Kiss Me Like You Mean It: A Novel

by J. R. Rogue

  Then, the call came. It was a Thursday night, and I was lying in bed. Our house still wasn’t fully put together. There was only so much I could do with the bigger pieces without Connor to help. We had just bought a new bed two days before, and it was downstairs in our living room.

  I had drawn all the shades, was lying in clean sheets after a shower when I heard the ringing.

  “Gwen,” my mother said, as if she didn't know she called me.

  I rolled my eyes and sighed. “Yes.” I was on the defense, afraid she would scold me for my silence toward my stepfather. She always had a way of knowing those things. When she told me what Arya said, that he molested her, I didn’t see damnation in her eyes. Despite all he did to my mother, the cheating, the lies, she still supported him. It made me resent her, I could see that now.

  “Have you talked to your father?”

  It was a question I heard time and time again. I was twenty-nine years old and here she was, still trying to make our relationship more than it was. Always calling my brother and I, urging us to reach out to him. Why did we, the children, have to be the bigger person? It made me rebel, ignore his number on my phone.

  “No,” I said, clipped, pissed. I propped myself up on my elbow and reached for the light switch above my head, my hand still when she spoke again.

  “He’s sick. He has cancer.”

  I did not want to cry when I got the news, but I did. I wasn’t sure who for. For myself? For him? I knew I had to choke on my secret. I couldn’t come out then, accuse him of molesting me if he was dying.

  I couldn’t stomach the other hurt there. I hurt in the pits of myself. I didn't want him to die. I wanted him to die. No one tells you how to feel when your monster is melting away.

  I didn't want to see him again, but I would have to. I would have to go to the hospital.

  I would have to smile at him and hug him and let him put his hands on me, the ones that changed me, the ones that broke me.

  45

  I Was Silent

  Connor

  There is something inside of me, in my blood, that wants to go off on her. I held her as she shook the night she told me she thought someone had molested her. The signs had been there for a while. She was pulling away when we slept together. She had always been a spirited lover. We loved to play. My hand around her neck, reverse cowgirl, fucking on the hood of her little Hyundai. All summer she had been timid. She rarely slept. I would wake in the night, in her tiny trailer, alone in bed. I would look for her every time, and find her the same way every time.

  She would be at her dining room table, with a pad of paper, scribbling away. I couldn’t sleep. I’m sorry, babe. Did I wake you? would often be what tumbled from her mouth. I would take her hand, pull her up, wrap myself around her.

  Sometimes, she came to me. Sometimes, she insisted I try to fall asleep again.

  Gwen loved to write in a journal. It never really interested me much, the contents of those pages, until I was losing her. Until her secrets no longer reached my ears. I didn’t know her sleepless nights would be the first nail in our coffin. I couldn’t reach her. I couldn’t understand her. So I was silent. I was a wall and she flowed around me.

  The day she told me she wanted to go see her stepfather in the hospital, the one who violated her, I didn’t argue. I let a bitter seed bloom into something resentful in my stomach. How could she go see him? How could she still care about him?

  She told me to keep quiet about what happened to her. She couldn’t remember it anyway, and her family couldn’t know. So I was without a confidant. No one to confess my feelings to. No one but her and I couldn’t burden her. She was dealing with enough. Weight loss. Hair loss. Her blue eyes were grey and her skin seemed to change color before my eyes.

  This was supposed to be one of the best times of our lives. I had bought a house. We were out of her tiny trailer. I was working a lot, but I hoped my goals made her happy. I knew she wanted to marry me but I wasn’t ready. We needed to build something together. To build a foundation. Financially and emotionally. Money was on our side but this would be the beginning of the slip. I didn’t know it then, but a pit was pooling around our feet. We would rise some days, but we would always be our past. If I had known our rocky beginnings would be better than our future, would I still have tried? Hard to say.

  There was this pull I felt.

  Always toward Gwen.

  Even when I hated her, I felt it.

  46

  I Loved The Lie

  So much time has slipped by, so easily, and sad. So sad like me, all the time. It’s May now and I don’t know where the time has gone. The new house looks great. My stepfather is in stable condition, so I don’t have to go see him in the hospital. I don’t have to pretend. I can just hide away, go on with life. I have a new friend now anyway, someone to distract me from the fact that Connor and I aren’t what we used to be. You can find friends in the strangest of places.

  Just before Connor and I got together, last year, he was seeing a girl. I knew her. The redhead.

  Her brother and my brother lived together. We went to the same school but with her being six years younger than me, it's not like we could hang out or anything.

  When I found out Connor was hanging out with her back then I saw red. Not red like her hair, red like rage. Another redhead was getting in between us.

  She wasn't the bad penny but she was a wedge in my way. When a coworker told me she was hanging with a girlfriend and asked me to come along I showed little interest. When she told me that Kate, the red-headed wedge from last year, would be there, I decided to go.

  I wanted to be petty. To rub it in her face that I had Connor, even though that didn’t seem like anything to brag about anymore. I liked to win and I could be ugly.

  When I got into the car with the girls, I kept quiet. I didn't have a game plan for my childish release. I wanted to feel her out. I didn't expect to have more fun with Kate that night than the girl I worked with.

