I think Jack was just as confused as I was about what he wanted out of me. Maybe he knew what he wanted and was just too afraid that he would be rejected. As much as we could not have been a couple in kindergarten, I think my rejection of him during that time had hurt him more than I would have thought.
It's not that I didn't think that I deserved better than Brian. I knew that I did. I even knew who I wanted and how I wanted him to rescue me. I had a sick, twisted little fantasy of Jack being so upset by another man having me that he would just f#ck me in a violent rage. But Jack... For some strange reason, Jack has as much of a problem raping me as he does watching me getting smacked around by another man. I think you can see why my father thinks I am no good for Jack. I have to agree with him a lot of the time.
Like I said when I first started to talk about the abuse, I don't want to justify it. I only want to explain how... Sometimes you know something is wrong, but you still find yourself accepting it for other reasons. Sometimes something that should be so simple turns into something complex. Looking back on it, you can see the millions of things you should have done differently, but when you were in the middle of it, everything you did seemed to make perfect sense.
One night, after Jack and I had actually gotten together, we were in bed. I was trying to get him to have sex, which I knew that he would refuse. I then asked him if he minded if I pleasured myself. He said he didn't as long as I didn't mind that he was going to be pleasuring himself as well. I pointed out that this was kind of counterproductive and that we should just go ahead and pleasure the other person properly. That's when he said, “Honey, our entire relationship has been built on us working against the other while trying to achieve the same goal.” He then smiled that smile that I hate so much and kissed me before he rolled over.
I mention this here because that was really why I put up with the abuse. Although Jack and I wanted the same thing, we were going about it different ways. He wanted me to make a decision. After everything that I had ever said or done to him, he wanted some sort of confirmation that I wanted him for something other than sex. And after everything he had ever done for me, I wanted him to love me completely. I wanted him to make the ultimate decision, the decision that could never be undone once it had been made.
I don't know how long I would have put up with the abuse. I liked the fact that I was dating a popular guy. We made a cute couple. My father liked him. I was fooling around with Jack on the side, which actually caused the majority of the fights that I had with Brian. If I lost the fights against Brian, it was not that I didn’t try. I was fighting for Jack’s honor. I was fighting to make sure that Brian believed that nothing was going on between me and Jack. I was fighting to make sure that Brian didn’t try to beat up Jack. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was willing to take on a few rounds with a man, who was stronger than I was, if it meant protecting Jack.
In the end, despite Jack's refusal to save me as I would have wished for him to, he was the one that did save me. All of his pleading to my intellect had done nothing to persuade me to breakup with Brian. But as the fights became greater, I found myself spending more time with Jack and less time with Brian. This, of course, did not go unnoticed by Brian, which increased the fighting, which increased the amount of time that I spent with Jack.
At the Super Bowl party at my father's house, I was spending time with Jack. Maybe Jack was extra flirty that night. He has never enjoyed football and does not understand the game. When he gets bored he finds ways to entertain himself. I don't think he would have come to my party if it had not been for me. I think he would have protested the game by reading a book. That is what he usually does. I don't know if he came to the party because he knew that he could keep an eye on me and defend me if Brian tried to hit me. All I know is that Brian started to hit Jack this time instead of me.
If I have ever had a weak spot, it has been when other people have hurt Jack. When we were in middle school, some of the bullies would try to pick on him because he was smaller and well-liked by the girls. He would spend the majority of his time hanging out with girls really. He hung out with Arthur and Leopold, but those were really the only guys that he would hang out with. Anyway, Jack would get picked on, and girls would come to his defense. I was part of this, but I wasn't the only girl.
There is just something about Jack that makes girls want to protect him. I know that I'm probably not the right one to explain it considering that I have hurt him so much over the years. I think it is partly that he is sweet and the kind of guy that you know you should date. He's just... He understands women and actually listens to you. He is one of the few guys who seems to notice when somebody is wearing their hair differently or did an especially amazing job on their makeup. Even if he is not the most “masculine” guy in the world, there is something appealing about a guy that would rather go shopping than watch sports or hang out with his friends. Even if you aren't dating him, he seems to give any girl that he is just having a casual conversation with his undivided attention.
And I don't want to make it sound like Jack isn't a man. He's just a different kind of man. This one time I went shopping with him and a few of my female friends. We were probably sixteen at the time. He was the only guy in this group of girls as we were shopping for new clothes. Most guys would have been bored. Jack wasn't. He was... He was doing typically Jack things and giving all of the girls advice on what clothes they should buy. But here's the thing, he was actually truthful. If an outfit didn't look good on you, he told you so. He wasn't going to tell you that he liked it on you because he knew that you really liked it.
And here's another thing about Jack when you take him shopping for clothes. He makes you feel beautiful. When you step out of the dressing room and ask him what he thinks about the outfit, he checks out your entire being. He notices how the color works with your eyes or makeup.
