25. PRESENT: Exorcism
Mr. Roper had nearly swallowed his dentures when he heard the news about Jack and Janet. He flew into a rage, started screaming that everyone had been playing him for a fool all those years and threatened to evict them all, starting with his own wife. But after the three of them, including Mrs. Roper, convinced him that it was only his guidance and his own stellar example as a paragon of masculinity that had helped Jack become a man, he was so touched that he even allowed them to stay on living as a couple until they found a smaller apartment elsewhere. Hopefully, someplace with a more tolerant landlord.
Janet remembered Jack's stunned reaction when he found out that she was a virgin. She hadn't been offended. He knew she was a modern, open-minded woman in her mid-twenties, so he naturally assumed she had to have a sex life. After all, they were living in the 1980s, not the Middle Ages.
She hadn't been saving herself for marriage. Who did that these days? Perhaps only church-going small-town girls like Chrissy. She hadn't even been consciously saving herself for Jack, since she had no idea whether anything would ever happen between them.
She had told Jack the truth: It had been her love for him that put a damper on her getting intimate with other men. She had just not told him the whole truth.
Not every man she had dated had been a jerk or a pervert. There had been a few good ones over the years, men worth hanging on to. And she had indeed been determined to go through with it a few times. And every time, even if she managed to push Jack out of her mind for the time being, at the precise moment when she should have opened herself up to her lover, the repulsive features of that monster from years back would be superimposed over the poor guy's face, and her heart and body would become a tightly clenched fist.
When she finally found herself in Jack's bed, her main fear was that it could happen again. What if she was so broken, so badly damaged by that childhood trauma that she couldn't even be with the one man she wanted, the love of her life?
It did not happen. The demon had been exorcised. She was free to give her love.
She had never told Jack about that incident. Some day she would. Just not right now. Not because she had anything to be ashamed of. It was simply that, even if they lived together for a hundred years, she knew they would never be quite as happy as they were now. And she did not want the heartbreak and terror of that long-bygone night to mar this happiness.