  I don't often click with women. I don't often click with anyone, actually. There was something about Kate's easy laugh. It was loud and warm. She said she hated it, that it embarrassed her, but I liked it. I liked people who were open and talkative. I was the opposite and those were the people who always drew me out.

  I abandoned my plan to be petty. I talked to her about our brothers and our hometown. We exchanged numbers and we avoided the fact that if anyone knew we were friends they would think it was a lie, a joke.

  When I got home I told Connor how much I liked Kate. I think it made him uncomfortable, and maybe he questioned Kate's motives for being my friend.

  Women are expected to hate each other over men. And we often do. I went out into the night with a hate in my heart. A possessiveness over my boyfriend, but it was driven away by kindness. I never made a snide remark. They all drowned in my throat when confronted with honesty and an open mind.

  Sometimes you meet someone and they reflect in your good qualities. I needed to lay down my fighting tools. Connor was mine. But I doubted any commitment made to me these days. Marriages fell apart. Families fell apart. How could we not?

  I wanted to marry Connor, despite our issues. I wanted a little bit more security.

  I was always craving that. Security. Though, I wasn't sure what I would do with it.

  My suspicions were confirmed when I started to tell people that Kate and I were friends. Lesley rejected the idea. Said she was out to get me. I wanted to ask her how she knew. If she recognized a likeness since she was the shittiest friend I ever had.

  Maybe she was afraid I would see someone with honest intentions and leave her, drop her.

  If we didn't work together, I would have done it a long time ago. But I felt married to the idea that we needed to get along.

  It took a while for Connor to ease into the idea as well. When the three of us finally hung out, I felt no jealousy when Kate and Connor talked. They acted more like brother and sister than two people who had sle
pt together. It was no wonder they didn't work out.

  I would never have expected that we would all live together later.

  It wasn't too much later that Lesley found another job. As soon as she was gone we stopped talking. We deleted each other from Facebook. I finally felt like I had someone else on my side. Maybe I could eventually tell a friend about what I was feeling, what was hurting me, and I could feel better.

  I loved the lie.

  47

  A Child Of My Own

  “It wasn't long before I started to realize that I didn't recognize myself. I had bitten my tongue so many times I was surprised it hadn't fallen off into my mouth. I deserved to choke on the blood. I changed myself too much for Connor, and never told him the fear I had over my morphing skin, that all I had in my palms for him was resentment. I was reading a lot. So many stories of girls and guys who couldn't get their love figured out because they couldn't communicate. It was infuriating. I wanted to throw books across the room, scream at them."

  "Because that's the life you were living?"

  "Yes. I knew what it was like to watch your face fall in reflected glass. To watch words die in your own eyes. I wanted to keep Connor, above all else. I didn't care how I lost myself in the meantime. He could settle down with my corpse. The shell of the feisty woman I used to be."

  "Did anyone point out the changes in you?"

  "No. The world wants the wild girls to settle down. Get married. Have kids. I was on the path to being what society needed me to be. One person noticed. Kate. We were supportive of each other, but we knew our boundaries. Where our opinions were not necessary. Or where they would be met with regret. It was enough to have a friend there who supported me unconditionally. She would be there if I stayed or if I left. If she knew just how sad I was maybe she would have pressed more. But I was so skilled at hiding my lifeless eyes. At lying in texts.”

  "But not face-to-face. You say you can't hide your emotions. And I can see that."

  "Yeah. I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse." I pause. "My mother always told me to be a strong woman. But I watched her bend herself into a half-woman for my stepfather. For the man who hurt me. Then I watched her do it again and again. I wonder if it started with my biological father. Was it a learned skill? To break your mold and let yourself spill all over the floor for a man? Did she learn it from her mother? I had never seen my grandfather be anything but kind, but, do we truly know anyone? Ever?"

  "What happens behind closed doors is often hidden. You just said you hid what was going on between you and Connor. What was his family like?"

  "Perfect," I laugh, and it is not happy. "I was so envious of Connor's family. But they made him the way he was. Connor with the stoic face. With the heart of stone. Never letting his feelings out."

  "Did you try to talk to him?"

  "No. I think our beginning caused us to hide our feelings from each other. We trained ourselves to be that way. To hide the truth. He couldn't wrap his head around the fact that I didn't want to tell anyone about what my father did. But how could he? He was untouched, from this Hallmark Card life. He couldn't relate to that and I resented him for not being able to open his eyes to the way things were tearing me apart. It was then, in his silence, that I turned to words."

  "What did you write?"

  "My first novel. When Connor was silent for days at a time, I wrote my story. The one he could never sit down to hear out, fully. I made up a girl, named her Sera, a name I had reserved for a little girl I hoped to one day have. And I made her story just as mine. My mother still didn't know she had married a monster. My brother didn't know his father was sick. Not just with cancer, with a sick attraction to little girls. I wanted one of those things to kill him. I wanted so many dark things. In those days, I started to lose more than gain.”

  “What was the hardest thing to lose?”

  “My desire to have a child of my own.”

