There were dates. And singing under my dorm window. Kisses under star-littered skies. We spent hours talking on the phone. He’d leave me iced coffees and doughnuts at the reception when I was studying for exams and forgot to eat. I wasn’t just in love. I was smitten to a point where I thought about a wedding, and babies, and a happily ever after.
“Freshman year was great. He was popular, athletic, wealthy—though that was neither here nor there for me—and he treated me like I was the rarest, most precious thing. I gave him my virginity. Then I gave him more parts of me, slowly. Parts he had no right asking for. By junior year, we’d moved in together. I didn’t mind living in dorms, but Connorhad an entire apartment rented out for him by his parents. He convinced me to move in, claiming I’d be saving money. That’s when the power shift began.”
I took a breath, chancing a glance at Grant. He was inhumanly still. I doubted he was even breathing.
“It was the little things he did to make me remember I was indebted to him. He asked me to do all the housework to pay off my part of the lease. At first, I thought it was a reasonable enough request. Until I became our housekeeper. He didn’t lift a finger. Like, he didn’t even load the dishwasher once the entire time we lived together.
“As time progressed, he found more and more ways to make me feel ...less. In every possible way. He wanted me to lose weight—only five or six pounds, he said—so I could be as skinny as his ex. He framed it so it was forme, not for him. He just didn’t want his parents and siblings to compare us and for me to fall short.”
“That scumbag ...” Grant ran a hand over his mouth and jaw, his nostrils flaring with barely contained rage.
We were still standing in the mouth of his kitchen, which I thought was a little awkward for this conversation. Then again, you didn’t get to choose when or where your monumental moments took place. Sometimes the biggest moment of your life happened right in someone’s hallway, between a shoe rack and an umbrella bin.
“So I lost the weight, but that didn’t help either. He seemed to slowly hate everything about me. The way I smelled—I had to switch from my favorite perfume to Chanel 5. Who I hung out with—he thought all my friends were shallow. My college performance—he always told me I was slacking. The first couple years he put me down privately, but that last year, he was public about it. He’d openly criticize me when in front of our friends, comparing me to other women and showingme where I fell short. And the worst part was, I tried so hard to appease him. He was so subtle about changing me, aboutloathingme. So careful to make it look like he was just watching out for me, pushing me to my limits, helping me grow. That I was a lazy, incompetent, ditzy woman with no aspirations or talents.”
“He abused you,” Grant said simply. “But my guess is he had seen this kind of abuse at home, perfected the technique, and was able to apply it on you. You didn’t have any experience with relationships, and he capitalized on that.”
I nodded. I’d thought about it a lot, and from the little I’d seen from Connor’s parents, it appeared that his father was just as awful to his mother as he was to me. She was always stick thin, quiet, and subdued.
“From a happy, bubbly young woman, I morphed into someone unhappy and insecure; I hated that I wasn’t skinny, and bright, and pretty enough. That I never had the natural instincts to get things right to make my own boyfriend like me. Our third year together, he cheated on me with one of my best friends from college. On mybirthday. I was sick, and he said they’d planned a surprise party for me, so he might as well show up for both of us and have a beer with our friends. Indeed, I was surprised when I managed to drag myself to her apartment and saw my boyfriend’s dick in her mouth. They were the only two people there. Everyone else had gotten the memo and hadn’t shown up.
“At this point I was so exhausted, I wasn’t even sad. I left him and moved out, but he came crawling back. He begged me to give him another chance. Told me he was a changed man. That he’d seen the light. That his mistake was going to reshape our entire relationship, because now I had power over him, too, since I was the one who’d walked out on him.”
“Jesus.” Grant shook his head. “Now I get why you were hung up about moving here. The rhetoric alone to frame relationships in terms of power and supremacy is crazy. He clearly didn’t understand the assignment.”
“Neither did I, apparently.” I offered him a sad smile as I pried my alcohol-free beer from his hand and clinked it with his bottle before taking a sip. “Because I took him back. I returned to our shared apartment. He was right, though. Things weren’t the same. They became much, much worse.”
“Did he ever lay a finger on you?”
I shook my head. “He didn’t get that far, thank God. But the moment he changed the locks to punish me for texting with my male TA about nonschool things, that’s when I broke things off for good. Alas, it was too late by then.”
“What do you mean?” Grant’s voice was thick with emotions.
“I was already pregnant.” I shrugged. “I was on birth control, but I was doing a terrible job being on top of it. I took my pill at irregular hours, and sometimes skipped a day. Looking back, I was depressed. Unfocused. I thought we were safe, because—wait for it—we used the pull-out method too.”
Grant’s face remained serious. “That doesn’t make you stupid. It makes you young and inexperienced. Women just happen to pay for their mistakes much more heftily than men in that department.”
I chuckled humorlessly. “Yeah, well, Connor pulling out had nothing to do with trying to stay safe. He just really liked finishing on my face or chest.”
He closed his eyes, screwing his fingertips into their sockets. His nostrils narrowed with a deep breath.
“I called him after I realized I was pregnant.” My throat began closing around the confession, my windpipe narrowing.
This was the part where I was going to break. I knew it. Because I was sure Grant could already guess the rest of the story. After all, I presently didn’t have any kids.
“I broke the news to him in person. I think the only reason he’d agreed to see me was because the asshole actually thought I wanted him back. When I told him I was pregnant, his entire behavior changed. He pressured me into having an abortion, which I didn’t want. Not because I had anything against it—I had actually contemplated it seriously—but at the end of the day, I didn’t see this as a punishment, but a blessing in disguise. I always knew I was going to work with children and loved babies.”
“I’m going to kill him,” he muttered quietly. In that moment in time, I was even a little worried he’d do something stupid. Connor’s meaningless existence wasn’t something worth throwing away Grant’s precious life for. “Sorry, please continue.”
“When he realized abortion was out of the question, he decided to bully me into reversing my decision. He sent his mother, his father, hisunclemy way. First, to try to reason with me. When that didn’t work, they tried to bargain with me. Pay me off to abort the baby. They treated me like I was a gold digger or something. Like this was premeditated.”
It hurt. More than hurting, it took a huge emotional toll on a twenty-year-old girl who was newly pregnant and crashed on her friends’ couch while trying to find an apartment close enough to college.
“I think, subconsciously or not, he knew if he put enough pressure on me, he’d be able to get rid of the baby. So he used every trick in the book. He purposefully started dating some of my so-called friends—the ones who weren’t loyal, anyway—parading them in front of me. He spread vicious rumors about me. The stress was too much.”
Tears blurred my vision. I hated that the bastard could make me cry, even after all these years. He did not deserve my tears.
“Finally, he managed to break me. It was Thanksgiving. I was at my parents’ house in Harrisburg—they lived in Pennsylvania back then. He showed up at my doorstep, and when my dad opened the door, he was drunk off his ass, accusing me of stealing his sperm, of going after his money.”
