by Olivia Wild
The Last Adam
by Olivia Wild
Table of Contents
Chapter One:
Meeting Adam
Chapter Two:
Enough Abuse, Already…
Chapter Three:
That Time AC Pushed Me Out of a Moving Car
Chapter Four:
Drowning People Sometimes Die Fighting Their Rescuers
Chapter Five:
The Red Door
Bonus Sneak Preview of
"With Every Temptation" Book
Chapter One:
Meeting Adam
He is positively gorgeous when I first lay eyes on him. Adam is his name, not like “AC” – as my husband has chosen to call himself, since that Adam Christian hates his first name, and therefore chooses to go by initials that distance him even farther from people.
My mother told me that back in slavery days, the white slave owners used to instruct their white wives to call them only by their initials, so that the slaves wouldn’t learn the real names of the men who owned them like so much chattel.
My artistic photographer husband simply hated the name “Adam” – and seeing as though he’s an atheist, he probably hated the “Christian” part, too – so he adopted the “AC” moniker nickname ever since I can remember, since that fateful day I met him while still in college in Florida as I was getting over the heartbreak of a cheating fiancé.
Can you say “rebound husband,” anyone? Seriously, Olivia, who but you would jump into an abusive marriage trying to escape a crack-smoking, womanizing fiancé? Ah well, such is life, and all the verbal attacks punctuated by actual physical attacks during this dark time are grist for the mill – and words for these pages.
Adam – the handsome new coworker placed right in front of my cube, attached, in fact – is taking my mind away from all those haphazard happenings in apartment #2012 on the 20th floor of the building that’s 12 blocks south on Michigan Avenue of the dividing line that separates the north side of Chicago from the south.
He can get it, this new guy, this Adam Emmanuel, that is. Although we both work in the financial sector, helping companies manage their 401(k) retirement plans for their employees, Adam has a freshness about him and a jazzy hairstyle and positively piercing blue eyes that feel like they bore straight into my soul sometimes as we stand around in a foursome – that’s including Rod and Joseph, two other Account Managers on this 10th floor of the Chicago Title & Trust building – and shoot the breeze between breaks in work.
I love those breaks. Not just being the only female in our tight crew, but the fact that no one else has that special something the four of us have – that “clicking” that’s meant to be. When it’s right, it’s right, and all these other females who come along and try to break my spirit by clucking about my short skirts and low cut dresses can’t stop my flow.
Phuck them, as the interwebs might say. Okay, that’s not right Olivia, you don’t really mean that all the way – although plenty of them are scathingly jealous enough to try and shoot daggers at me with their own evil stares. I can tell by the way they hit up Adam’s cube that they want him as well, and my presence has thrown a beautiful monkey wrench in their plans.
But cutie-pie that he is, Adam welcomes them all the same, allowing them to chat him up and listening to their problems until work comes a-calling. Or, until I sneak over to another cubicle and call his phone, pretending I’m “Karen Pringle” or “Robert Staff” or another one of our coworkers, in order to rescue him from their endless ramblings.
I can’t lie: I’m one of the ones who wants Adam all to myself, too, and it appears he wants me as well. But he’s unlike any guy I’ve ever dealt with. He’s not necessarily too shy and standoffish, like one of those men you have to ferret out whether they’re gay or intimidated by you. I don’t get that vibe from him.
But neither is he like those “man whores” who turn on the uber-charm and flex the extra muscles that make their tattoos dances on their deltoids, giving me the smile and the “oops I accidentally rubbed your boob buy I’m not going to say ‘I’m sorry’ out loud because it really wasn’t an accident” feel up. It’s the exact same practiced move they’ve done one hundred thousand times to one hundred thousand other women – I’m not special to them.
I’m merely one more cog in the wheel of butts and breasts that is their candy land life.
Adam, however, gives off the kind of vibe like a caring brother mixed with hot otherworldliness and intelligence that you can’t put your finger on but would certainly like to try.
I think he likes me. After all, when that package of supplies came to our department, with “Adam & Olivia” written on the label, didn’t we cut it out and save it – unnecessarily – and even decorate it with curly-cues and pretty designs?
“Do you need the sign?” Adam asks me when I’m having a bad day, perhaps after overhearing another bad conversation with the stupid client that called me “clueless” to our boss.
“Yes,” I’ll retort, and he’ll pass it back over to my side, over the cube wall, so I can take my turn at staring at the conundrum.
“Uhn-ahn,” Laura, an older mom-type of a kindly colleague, said to Adam one day when she spotted the sign on his side, proudly displayed in the corner like a Picasso painting. For she knew I was married, and that the “Adam” joined by an ampersand to my name on that decorative little sign had nothing to do with the Newport chain-smoking dread-locked artist a few miles away in our marital apartment.
She was a sweetheart, and her sounds of negative disapproval were probably right to her. After all, Laura knew I was married to another man. But if I could reach back all those years to the time I first met my coworker Adam – the last Adam, not the first – I would retort an affirmative, “Uh-hun!”
