“He what? What the fuck that nigga did?” I roared.
“He tried to force himself on me. He was able to pull up my dress, and he was almost successful, but you know with what happened to me when I was younger, I refused to let it happen to me a second time. I fought him off me. That’s what happened,” she voiced, and I was angry at her words.
Angry that she would keep this shit away from me. Granted, the weekend after Dionne came back from Milan, her and I weren’t together yet, but she should have still told me. She left that part out when she was telling me about her past dealings with him.
I backed away from her, putting my hands in my pockets, not sure what the fuck I wanted to say or do. I wasn’t sure what Icoulddo.
“I don’t expect you to understand why I kept it a secret. I don’t like talking about shit like that, but you forced me to, and —”
“I don’t trust you, bruh,” I just went ahead, and I put it out there for her.
When I said that to her, her eyes bucked, and you could tell that she was pissed with what I just put on the table for her to hear.
“You don’t trust me? So what? You think I’m lying? Why the fuck would I lie about that?” she screamed, wanting to know.
“I know you not lying. That’s the thing. You sit on heavy information like this, and you only choose to speak on that shit when the conversation goes left. How the fuck me and yousupposed to ever get somewhere if you continue to withhold information from me, yo? I know for a fact that if I never showed you that photobook, and you saw my dad, that you would have never told me that he touched you as a kid. You won’t even tell that shit to your mama, and your sisters. Here we are again, in this same fuckin scenario a couple of months later, and now I gotta find out from you that your ex-nigga almost sexually abused you. I love you Dionne, but I hate that part of you where you let people do certain shit to you and allow them to fuckin get away with it. Not only do I hate that, but the keeping secrets is another thing that I can’t fuck with. I don’t like that shit, man!” I spat, keeping it real with her.
She nodded her head at what I said to her, reached over for the dial on the stove, and she turned the stove off.
“Well, that’s my cue to go home now. Since you hate me, can’t trust me, and I’m getting punished for not wanting to share humiliating life events that I had to endure over the years,” she said, and I sucked my teeth, while shaking my head.
“There you go about to put words in my mouth again and believe the dumb ass shit that you want to believe. When the fuck did I tell you I hated you? Where the fuck is the punishment taking place that your speaking of?” I wanted to know.
“The punishment is right here, Tavion! Your mad at me and punishing me for something that I didn’t tell you! I don’t like talking about shit like that, okay! What pleasure will I get out of going into intimate details with you, telling you how your father came into my bedroom when I was only eleven years old, and fuckin raped me? What pleasure do I get out of telling you that the next morning after it happened, we all sat at the dining room table together, having breakfast, while he sat across from me, smiling at me, chastising me because of what he did to me? You want me to trauma dump on you? Okay, lets trauma dump then,” her voice cracked, and the tears that had welled up in hereyes, they eventually started to pour down her face as she walked closer to me.
“I’ll start with the fact that I have daddy issues. I told you this before, but I never fully went into detail with you. The only relationship that I have with my father is the one that happens at the prison, or over the prison lines, where our conversations are being recorded. I used to be envious of little girls back then that had a father show up to the school for things like award ceremonies, chaperoning at our field trips, or even the father / daughter dances. I’ll give you one even better and tell you something that I’ve never uttered to anyone else. Back when I was a teenager, I thought about suicide more than I thought about boys. I was hanging onto that secret of what happened to me, and it was mentally killing me. You just don’t know how many times I thought about killing myself when I was a kid. Is that the kind of sad, traumatic, and depressing shit that you want to hear from me, Tank? I know it isn’t, and that’s why I don’t tell you because if I do, I know that you’ll probably leave me and feel like I come with too much trauma and pain, so I make your load less by not revealing this shit to you. You already told me that you don’t trust me, and you can’t take that back, so I’m going to leave,” she finished, and then she turned on her heels, so that she could walk out of the kitchen.
I told her that I didn’t trust her out of anger. I probably should have said something else because I could tell that I’d hurt her feelings with that. As much as I wanted to be an asshole, and stay down here, allow her to pack her shit up, and leave, I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t because that’s not what I wanted. I didn’t want her to leave.
Shaking my head, I walked out of the kitchen, and I went over to the stairs, jogging two at a time up the stairs, and I made it onto the second level of the house. I went into my bedroom, where Dionne had her Louis Vuitton duffle bag, and suitcaseon the floor, and the drawer here that belonged to her, she was pulling shit out of it and throwing it into the bags. She was doing it angry, and crying.
When I walked inside the bedroom, she wouldn’t even look at me.
“Stop. Come here, and let me talk to you,” my voice was much calmer than what it had been when we were downstairs together.
