Decadence (12 page)

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 apply for a teaching position at one of the local schools
there. 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 had died when I was only 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-two. 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 husband,
going through that trying time, made me take a hard look at my own
life, and then at me and 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 working on her did. He was living on coffee and
energy drinks; sleep was 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. 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.”

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 exes, 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 seven breaks over the past four years. Seven. And out
of those seven 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 I could get, 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, 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 a little girl on
girl action on a free porn site early 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 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. 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, us girls weren’t that different
from the male species after all.

“I didn’t know you were into girls.”

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 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.