Adam did end up becoming mine and I became his, but not after a whole lot of divorcing and remarrying drama ensued. Let me tell you my story…perhaps it was really telling that I met my Adam on February 14th, Valentine’s Day. And maybe a bit quirky that he thought I looked like a porn star. Either way, it was the perfect time to meet the perfect man, because the one I had at home just wasn’t it.
Chapter Two:
Enough Abuse, Already…
The first time AC got violent with me was soon after I met him. I know we were lounging around in bed, talking about nothing so significant to me – perhaps the fact that I was still wearing the small diamond on my left-hand’s ring finger that my fiancé Ed had given me.
Well, it turned out that Ed was a handsome and talented man, but also a crack-smoking man whore who had tried to hit up most of my college friends, and slept with the ones he could.
He even slept with Sherice in the pool at Tom’s nice apartment near FSU when the four of us stayed over, and when I woke up late and Tom told me that Ed and Sherice had “gone swimming,” my heart sank.
So Ed was out and in came AC, a man who picked my toes over the toes of my good friend in an impromptu “Whose toes are prettier?” contest.
By the time I’d graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and headed back to my hometown of Chicago, AC and I were already on disparate paths. Heck, I was 21 when I marched across the stage to shake the university president’s hand and avert his gaze as I accepted the blank paper that represented my diploma.
“I love you!” AC yelled from the balcony’s rafters, and the sound was annoying to me.
There he was, a 29-year-old man – eight years my junior – who hadn’t even gotten his own diploma yet. But that wasn’t really what totally bugged me. I mean, the man did do a stint in the Army and possible a Special Forces run. It was the
angry side of him that consumed his soul that made all his other qualities not worth the mean outbursts.
I fell in love with the artsy-fartsy side of AC – the way he’d spend hours in the dark room, developing crazily creative or untrustingly sexy pics, murmuring about “Sabatier solarization” and F stops and the like. I didn’t realize I was more in love with the artist’s way instead of him, or maybe I really was in love with his ripped cargo pants style, and the way he – as a black man – could wax philosophical about Metallica and Missoula, Montana.
Those dreadlocks and funky style of dressing grew old, though, when he eventually graduated and moved reluctantly to Chicago with me, taking a job at the post office instead of the newspaper photographer position in Naples, Florida, that would’ve been right up his alley.
But I digress.
“Trick! Slut! Tramp!”
Those are the words AC called me, back when we still lived in that little ruddy first floor apartment in Florida, lying around on his Murphy bed. He was probably mad because I hadn’t removed Ed’s ring yet, so that was his way of letting me know.
Then there was the time we argued about something and he pressed his open palm against my face and pushed me hard back on his bed, forcing me to run out into the night wearing a miniskirt and shirt and shoes, into a leery stranger’s apartment – a curly-haired Jewish man who reticently let me use his phone in the foyer so I could call Ed to come pick me up.
The abuse continued to act as markers, subheads, if you will, in the pages that made up my life of fun and thrilling times with AC. I wasn’t happy about having to foot the major portion of our $700-plus monthly rent – plus $70 per month parking fee – for our downtown high rise corner apartment, while his dad’s $1,000 periodic wires and AC’s mere pittance of a paycheck barely usurped (if not at all) my income.
I wanted a man like Adam: more clean cut, a downright metrosexual who was intimately familiar with showers and smell-goods and haircuts and the practice of actually tucking a non-ripped shirt into non-torn pants.
He even had a nice little wide butt that I checked out as he walked away from my cube, and the days of us chatting and laughing and were highlighted by the fact that Adam knew how to write a business letter – one simple fact that was lost on AC that wondrously caused my respect for him to drop so many levels.
Adam knew how to speak to clients, too, no matter their race, color or creed. I loved that about him. He had an easy rapport that made me smile as I dipped my head low and eavesdropped on the external clients he’d advise about innocuous matters.
My love for him would grow deeper still, when I heard him singing a gentle song from “Schindler’s List” that unveiled a soul so sensitive, I knew he was nothing like AC. But I promised to tell you about more abuse, so let me get the next few incidents with my husband out of the way, and then tell you how it all came to a head.
Chapter Three:
That Time AC Pushed Me Out of a Moving Car
We are arguing again, AC and I.
The fights start like a sudden storm that builds out of nowhere.
Being with a violent man, I know I shouldn’t push it. There are times when I should back off and quiet down and “Keep Sweet” like one of those brainwashed Warren Jeffs' cult members in Utah. But my female-ness won’t let me shut my mouth.
Doesn’t he know who my mother is? She would hardly shut up and back down for nobody.
“I’m glad nobody stole my car,” AC says, after we enter his black Dodge Shadow – a stick shift that he drives around town like he’s racing in the Indy 500, barreling dangerously close to other cars before braking hard and switching lanes with the sudden urgent and jerky moves of a race car driver trying to avoid an accident.
We had inadvertently left the car doors open while we darted inside the Chinese food place to grab dinner for the night.
“Yeah, and my purse was in here, too,” I say, relieved to find my purse safe and sound on the floorboard of the passenger’s side where I’d left it.
“Yeah, but they could’ve stolen my car,” he retorts, putting emphasis on the object as if to say that my property was nothing in comparison to his.
