Crush

by Laura Susan Johnson

  He sucks me hard, and the sound his mouth makes when it parts from me nearly ends me. "Please what?" he growls so silkily in his throat that I almost orgasm again. I lay beneath him, my chest heaving. I can't answer. I want his mouth back on me. I want it back. I can't believe how close I am to him while I'm inside of his mouth, how warm, how safe, how utterly loved. I can't explain this oneness. Where do I end? Where does he begin?

  I'm afraid of this total loss of control, this possession he's taken of me. I'm afraid of what's breaking inside of me because when it's out, I'm going to shatter into a million sparkling pieces and be scattered all over the universe.

  I don't want to surrender. I don't want to let it out, but how can I hold it in?!

  You're not dirty, you're delicious. The sordid images seared into my brain my whole life long burn away brightly in the unbearable heat. "Please? Please? Please..." I beg as Tammy devours me like a lion savouring the pulsing blood of an antelope.

  My body clamours for release, twists itself into knots, screams for an end to this horrendous, beautiful torment.

  He takes his mouth off of me again, just long enough to say, "I want you to cream right into my mouth, Baby, come on... come on, Baby... I know you're ready. Come right into my mouth..." His voice strokes me inside, fanning the already monstrous fire, then his mouth returns...

  It breaks. I can't stop my body's response to his beguiling voice. I thrust, sobbing, my back arching painfully, my soul separating with a soft ripping sound...

  ...and floating, like an angel, above my flesh.

  The chains snap from around my ankles.

  Let it go... let it go... just let it go...

  A brilliant light strobes before me, and I scream, hoarse and shrill, in agony and pleasure as my body empties itself into Tammy's willing mouth.

  This is different. Usually when I come it's hard and quick, over with too soon, or slow and rich and wet, my entire pelvic region clamping, releasing, clamping, like our first time or the day he gave me my angel.

  Right now I can't describe it, except it's not so much physical. It's all feelings. It's like everything is leaving me and I don't know if I am comfortable with everything I've ever known leaving me. All my fear, all my anger, all my hatred. It's seeping swiftly out of me. It's like pain, but it feels so good.

  I slowly come back to myself, and, like the vulture that waits for a last dying gasp, it's there again as my body softens and my heart bridles itself from a gallop. It's there, hideous, hateful, persistent, the voice of Satan, the Accuser, the Liar. That's who it is. That's who it's always been:

  You're dirty. You're nasty. You're just like your daddy...

  They were Satan's disciples. They were doing Satan's work when they raped me. When they beat me. When they tortured me.

  You're a pervert. You're dirty. You're just like him.

  Shut up, Liar! I retort in a soundless screech.

  I turn and tell myself, He's a liar! He's the father of liars, remember?

  Tammy thinks I'm strong. And he's right... I'm strong...

  But I'm not as strong as I'd like to be. I never have been as strong as I'd like to be. The visuals crowd in on me, corner me, queued up, raising their clubs, attacking, and all I can do is cower, cry, cover my eyes...

  But then, Tammy is here. "Come on," he says, and he takes me and holds me and lets me cry. I cry for a long time, because it hurts.

  It hurts to let it go.

  But I have to. I have to let it go. Forever.

  And I have to let Tammy love me.

  He holds me close, talks to me. I feel the strong, solid thud of his heart against my cheek, and I know I trust him. Abruptly, I'm all over him again, like syrup on a hotcake, kissing him everywhere. He bends and folds my body like origami. My heels dig into his ass, pull him to me, and we laugh as he mounts me and fucks me like there's no tomorrow.

  After hours of dozing, eating cold leftover pizza, and fucking our brains out, he finds me sitting out on the balcony at four o'clock the next morning. He asks me if I'm alright and I nod, Yes. "Can I come out there with you?" he asks. Of course, I nod.

  Cooling tears are still dangling from my chin as he whispers, "Penny for your thoughts?"

  I shrug. "I'll go get your pad," Tammy says. Then he halts just as he's about to open the sliding glass door into our room. "You're not going to do anything, are you?"

  I can't believe he can still think that.

