"I love you," you tell me, and it feels like a betrayal. I remember when we laughed at such things. I remember when you were vicious and untrustworthy and said those words to everyone and anyone you thought might fall for it. I remember how you fattened them up with "I love you" like pigs before the slaughter...and how you belonged to me, simply, in the evenings.
And how I belonged to you. Others had my body, my smiles and kind words, the privilege of claiming me as theirs in public. But you held in your hands the most precious thing I had, the knowledge of my secret corruption.
I remember it so well, the day I finally decided to let you in. I was dating some guy whose name began with a C—who was it? Chad, I think—and seeing someone older, Rafaello, the new AP Spanish teacher, on the side. You had told me you were staying in that night. Usually Rafaello and I met at his house, but that evening, I took him to mine. Took him into my room and left the door a little bit open, as if by accident. Let you watch me as I tied his hands to the bed. Let you see as I rode him for hours. Let you see us do line after line of coke together, let you hear me sweetly reminding him of the blackmail power I had over him.
Before that, you'd had your doubts, but you mostly acted like you bought my Mary Sunshine act. You'd tried to seduce me a few times, and, finding yourself politely and completely turned down each time, apparently put me on the back burner as you went off to pursue your other conquests. You grew as icily well-mannered towards me as I was towards you, but every once in a while, when you thought I wasn't looking, I'd see you giving me a long, hard, appraising look. And I wanted so badly to reveal myself to you, to take you in as my friend and ally—I'd been alone for so long—to take that risk. And so I did.
After that, we spoke about all kinds of things. The first thing you did, as soon as Rafaello had gone, was to come into my room and demand that I give to you what I had given to him. I refused, naturally. You ran your fingers over my collarbone, over my breasts, and saw my skin flush despite myself. You tried to blackmail me with what you'd just seen. I pointed out that you had a known record of trying to seduce me, and I was known as a perfect little angel to everybody, and who did you think they were likely to believe? You nodded, defeated, and pulled away.
And then you were on me, attacking me with biting kisses and searching hands, not the teasing touch of the seducer but the rough greedy grip of a desperate man. It was a side of you I wouldn't see again until years later, when you were already grown up and unhappily married to Annette. I responded in kind until you took your cock out, at which point I slipped away and showed you the door with a few sarcastic words. You were pissed about it, but you went and didn't whine, didn't try to beg me for sex. We both knew that the instant I fucked you, you'd gain ascendancy over me, according to the same bullshit societal rules that required me to hide from the world the activities that got you an enviable reputation as a playboy.
The next day, we had our first real conversation, the first of many. You told me of your latest conquests, in pornographic detail. I laid my head in your lap and told you of my affair with Rafaello and how it started, and of my plans to befriend and ruin a sickeningly sweet teacher's pet that had been my main annoyance at the time.
But you never let me in the way I did with you. I held nothing of my life back from you, but you always had that journal of yours, that black book full of thoughts you never let me see. I found out why only after your "high school sweetheart" had photocopied the thing and spread the copies all over school in order to destroy me. Record of your conquests, my ass. It started out that way, but over half the pages in there were about me. You'd recorded with stalker-like attention to detail the specifics of my cocaine habit, my sexual history, my subtle undercutting of any other girls who got in my way. It wasn't a collection of insults, no matter what Annette and the others thought—it was a shrine. I remember one entry in particular:
September 16th. Sirens hurting my eardrums, ambulance peels away rushing from our house to the hospital because Kathryn's overdosed. Her mother says this isn't the first time. When I visit her there I will only be allowed to come as her brother. Is she deliberately torturing me? Probably. It doesn't matter. There is no god. So I say this only to you (here, where you can't see it): Kathryn, please don't die.
By the time I read this, you'd already chosen somebody else. It was old news and no longer meant anything.
But somehow, your words still helped give me the courage I needed to get clean.