And he can say things that you would hate most men for. He is the only guy I know that can make you feel beautiful when he is telling you that an outfit makes your ass look big. I was a little hurt the first time that he did this, but he does it by saying that it's the cut of the fabric and not your body.
When I was shopping with my friends, he made all of them feel special. He looked at them like how a guy looks at girls. He noticed what the clothes do to your breasts, if they make it look like you have a bit of a pooch around your midsection, if it makes your ass turn heads, or makes your thighs look fat. He makes you feel good about areas that you are insecure about. A man like that needs protecting from other men who want to beat him up for being different.
So when Jack started to get into a fight with Brian, I had to step in. And when he tried to diminish Jack's masculinity in gym class, I had to break it off with him and publicly humiliate him.
It is one thing for me to get beaten up. I have never thought of life as something pure and beautiful. I have always known that life was hard and that people were terrible. If I was smacked around a little, I did feel that I partly had it coming for the terrible things I had done. Jack, on the other hand, has a beautiful soul that can't help but to make you think that there is some inherent good in the world that is worth preserving.
After I had broken up with Brian, Jack and I started to change our relationship again. He calls them the Peace Accords. I don’t know what he is actually referring to. We never signed any deals or even discussed anything about our relationship during this time. I have never really pressed the issue with Jack. He can call them his Peace Accords if he wants. All I know is that we started to spend the night together around this time and that we were not a couple. I continued to go out with other guys.
I'm not sure why we started spending the night together at this time. As I remember it, he declared his love for me. I told him I wasn't looking for a relationship. He said that he wasn't talking about a relationship and gave me the impression that he was talking about sex. Since I knew that he was offering himself to me, I thought it was kind of tragically bea
utiful. I started crying. He started comforting me, and we fell asleep in my room. I think we started spending the night together after that.
He is honestly the only guy in the world that can get the crap kicked out of him and still be concerned about me. I wanted to nurture him and take care of him that night. He will ignore his own needs to try to give me what I want. Damn it! Jack was right. We spent the night together for the first time the night of the Super Bowl party. I hadn't broken up with Brian yet. He was arguing with me about this when he was writing his section of the book. I told him that we had not started to spend the night together until after I had broken up with Brian.
I don't know how he remembers the exact order of everything that we have ever done together. I know that he has a keepsake box of things he has gathered from our time together. Some of them will remind him of good things. Others will bring up some not so nice memories, but he will still treasure them.
Okay. So what does he mean by the Peace Accord? He had gotten beaten up. I told him that I wasn't going to break up with Brian. He declared his love for me. I looked at him with his face a bit of a mess and tried to get him to just take it easy. He needed to recover. He then started to put the moves on me, which I normally would have enjoyed. It was just that this time, he was so badly hurt that I wanted to take care of him instead of take advantage of him. I started crying, and he started to hold me. There was no peace. We didn’t even discuss anything. We just…
It's a good thing I love him because he really pisses me off sometimes. Not only was he right, he won't tell me what he meant by the Peace Accords because he thinks that it will hurt me if I know the truth. I know that I have hurt him. He just refuses to see me as something evil.
Anyway, we started spending the night together on Friday and Saturday nights when my mother was home. Jack didn't spend the night on weekends that my father was my guardian. We have gradually increased the nights that he sleeps over. When we first started dating, it became almost every weekend. We stopped caring about my father and what he would think. Lately, Jack has been spending almost every night with me.
Our parents don't care. They know about it. They just don't care. Jack's mom thinks it is good for him to be doing this. She says that he needs to unwind. I think she might have a problem if she didn't know that Jack truly loves me. If he was just sleeping with me because he was horny, she would object. I really wish there was a term for what Jack and I do in bed. Sleeping together doesn't quite cover it because it implies sex. That's the one thing I can say that is not going on at night when he is in bed with me.
Anyway, my mom doesn't have a problem with it. She thinks I deserve to be happy. Jack is a nice boy. It makes me happy.
And my father. My father has been nicer to Jack lately. Let's just say that I have made an agreement with my father concerning Jack. I basically get to enjoy Jack as my boyfriend without my father interfering. In exchange for this, I had to promise that I would give Jack up after high school. Jack doesn't know this, and he's never going to find out. He just thinks my father is trying to be nicer to him because of me. So in exchange for my father not being as mean to him, I agreed to break Jack's heart after high school.
Don't judge me, or think that I am terrible. Jack and I can not last. I am going to enjoy what time I can with him.
Jack and I spent the next couple of years spending the night together. I would go out with other men and then spend the night with Jack, teaching him some of the new techniques I had learned from my “flavor of the month” as Jack put it. I don't want to say that this time of my life wasn't fun. I had the best of both worlds. I got to go out with really hot guys, and I got to be with Jack in an almost purely sexual way. It's not that Jack wasn't more than a sex toy. We did talk about important stuff at this time. It's just that... Well, despite him saying that it would be okay for me to go out with other men, I knew that it still was hurting him. It caused a lot of sexual tension between us. It was fun and thrilling.