  "I'll get your pad," he says again, and dashes inside, returning only a few seconds later, stumbling clumsily, nearly stubbing all ten of his toes on the heavy iron patio chairs, obviously terrified I'd thrown myself to the ground below. When I shake my head sardonically at him, the dam he's constructed over the past several weeks begins to crumble. "I'm sorry, Jamie... I almost lost you... twice!" He sits and pulls me into his lap, and we hold each other. Instead of writing, I force the words through my mouth: "I... love... you... Tammy."

  Unable to speak another word, I scribble, I'm crying because I'm so happy! I don't want to die!

  Tammy cries on. "My worst fear is losing you," he sobs.

  You didn't lose me, I write. I'm here.

  "I'm never lonely when you're close to me. I couldn't take it if I lost you..."

  I'm the one who was attacked and left for dead, but Tammy was nearly killed too. I know that. As physically big and strong as he is compared to me, sometimes he seems the more fragile of the two of us.

  "I'm here," I whisper, nuzzling my nose to his.

  "Yes," he whispers back. "You're here."

  I lost another kind of virginity tonight, I write.

  "Me too," he sniffles. "Thank you, Jamie. Thank you for letting me in."

  You know I love you. And I trust you, I add.

  "You do, don't you?"

  Yes. I lay my head on his shoulder and gaze over it as he gazes over mine. We each stare out into the sparkling skyline of Vancouver stretching up into the inky, starry firmament. We hear the whispers of early morning traffic. I feel a gentle, cold wind lifting and ruffling my damp hair. The gold band on my finger flashes in the dark.

  forty-five:

  tammy

  (life goes on...)

  ...but I'm with Jamie. The trial, which is coming up in June, is in the way of us really living. We return home after our wedding, try to settle into domestic life. I go back to work at the UC Davis station with my show, my hours now from six to ten pm so I can be home at night with my husband, but I feel a restlessness. I want to do something more with my life. The job's been fun, but it seems I'm about more than just fun nowadays. I want to concentrate more on writing about animal cruelty, and focus a lot more energy than ever on the fight against it. I've read a lot of articles in the PETA magazines about the mistreatment of everything from snakes to ducks and geese, and I feel like I'm sitting and doing nothing about it.

  Eventually, Jamie returns to Saint Paul's Hospital. His peers and superiors accept that sometimes he cannot speak (I feel like my throat is stuck, it's so weak, he's tried to explain to me.) and has to rely on a notepad or gestures to communicate with the staff and patients. But he, too, has felt a big sea change. I want to work with AIDS patients, he tells me. I'm going to go into hospice nursing. I want to do something real—really help people. I don't feel like I really help people when all they did was break their leg skiing. He mentions a cat sanctuary on the coast again.

  Deep in the wee hours one night, I begin to cry while feverishly typing out an article about an animal "hoarder" who was recently busted in Michigan. She had upwards of two-hundred cats and dogs living in squalor in her barn, attic and basement. They were crammed into cages, sometimes two animals in one cage with barely enough room to turn around. The cages were encrusted with filth and waste, and there were corpses in many of them. Several cats and dogs were covered in skin infections. Some were half-starved. Some were so far gone they had to be humanely put down.

  Crying's not an unusual thing for me. I cry all the time when I hear
bad things on the radio, or see them on the news. It's not just animals I care about. I cry over the poor little kids from Somalia who are being driven from their homeland by drought and al-Qaeda terrorists. I cry over the atrocities committed by the drug cartels. I cry over a lot of things that I never used to think twice about.

  My heart is tenderised.

  I still won't watch crush videos, but the other day, I was on a website, a good and sincere website trying to bring awareness to the world about this evil, and I saw a couple of still captures from a crush video—just still captures, not moving video, but they were horrible—a man torturing and murdering a puppy, oh God...

  Why are these kinds of people allowed to live among the rest of us? Why are they allowed to live anywhere?! They should be taken far away from any living creature, put on an uninhabited desert island (get all of the animals safely away first!) and left to their own devices!

