Chapter Twelve Layla #2
“Was I the only one who saw her flirting with you right now?” I blinked. Grant being a gaslighter was not in this year’s bingo card.
Fortunately, he shook his head and clarified, “I know she is flirting, just as well as I know that you don’t give a dang.”
“Of course I give a dang. You’re dating her. Or at least, this is where it’s going.”
His expression smoothed over, turning from confusion to arrogance. A smug smirk pulled at the corners of his mouth. “And if I am?”
I uncrossed my arms, balling my fists by my side. “Then I don’t want to be in the next room when you bang her. Is that really too much to ask?”
“We live on separate sides of the hallway.”
“Your apartment is not that big.”
“But something else is, and I see it’s been on your mind quite a bit recently.”
“You got me there.” I rolled my eyes. “Can you blame me, though? Your ego is too much to overlook.”
“Just admit it.”
“Admit what?”
“You’re jealous.”
“You’re delusional.”
“Maybe. But that’s beside the point. You’re still jealous.”
I was, and I hated it. There was no point in denying it, though. I wanted to do the mature thing and tackle this thing head on. The baby deserved so much more than two parents who played games with each other.
“Yeah, I guess I am.” I searched the floor, avoiding his gaze. “I like you.”
“You like me?” he repeated, stunned.
“Why does that surprise you?” I scowled. “I’ve been sleeping with you for years.”
“And refusing to take it to the next level the exact same length of time,” he reminded me.
“That has nothing to do with you. You’re perfect,” I admitted exasperatedly. “It’s all me and my screwed-up relationship with men. Connor broke me. Trying to have a healthy relationship with a man is like trying to put a bouquet of flowers inside a shattered vase.”
“You’re not a shattered vase.” His eyes hardened. “You’re a human, and one of my favorite ones at that. Now tell me what happened. I need to know just how hard I need to punch this guy next time I see him.”
God. I was going to open up to him, wasn’t I? There was no other choice. I needed him to understand me. Unfortunately, baring my soul made me feel a million times more vulnerable than baring my body to him.
“Remember when you joked in your car that he must’ve killed a baby to make me hate him so much?”
A zing of something formidable passed through Grant’s pupils. “Yes?”
“Well, he kind of did.”
Grant’s expression morphed to deadly and entirely frightening. For a second, he didn’t look like himself at all. “I’m going to need you to elaborate.”
I couldn’t believe I was going to tell him what I had only previously told Maddie. Though I’d never admit it, I always felt what I’d been through with Connor was proof I was a weakling. A starry-eyed, naive girl who deserved how he’d treated her.
“I met Connor the first week of my freshman year in college. It was in Oregon, across the country, light-years away from my friends and family. We immediately got together. He was my first boyfriend. My first everything, really. I’d always been extroverted and popular, but I waited for the perfect boy.
For a short while, that’s who he was for me. ”
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 Connor had 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 for me, 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 showing me where I fell short.
And the worst part was, I tried so hard to appease him.
He was so subtle about changing me, about loathing me.
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 my birthday. 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.