She pretended that she didn’t hear me, as she continued moving around the room. The handle on the suitcase that was on the floor, she left it extended, so when she tried to walk past it, and go into the bathroom to grab her items out of there, she ended up tripping over the handle, where she fell on her ass, and that fall made her ass start crashing out.
I walked over to her, leaned down so that I could grab her arm, but she pushed me out the way, not wanting me to touch her.
“Move, don’t fuckin touch me!” she screamed. I didn’t mean to laugh, but I did it anyway.
“How you going to get mad at me because you fell and bust your ass? Dionne, what the fuck is wrong with you?” I asked her.
“You said you don’t trust me!” she screamed, as if she had no understanding as to why I was questioning her crash out right now.
“I shouldn’t have said that. I was only trying to say that I don’t like it when you keep heavy shit from me like that. When you keep that kind of stuff from me, it makes me feel like I really don’t know who I’m lying next to every night, and whatever other heavy secrets you might be keeping from me. I told you before that your pride don’t have to be high with me. I’m not in the business of judging you for anything that happened in your past, especially when it comes to shit that was beyond your control, with niggas taking advantage of you. When you hide that kind of stuff from me, it makes me look at you like yourcontinuing to give niggas a pass, and letting them get away with violating you,” I was calm with my words because I knew that that would be the only way she would calm down.
It worked too because after a few minutes, she got herself together and stopped with the crash out. She pulled her legs up, so that she could sit Indian style, and she picked her hands up, and wiped the remaining tears that were left over on her face. She dropped her head, looking at the tiled floor, and she chose not to say anything else.
I used this moment to sit down as well, but instead of going on the side of her, I sat right in front of her, opening my legs, and placing one on each side of her, keeping her in the middle. I wanted her closer, so I reached in, so that I could drag her my way, and for a few moments, I didn’t bother saying anything, and neither did she. She eventually picked her head up, and she looked at me with sad eyes.
“I didn’t realize how broken I was until recently. For so many years, I’ve done so well at suppressing my feelings. All this crying, screaming, and crashing out that you’ve witnessed me do, I swear this isn’t even like me. I don’t cry often, but this relationship has tested me, forced me to speak about things that I’ve tried to bury. I don’t feel like my pride is high with you. I know you won’t judge me based on my past, but Tank, I’ve trained myself for so many years not to cry out loud for help, that it’s really the only thing that I know how to do. When you’re a rape victim, it’s not an easy thing to talk about. There will be people out there that don’t believe me. Someone will think that somehow me being a rape victim is my fault. I also never wanted to say anything about what Garrus did because then it would have people talking about what went down between me, his wife, and him. I didn’t want that pressure back on me. People still hate me for that, and trust me, if I had chosen to go to the cops about what he did, there would have been thousands of peoplethat didn’t have the least bit of sympathy for me. Trust me, this isn’t something where I’m protecting my predators. It’s more so me just protecting myself,” she finished, and I heard her, and understood everything that she was saying to me.
I kept quiet for a little bit, just trying to see how I should respond. Dionne was in a very sensitive spot right now, with her feelings still running high from what just happened, so I wanted to be careful with my words. At the same time, I wanted to be a little firm with her ass, so that I was still able to get my point across.
“Relationships aren’t easy, Dionne. If we going to do this shit for real, it’s going to be times where we’re forced to have some uncomfortable conversations. I remember one of the first heavy conversations that we ever had was about my dad. I hate that nigga, and I don’t like talking about him because he’s one of those people in my life where just the sound of his name will have me ready to spaz. Even with that, I went deep with you, telling you shit about my childhood. I don’t want you to feel like me and you gotta have trauma dumping sessions. That’s not what I’m trying to get through to you. I just want to be the person in your life that you run to when some bad shit happens to you. You see how I walked in the house, and the first thing you told me was how you saw that nigga in the parking lot? You told me how that made you feel sad. I want you to come to me when shit makes you feel sad, mad, or depressed. I don’t look at that shit as a burden or too heavy for me to accept from you. You gotta get out of your head with that,” I took a pause because she was crying as I was talking to her, so I stopped for a second, just so that I could wipe her tears.
“And you still punishing yourself for the shit that you were doing with Garrus while he was married. The fact that I had to tug that shit out of you, lets me know that your still making yourself pay for it. There’s this part of you that’s convincingyourself that you deserved what he almost did because you were dealing with a married man, and that’s not true. No woman deserves for her body to be violated by anyone. Certain shit just going to have repercussions. A nigga bring tears to my lady, disrespects her, violates her, any of that shit, he going to have to feel a little pain, and deal with me. You feel me?” I asked her, and she nodded.