  I usually weep quietly and then wipe my tears and press on, but tonight, it's just so overwhelming, all of it. It's like the weight of everything that's happened to us, the weight of evil in this world, is finally caving in on me, for real. I break down, sobbing all over Jamie, and he scribbles, You've been so strong for me, but you have to take some time off. You've been doing so much, he insists. I'm sitting up at night on the computer, researching, still writing articles for the Glendale shelter and Purrfect Peace, and now contributing my time to an animal rights group in Vacaville.

  I'm overtired, Jamie says. I cry so easily and feel everything so intensely.

  "Excuse me for caring," I snap at him quietly.

  I know you care, he gently writes. But you're going to make yourself sick and burnt out and useless if you don't take a break.

  "I know that," I mutter irritably.

  All you can do is pray, Tammy, Jamie writes. You can't be there for every single cruelty case. The world is too big and too evil. All you can do is pray about it.

  I sit and tearfully glower at my screen, trying to ignore him.

  Let's go to Fort Bragg.

  "Now?!" I exclaim.

  Yeah, why not? We can be there by dawn. We can dig our toes in the sand, watch the sun come up.

  I shrug carelessly, but the thought of the ocean is beginning to lift my ass out of that chair already.

  You need pampering, he writes. In two days, you'll be refreshed and ready to take this on again.

  God, I love him. It's like a second honeymoon. We sit on the beach, take deep breaths, let the cold, salt spray hit our faces, bury our toes in the sand, close our eyes, open our hands, and just let our bodies relax. After a while, we abandon our meditations and play in the surf. I pick him up and carry him out to where the breakers are curling into white foam and I toss him in. He leaps up at me and silently screams, "It's cold!" He tries to grab me and pick me up, but I'm too heavy, so he grabs my legs and shoves at me until I lose my balance and tumble in.

  When we return to our motel, we take a warm shower and watch the sand swirl down the drain. Jamie obviously means to pamper me. He gently and firmly massages my feet, my back and my neck and shoulders, and his warm hands melt the tension away. He holds me close to him, softly kissing my face, whispering to me, making me relax. My eyes drift closed, and I dream sweet dreams. The motel room has blackout curtains, and we spend most of the day just sleeping, with the TV playing on low volume.

  We wake up in the middle of the night and make love. I beg him to top me. I want to feel him inside of me. I want to feel what he feels. I want him to feel what I feel. He shakes his head.

  "Please, Baby."

  He writes, I can use my fingers. And I accept.

  He's very shy, because he has to look, really look at my body in order to use his fingers.

  I remember watching Uncle Price molesting Natalie, an infant. I remember violating my dog Cotton. How wrong it was. I still feel so ashamed, so shitty, about all of it. Jamie says he'd rather die than ever become a child molester. I feel the same way. How could I have done that?

  Children do weird things, Jamie said once.

  I could never do it again. I will never, ever hurt or molest a child. Nor will I ever hurt or molest another animal. And I know it.

  People do change. Children do grow and learn right from wrong. I have a conscience.

  Jamie's movements are gentle, tentative... Is he thinking this is wrong? Is he worried that he's molesting me? Is he still having those fears about becoming 'Daddy'?

  And I do everything I can to remind him that we are not our fathers; we are not our uncles. We are Tam Mattheis and James Pearce. We are two adult men. We are a loving, married, committed, consenting couple.

  I do everything in my power to let Jamie know that I love him... that I trust him. I whisper and writhe my encouragement as his fingers speak to me.

  This is intimacy.

  We grow closer with every new experience.

  I want him inside of me.

  But he's not ready right now, he says.

  It's okay.

  It's going to take a while. It took him so long to let me do what I did on our wedding night. And I can wait for him, as long as it takes. I know one day, he'll make this latest wish of mine come true.

  We talk and talk, and a new life, even beyond the completion of being married, calls to us. For weeks, we both sort of push the little voices into the backs of our minds.

  But what are we waiting for?

  Mom is always here, cooking, cleaning, fussing over both of us, and Jamie knowingly says, or rather writes, She's lonely. Let's have her move in with us.

  "I don't think she'd want to give up that house... it's hers, free and clear."