  48

  Invisible Clock

  Connor

  I've never understood the men who told their girlfriends or wives that they couldn't go out and have fun. I wasn't controlling in that way, and neither was Gwen. We never had to ask permission to do anything and we never told each other no. If she wanted to go out with her friends, then she could go out with her friends and the same kindness was extended to me. I was working late a lot. And often, whenever I came home, she would be out with her friends. I didn't expect her to just wait around for me. But it was lonely coming home to an empty house all the time.

  There was nothing wrong with her friends necessarily, but they were single, and their idea of having fun was different than what I hoped hers would be. I knew the way guys looked at her. And there was no way they weren't still looking at her that way. It shouldn’t have mattered how men looked at her. All that mattered was how she was looking at them. The truth was, she pulled away. I feared she was unhappy. The harder truth to face was that I didn't blame her.

  Sometimes every little thing you complain about in someone is every little thing you love about them. You don't realize that you're changing them, that you want them to stand up to you.

  Gwen was once fiery, dominant, in the early days. She wasn't anymore. She had bowed down to something inside of me that she saw, something I couldn't change her view on. I never wanted to control her. But she had taken into consideration everything I wanted and was throwing away her own wants for me.

  Sometimes it was something small and simple like a TV show she wanted to watch and I knew she wanted to watch it, but when I came home and she had ESPN on for me, I wouldn't say anything. I would just wait to see what she would do and she would never use her voice. She turned into a tiny meek mouse.

  If I was being honest with myself, I loved the way our mistakes looked in past tense. They were neat and tidy. Easy to attach solutions to. I was too caught up in perfect. That was my problem. One of them.

  There was an invisible clock in my heart. One that counted down to the day I would propose to Gwen. It would start over every time she lashed out. Every time she fell into a pit. Every time she went weeks without sweeping our kitchen floor. Every time she showed her biting jealousy.

  Perfection. That's what I wanted. I didn’t see it at the time, but I would when she left me.

  I would never be able to break her of her reach for perfection. I planted it there. It was a stain between us.

  She was never enough for me, not in her eyes, because I strung her along for so long. I wish we could have gone back to the beginning. Before we both fucked it up.

  49

  A Bigger Monster

  "When I was fifteen, I wrote poetry about a boy I had a crush on. He was a mean popular kid, but I was fifteen and I didn't care. I didn't know then that it would be a pattern, to love boys who were mean to me. When I started writing again as an adult, it was to subdue the sadness I had inside. I wrote about Connor. All the things we could never say to each other's faces. I pretended the typewriter I bought was for show. A new prop for the house.

  “Our home was decorated in warm colors. I started working on it when I was warmer. Nothing inside our home back then matched my inside. I want stark white, nothingness. The black typewriter would look beautiful in a white room with nothing but a blue desk. But no, my house was warm reds and tans, a constant reminder of the days when I had hope. That he would marry me and we would create a family here. I kept the typewriter in my office. I typed away when Connor was gone on business trips for his new job. I stashed the little papers I typed in a box behind the file cabinet.”

  "Were you afraid of what he would realize if he read your words?"

  "Yes. He would see the truth. He barely looked into my eyes back then. When he came home, I didn't hug him. I didn't kiss him. And he didn't complain. I said ‘hello’ and ‘how was your trip’ and his monotone voice filled the space between us. It was vapor, stagnant."

  "What did you do with the words you wrote on those little papers?"

  "I never thoug
ht about posting my poems online. It seemed like a stupid idea. When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a lot of things – an actress, a vet, a writer, a poet. I let my dreams slip away because my anxiety was a bigger monster than they were. It crashed into the room of my heart and soul and left no room for the things I desired.

  Connor had been gone for a five-day trip when I posted a piece online for the first time. Having it go viral was not in the cards. I had already been working on my first novel for years. I was getting nowhere. The story was too big, too personal. I modeled my character after myself and that was a mistake. It was the only way to tell the story of what my stepfather had done to me, but I couldn't work my way through it. I put it aside for months at a time. I picked a pseudonym from the beginning. Something to hide behind. When I posted my poem, I used that same name. Then I saw it spreading across the internet like wildfire. Every day more people followed my new poetry social media account no one knew about. Not Kate. Not my mother. Not Connor. I was too embarrassed to tell them. It was too raw, the words I was posting."

  "But that made it easier, right? To hide behind the name?"

  "Yes. How could that ever be the real me? Posting my feelings online when I wouldn't dare utter to them to the man who was supposed to love me more than anyone in the world? The man who ignored me, left the room when family asked when we were going to finally get married?"

  "Maybe things would have been different if you had opened up to him then."

  I laugh. “Yes, maybe, but he didn't deserve to see my secrets. I trusted strangers with them more than him. They couldn't use them or wound me. But he didn't need random words typed on a paper to wound me. He did it best in his absence. His silence. I should have never moved in. I missed my trailer and the freedom I felt there. I missed knowing that no matter how much someone hurt me, I could just shut them out, turn off my phone, lock my doors. I didn't have that escape there, in the home we shared. I did on the days Connor was gone, but when he was home it was a delicate balancing act. A tightrope tango. Pretending nothing was wrong. Crying in the shower, hoping he wouldn't hear."