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I recognized that my thoughts were spiraling crazily and I took my dangerous self away. I went downstairs and watched a show about a female preacher who comes to town and she had a child out of wedlock from long ago, and recently attended a bachelorette party where a man popped out of a cake. One of the congregation discovers this and outs her, right there in church in front of everyone, and the good-bad preacher gets driven out of town. Then came the news, which was even more dire.
It took everything not to go up there and tell him how bad I felt and ask or demand that he want me. But it's not his job to fix me every time I'm broken. Or so I kept reminding myself. Yet I wanted to beg for his mercy — only his mercy would do, no one else's. How could he possibly win, with that much riding on him? Even if he did make it better, even if he said loving things and fucked me again and again, easy and tender instead of in his usual porn-star way, I would think he was doing it just because I demanded it. I may have thought I wanted to go to him for love, but deep down I knew that if I went to him, in the end I would find a way to make him pay.
I think I've never been in love before. I really can't say this, because I'm a lot less smart about romance than I am about most other things. But this is what causes me to think I
"You've never been like this before," he said. |
love this man the most, and maybe even have loved only him: I never wanted a man's mercy before. Had one of my girlfriends expressed that kind of need, I would have been incredulous. I would have thought she was stupid, though I would not have said it out loud.
But I wanted his mercy. I didn't know how to ask for it, so I didn't. And I hated him for not guessing, for not jerking awake and taking the steps three at a time to rush downstairs and save me. I hated him because my father left me when I was six and didn't come back when I begged him to, and I've never been able to ask anyone for anything since. I hated him because, when my stake-out was complete and it was finally late morning, he was still under the covers despite having slept for eleven hours. He was escaping me and my unspoken demands. It felt like he was leaving me, again and again. I felt so sad it just burned itself out, and I was nothing. If I was nothing, I had no history. My father never left me, and I had no bias against begging. So I did. I went to him and I begged him to love me.
"You've never been like this before," he said, "all girly. It's cute."
He opened his arms and I crawled in, and we were like two raw things rubbing against each other, two oozing skinned knees. It was his mother who left him when he was six, not his father. He's been punishing me, he's been scared, he hasn't known what he was doing. We were two children having sex in a horribly messy, dirty room, sad and angry and gleeful all at once, open eyes and greedy hands, very careful to not accidentally touch the little lump of dead space between us.
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©2006 Kevin Sampsell and Nerve.com
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