Our relationship at this time was far from perfect. Because he had already declared his undying love for me, I could lead him on sexually. He wanted nothing more from me than to say that I loved him. I wanted nothing more from him than to have him between my legs. It became a game to see who would give in first. He knew that I loved him, and I knew that he wanted nothing more than to f#ck me senseless.
I think I may have carried the game a little too far. I think Jack was really beginning to have some hostility towards me that went beyond the sexual tension. He said some things that just... Well, let's just say that...
On several occasions I would give Jack the impression that I didn't want him for anything except sex. I made him think that I would use him and then discard him like I had every other boy. And Jack responded in a way that made me think... I don't want to say that Jack ever believed what my father has always told me, but he has said many of the same things when I was teasing him.
One time I was being a typical cock tease with Jack. I had just gotten home from a date with another man when Jack comes over. He's asking me about my date, and I go over to him and start rubbing up against him. I tell him everything I had done with my date while reenacting the deeds on Jack. And Jack just stood there rigid. He didn't kiss me back. He didn't even seem to be enjoying it. I don't think he even got hard or anything. When I was done with my reenactment, I put my arms lovingly around his neck and looked at him. I then waited for him to kiss me. He just looked at me and said, “Do you always try to pick up men by offering them sloppy seconds?”
“Don't flatter yourself. I know you're more of a bitch than a man.”
He looked at me with such hatred. I could tell that he was really getting angry. He is a very hard man to make angry, but once he is, there is no hiding it. And then he did something that I did not expect. He smiled at me, but it was that smile of his that I hate. He then took my hand and gently caressed it. I didn't know what I was going to do next, but I never expected him to bow to me, kiss my hand, and say, “I apologize for my shortcomings.”
He then started to walk out on me. I was feeling all sorts of things. I was upset that he was walking out on me. I was sorry that I had hurt him. I was wanting him back and not willing to admit that what I had done was wrong. In all of my confusion, I yelled after him, “God damn it, Jack! What do I have to do to get you to f#ck me?!”
He stopped, turned around, and looked at me. He then started to walk back towards me. He gently caressed my cheek and started to run his fingers through my hair. He looked at me lovingly, and I found myself melting in his hands. I was like a kitten purring in his hands. I was not even noticing what he was saying when he said, “I guess it's a good thing you broke my heart early on. It has made me immune to your charms.” He then kissed me and walked away.
I called softly after him, “Jack, are you going to be spending the night tonight?”
“You know, you really are a remarkable actress. I think you should try out for the drama club.”
“What's that supposed to mean? You're the one being the drama queen”, I snapped back.
“I mean, for a second there I would have almost believed that you were capable of actually caring for a man.”
“But I...”
“Be careful, Dear. You might ruin our game and admit that you have feelings for me”, he said with a stupid smirk on his face.
But I continued to play along in my soft, sweet manner. “But I do have feelings for you, Darling. Every time I look at you I am overcome with a feeling of wanting to throw up.”
“Don't worry. It's called a gag reflex. It's what happens when you bite off more of a man than you can chew”, he said with a smirk and a twinkle in his eye. He then bowed and exited.
“You know, you never said if you were spending the night or not.”
He looked at me, and the smirk disappeared off of his face. He then walked back over to me and looked at me. But he didn't just look at me. He looked at me as if he was trying to pierce my soul with his eyes. Whe
n I couldn't maintain eye contact anymore, I lowered my head. I don't know how he interpreted it. I don't know if he thought I was ashamed or what. I was... He was reading me and trying to figure out what I was really thinking or feeling. The man does have the extraordinary gift of being able to read people. I'm not quite sure how he does it. If you ever see him being extremely silent, he is taking in his surroundings and everybody around him.
After reading me, he took me within his arms and gently kissed me on the forehead. He was comforting. “I think I will spend the night”, is all that he said. We spent the rest of the night as if nothing happened earlier. If you didn't know better, you would have thought that we were a couple.
Before Jack and I got together, we spent the majority of our days like this. It's not that I didn't know that I was hurting him. I thought that if I made him mad enough that he would take out his aggression on me.
The difference between me and Jack has always been what we have wanted from the other. Even from the beginning, Jack always wanted a committed relationship. I was capable of that before we started school. It was fun to pretend to be a couple when you are that young. You are doing what adults are doing. But when I started school, it wasn't as socially acceptable to be boyfriend and girlfriend. Maybe I shouldn't have rejected Jack during that time. I don't think I really rejected him. I just kept our relationship more of a secret. We could still be what we had always been without the actual definition.
By the time we were in fifth and sixth grade, we started to make that transition to really being in a relationship. It was becoming more socially acceptable. It was no longer the social practice of hating people of the opposite sex. It was okay to like boys.
I have always wondered what would have happened if my parents had never gotten divorced and if his father had never died. I wonder if we could have gotten together as an actual couple without all of the issues that we have had over the years.
Life Begins Page 13
