Seth stalked over to me, grabbed the remote out of my hand, and tossed it on the couch.
“So, this is how it’s going to be, Hiroku?” Seth asked, sulking above me with a look of reproach. “Aren’t you even a little bit ashamed of yourself?”
I glared up at him with a hostile, acrid feeling brewing in my gut. The mood swings I experienced while using were far more pronounced. Drug addiction did not bring out the best in me. “What would I have to be ashamed of, Seth?”
“Holding out for the pills? Doesn’t that make you feel a little bit slutty?”
I stood and met him at eye-level, so he could feel the anger rolling off of me in waves. “I’m the slutty one, huh? What about you? You’re the one who made this deal with me?”
“I didn’t tell you sex for drugs, Hiroku. I said I’d take care of you.”
Seth loved to turn the argument in his favor. It was one of his many talents, right up there with making me feel like a piece of meat. “Well, I’m not feeling very taken care of right now.” My rage was building like a tsunami. Perhaps it would be motivation enough to keep me away and prove to myself that I didn’t need Seth or the drugs to function.
Seth sensed the shift in my attitude. It was like he could smell my fight-or-flight pheromones concentrating in the air. He softened his tone and reached out to clasp my shoulders in an attempt to mollify me. “I just don’t want the only reason you come around here to be because I can get you high. I want you towantto be with me.”
Then maybe you shouldn’t have coerced me into this situation in the first place,my reptilian brain wanted to say, but I held my tongue because in his eyes I saw Seth’s vulnerability. All Seth ever wanted was for me to love him unconditionally as his mother should have. And in a way, I did. But my love for him wasn’t pure and innocent as it once was. It was guarded, suspicious, and at times like these, so bitter it tasted more like poison in my mouth.
Seth truly believed we could go back to the Before, and it seemed nothing I said or did would dampen his resolve to make that happen. He hadn’t mourned the death of our relationship in the way that I had. He’d never acknowledged that the love we’d had for each other was gone, and this bastardized version of reciprocal need and quest for pleasure was what we were left with. In all the time we’d been apart, he’d never stopped loving me.
Seth thought he could be forgiven, but he didn’t understand that I never would.
At the time, I didn’t think about all of this so clearly, but I knew instinctively that his blindness was something I could struggle against, or it was something I could exploit to my advantage. And if my end game was to have him continue to get me high, the choice was rather simple.
So, instead of lashing out and blaming him for creating this ravenous, insatiable monster before him, I turned on the charm.
“You’re right,” I cooed and trailed my fingers softly along the inside of his arm. “You’ve been so good to me, and here I am acting like a spoiled little brat.”
I brought his hand up to my mouth and kissed his knuckles one at a time. Seth stared at me dumbfounded, like he couldn’t believe his argument had worked.
“It’s scary sometimes,” I confessed to him, leaning in to whisper in his ear. “How much I need it. Makes it so that it’s all I can think about.” I dipped my head and looked up at him from under my lashes. “Maybe you shouldn’t give it to me anymore.”
I took his two fingers into my mouth and sucked on them, sliding my tongue along the underside of their length. Seth watched me in a lusting stupor. He was already thinking about ten minutes from now when I was naked and in his clutches. Being dependent on the drugs meant I was dependent on him to give them to me. If I was sober, I might go back to my wily ways of having a life outside of him. He might have competition for my affections. I might even leave him, and that was the fear that motivated him the most. I’d made a study of Seth’s psychology for more than a year. I knew what made him tick.
Seth withdrew his fingers from my mouth slowly, pulling on my lower lip a little on his way out. “I’m sorry I made you wait.” He traced the contour of my neck, then tugged a little at the collar of my shirt. His desire was so transparent. “That was a dick move. I just feel like sometimes when we’re together, your mind is somewhere else.”
He was absolutely right. My body was his, but my mind and soul had been claimed by another master.
“I’m right here,” I assured him. I leaned in to kiss him, taking my sweet time and giving his mouth my full attention. I pulled off my shirt and dropped down to my knees to further convince him. That position was where he always liked me best, looking up at him with my wide innocent eyes, awaiting his next command…
Afterward Seth got me high, and I told him I loved him. I may have even meant it.
You tell me, who was the monster now?
NOW
There’s a phrase I keep thinking of here in rehab, or rather a lyric:
Fear is the heart of love.
It’s from a song by Death Cab for Cutie, and I keep going over it in my reflections. I dealt with a lot of fear in loving Seth. Fear that he would leave me for someone else. Fear that he was cheating on me or lying to me. Fear that I wasn’t artsy, sexy, or interesting enough to hold his attention.
And Seth feared abandonment or as he called it, being “shut out” by me. Perhaps he was also scared I might one day take a hard look at our relationship and say enough is enough.
Dr. Denovo and I have this ongoing discussion about love and its foundation. Doc tells me love is based on honesty, respect and compassion. He doesn’t come right out and say it, but he’d like for me to believe that my relationship with Seth was somehow less of a partnership because of the fear, mistrust and power struggles. That our love was just a series of artful manipulations.
But I’m not sure I agree. Even if our love was a poison slowly consuming us, that didn’t make it any less potent. Even if fear was the heart of our love, it didn’t make our feelings for each other any less real. And even when Seth sought to hurt me, it didn’t necessarily mean that he didn’t also love me. When a parent disciplines a child, isn’t that also a form of love?
Some might argue that fear is the most basic of human emotions, and without it, how could you possibly know love? How can you know happiness if you’ve never known sorrow? What is pleasure without pain?