  But you're not there anymore, writes Jamie.

  "I wasn't there for sixteen years and she did okay, didn't she?"

  She's getting older. She's lonely, I can tell. She needs us. Besides, you said yourself you get along better with her than when you were a kid. She loves you, Tammy.

  Unexpected tears gather in my eyes. I didn't realise how much I missed her when we were so estranged, how cut off I felt when she put that wall between us after what happened with Cotton.

  Jamie's right. It's not easy to let go of your guilt. It's not easy to ignore the Devil when he taunts and torments you about things you can't change. You have to rebuke him every time he comes around to bully on you.

  We've both been seeing Doctor Halliday once a week for therapy as a couple, and twice a week individually.

  She's nice. It helps. We learn...

  She suggests that an antidepressant might help me to better cope with the things I encounter in this difficult calling I've followed. I listen as she explains that it can help me focus without feeling so helpless and angry and tortured. "It won't make you stop caring," she stresses.

  It's with some trepidation at first, because I worry about "needing" antidepressants, and I worry about the stigma, the ignorami who think they're for "crazy" people. But after six weeks or so, I can see that they're working, and I know neither Jamie nor I have any reason to be ashamed of them.

  I've helped Jamie with his demons, and he's helped me with mine. I know I've said a million times that I wasn't sure there was a God up there looking after everything, but I'm changed. No, I'm not into radio preachers or people telling me my marriage is a sin, but I do believe in God. I've been raised to believe in Jesus Christ, and I still do in a lot of ways, but I admit, I'm not sure exactly what I believe in. I'm still learning. I only know that there is a God. I asked Him/Her to save Jamie's life, and Jamie was given back to me. I don't rely on manmade books to help me figure it out. To me, God is a Great Spirit, something beyond my knowledge, but always there for me, always with an answer, even if it's not the answer I want or expect.

  I'm still in the process of forgiving myself for all the wrong things I've done. God forgives. Once I asked Him/Her to forgive me, He/She did.

  Forgiving myself: that's harder.

  In April, Jamie turns thirty-two, and we celebrate by going to
The End.

  He still can't bring himself to try and sing. I can't! he writes on his pad.

  "Just try. Maybe your voice is just hiding. Maybe it'll come back!"

  No! I can't sing!

  "Maybe it will come back once you're up there!" My frenetic optimism kills him.

  It won't just come back! It doesn't work that way!

  So I get up and sing with Stacy, "Our Day Will Come" by Ruby and the Romantics, a sweet, antiquated tune that saves us from a night of sullen silence.

  At the trial in June, Jamie's three attackers sit stone-faced and unrepentant as the damning evidence is presented one piece at a time: the blood-encrusted towel bar, the cotton rag with Jamie's blood and saliva on it, copies of the fingerprints belonging to the three defendants that were found inside and outside of Jamie's car, a shredded black garbage bag with both Cantrell's and Ray's fingerprints on it, and the testimonies of Officers Howard, Lord, and of course Bloom, along with Mrs. Cooke's invaluable information about what she saw and heard in her doughnut shop early that morning.

  In spite of our air-tight case against them, the defence tries to call my dad, Pastor Asshole, up to the stand, hoping to get him to speak about my violent past and the Cotton matter and smear me with the jury. They also try to mention the journals when Officers Lord and Howard are up there. Each time the defence brings up something completely irrelevant to steer suspicion away from their clients, the DA hollers, "Objection!" The judge ends up reprimanding the defence attorneys very severely.

  Anyway, when Jamie gets up on the witness stand, which he has been dreading for months, he uses a computer keyboard and overhead projector because of his inability to speak. When he does open his mouth, the jury cringes at his screechy, tattered voice. I've never heard his voice sound so exhausted. They see the scar on his forehead and he lifts his shirt to show the dark pink scar sprawling from the left of his chest all the way into his middle back, where they had to repair the kidney Ray ruptured with the towel rack. The jurors get angrier and angrier as they read what Jamie's attackers said and did to him. His memories of that awful night are crystal clear, and I both appreciate and hate that as I watch him cry silently.