“And they could’ve stolen my purse,” I say, putting just as much emphasis on my property – the bag that usually held the funds to pay for said dinners like the one we’ve just picked up.
He won’t let it go, and neither will I. Yes, his car is important, but so is my purse. I’m not lessening the importance of his stupid car. This isn’t some kind of silly contest as to whether his asset is more important than mine, but that’s the way he’s taking it.
“Forget your purse!” he is screaming and driving slowly along a gravel road before long. I know it is gravel on the side of the road, because I will be intimately familiar with it soon.
“Just get out!” AC eventually screams, letting the car roll about five miles per hour as he veers off onto the shoulder and steers with his left hand while reaching past me with his right hand to unlock my seatbelt, open the passenger door and push me out with a swift and sinister motion.
Thank God the car is going so slowly that when I instinctively reach out my palms and splay them to break my fall, I’m not that hurt. The dullish brown light of the empty side road, illuminated by street lamps and factories in the distance, reveals cuts and blood on my palms as I turn them over to spy the damage.
He is sorry. He always is…afterward.
I don’t know that there’s much in the way of a honeymoon period per se, like, AC’s not going to run out and buy me a phat diamond or Birken bag like some ballers who beat their women. He’s not paid like that, nor humble like that.
Maybe the most accurate way to describe it is a period of relief. As if his anger had boiled to a point like so much horniness culminates in a good orgasm, providing a momentary period of false peace and a sense of an uneasy reprieve, because when you’re living with a weather system like AC, you might not be able to predict when the storm brewing on the horizon will hit once more, but you know it always will.
From our 20th floor apartment overlooking Lake Michigan, we can see the small planes taking off and landing at Meigs Field. The colorful seats of Soldier Field are a stunning bowl of artwork dotting the land. But the storms – oh, the storms.
This vantage point provides the most glorious view of the storms as they roll across the water, wide sweeping vistas of clouds and rain and lightning like I’d never seen growing up as a girl on this same famous avenue, 81 blocks to the south.
It’s amazing the different things you can see in the same city, only from a different perspective, and from the viewpoint of time elapsed. This building comes equipped with small rectangular windows that open slightly inward, only tilting in about a 45-degree angle to let bursts of a breeze inside – strong ones that on windy days cause the long and lean skyscraper to sway back and forth like a wobbly drunken woman.
She is pretty, though, with her mirror-like windows reflecting the waves of the lake beyond, and no balconies to spoil the sleek and straight line of her curved slim body. It’s that same skeleton that worries me, when I think of the worst – of how I would escape such a location if tragedy ever struck.
The screens of the window could be easily popped out, yes, and even if I could maneuver my 5-foot 10-inch, 157-pound body out of such a small space, this building’s sheer face façade – which rivals any sheer drop of a mountain with no foot-loving crags and crevices out west – would make for a difficult self-rescue, even if I tied together every single piece of clothing and sheet set in this one-bedroom apartment.
The thunderstorms and building sway make for interesting viewing, along with the amazing view of firework displays that we’re treated to on holiday occasions. But this movie-like living also makes for a scary existence – as if two trains are running parallel on the yin and yang tracks of sadness and gladness of life. Good and evil, fake and real. All those things that can exist in one and make me feel an uneasy feeling these days.<
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“I hate you,” I tell AC one evening, and weakly throw his gym shoe at him, barely causing a thump.
I reply, he hurls the TV remote with the force of a football thrown to a faraway teammate, making it land straight on the bones that fan across the back of my right hand so hard that I fear he may have chipped a bone.
“I’m leaving,” I announce, moving toward the door.
“Where are you going?” he asks with fear and twisted concern, and the way he grabs both my upper arms in his hands makes me answer him honestly, so afraid am I of his next violent move.
“To my mother’s house,” I answer, something I oddly call my parent’s home – because they both still live there together, married for many years, in name only.
“Okay,” he says, releasing me.
I bolt out the door and into a cab that traverses the Dan Ryan Expressway past the project buildings that dot the landscape along that familiar path I’ve taken so many times, even as Mommy drove me down them in the 1970s as a child, before I’d ever heard of an AC.
“So, you don’t really need to go to your destination right away, do you?” asks my Kenyan cab driver, his dark face glancing up at the hurting and pretty soul, appearing like a wounded lamb in his back seat.
I can’t believe this. I escape one abusive man, only to climb into the cab of a man who’s threatening not to take me to my destination. I have the fleeting thought that this stranger of man, who answered this fare in the middle of the night in this mysterious city, could take me off to parts unknown and have his way with me – and no one would know where to find me or what had happened to me.
Thankfully, heaven prevails and before long, I am dipping into the darkened room that is my mother’s bedroom – the room that used to belong to Mommy and Daddy when I was a young girl. The boudoir where I only once caught them being slightly affectionate and sexy, when Mommy had her leg draped over Daddy’s outer thigh as they both laid on their sides facing one another. Her body language said that she was begging him for sex. His was that of a shy and reticent schoolgirl, enamored with the outright attention and attraction, but perhaps holding his goodies to himself, or saving them for some other woman or man – any individual other than my mother.
