to what I wanted in order to make me happy, his stubbornness. One of his housemates called me couple of days later and told me he’d come down with a bug, and broken up or not I ran over to take care of him. I loved him regardless of how he felt about me.
I wondered plenty of times if we would’ve gotten back together that first breakup if he hadn’t gotten sick. I wondered that a lot over the years, if we would’ve ever gotten back together at all, especially when we’d fight over some of the same issues we’d had from the beginning.
Now we were at a crossroads where I could give in and put the ring back on, accept what we were going through as just another misunderstanding or short term breakup, or I could follow through with what I’d started. We’d been together so long and had been through enough with one another that Ryan saw our fighting as one big mesh, just something that couples did from time to time. To him, we were no different from anyone else. We had our issues, we let them blow up in our faces, we yelled, we might take a break, but we weren’t really going to breakup, not in his eyes. Once flared tempers cleared, and things were back to normal, he forgot what we fought about at all until the next fight. Nothing got solved, nothing ever changed.
You couldn’t force someone to hear you; you couldn’t force someone to listen. I knew that now. I understood that.
And I didn’t expect him to change just for me. He didn’t have to. I didn’t want him to. Not anymore.
Just because he couldn’t give me what I wanted didn’t make me think any less of him. For a lot of other girls he was still the perfect guy, he could be that person for them. He had wonderful qualities. He was genuinely a good man. But he was also human, and every single one of us has flaws. Not all of us were meant to be with one another; not every couple was going to stay together through thick and thin.
The hotel room was beginning to feel stifling. I needed to get this over with. I needed to say what I had to say and walk away.
“Ryan, I am respecting your needs. Right now,” I said as I stood up. “You need someone who will accept you as you are, and so do I.”
“Don’t go.” He stepped in front of me, put his arms on my shoulders. He looked torn, like a man being ripped apart from the inside. “I’ll do it. Toys, watch…you know…whatever you want with you. Let’s just talk this out.”
“That would be almost like forcing you do it, and I don’t want to force you to have sex with me the way I want to have sex,” I told him gently, glad for the steadiness in my voice, the fact that the tears had stopped flowing, and I’d found my bearings somehow. “I want someone who will want to please me the way I want to be pleased. I think I deserve that. Don’t you?”
He shook his head, his jaws tight, strain written all over him. I felt bad, but not bad enough to give in and give him what he wanted.
“One of these days you’re going to have to realize that the world doesn’t revolve around your pussy. Fucking somebody isn’t going to make them fall in love with you, and I’m in love with you. I feel sorry for you because you can’t see that.”
I took in his words, took them for his truth, how he saw me and my situation and nodded my acknowledgment that he’d spoken and I’d heard, and he may or may not have been right. Whatever the case, I was done arguing. I was done feeling as if I’d done something wrong just because I told him how I felt. I was done being deprived as if it were an obligation of mine.
I sought freedom. I sought satisfaction. I sought experience. None of which I could gain by staying with Ryan. But I refused to be cruel and say those things that I felt. The weak were cruel; the strong had no need to be. And if there was one thing I knew, I wasn’t weak. Maybe I wasn’t as strong I wanted to be, maybe I wasn’t as strong as I thought I was, but I knew I was strong enough to walk out of that hotel room door without Ryan’s ring on my finger. I knew what I had to tell him and there was no turning back.
“Goodbye, Ryan.” I said just before I walked out the door, letting it close behind me. I didn’t look back. The farther I walked away, the lighter I felt.