Chapter Fifty
AJ
Looking back, I always found a lot of blame to place on my shoulders. Times I should have seen the red flags. Times I should have accepted bad behavior for what it was instead of making excuses for it.
The thing was, it wasn’t my fault.
I’d been really sheltered growing up.
I’d been born and raised in a small town in Iowa. Population: eight hundred. It was the kind of place you saw in old movies. With a one-road town flanked by mom-and-pop stores that shuttered at sundown. And all along the outskirts of town were the farms that kept the area alive.
Because of the small, tight-knit community, I’d been raised to believe that people were fundamentally good. That they were out to help, not harm.
I’d never been taught to look for red flags in people.
Maybe, had my early years been different, I would have seen the signs before it was too late.
As it was, though, my life revolved around my school with just a few kids in my grade, events in the town, and helping my parents care for my grandparents as they started to decline.
If we’d stayed in that town, maybe I would have ended up with Jimmy or Calvin, the boys from school I’d always had a crush on, who maybe would have grown to like me too.
The thing was, my father suddenly had a heart attack while working in the fields on a local farm one day.
He’d died before the ambulance could even arrive.
It became clear directly afterward that my mother had not been privy to our family’s personal finances. Which meant that, while we were grieving and trying to plan a memorial, we learned that the house was in foreclosure.
And we had thirty days to get out.
We’d been lucky enough that the town had gotten together to pay for my father’s burial.
But with nowhere in town to work, let alone stay, we’d needed to sell just about everything we owned, pack the car, and head into a bigger city, where my mother could find work.
I’d been fifteen at the time, naive as the day was long, suddenly transplanted in a place where I didn’t know anyone, where it seemed nobody wanted to know me.
Whereas I’d been reasonably pretty in my very small town, I was all but invisible in this new area.
And because I’d known everyone in town since I was a little girl, I’d never struggled to find ways to engage others.
In the city, though, I found that because I couldn’t find ways to approach and engage others, no one bothered to do so with me.
Slowly but surely, I became more and more introverted and lonely, so sure of my own inadequacy that the second someone finally seemed to actually see me, I’d been desperate for that attention.
At the time, I’d been a few weeks shy of my seventeenth birthday and working as a barista around the corner from our shoebox apartment because my mother was struggling just to keep the lights on and a roof over our heads with her three jobs, and I wanted to save up to buy myself a car.
It was the beginning of summer, and I was hyper-aware of the fact that I’d put on a solid twenty pounds of stress weight, which was stretching my work uniform to the max, and further reinforcing my belief in my lack of worth.
In other words, I was prime for the picking by a man with bad intentions and a silver tongue.
Then on a random day, there he was.
Waltzing into the coffee place, a plain kind of handsome.
Nothing about him really stood out to me, someone accustomed to seeing the entire beauty spectrum day in and day out.
He’d been average height, if maybe a bit on the shorter side for a man, with brown hair that flopped over his forehead, and brown eyes.
He’d been dressed in a button-up that was a little too loose, and a pair of slacks that were too long.
He’d ordered his drip coffee with milk. And I’d been ready to completely forget all about him like I would with any random non-regular.
Until he leaned over the counter as he waited for me to make his drink, and shot me a smile while telling me how pretty he thought I was.
As insecure as I was, as unaccustomed to compliments as I’d been, I’d eaten that up with a spoon, blushing, giggling, thanking him.
When I passed his coffee across the counter, his hand accidentally-on-purpose closed over mine on the cup as he asked me which days I would be working.
“Then I guess I know where I’ll be on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday afternoons,” he’d said.
I’d brushed it off.
Plenty of men flirted with my coworkers.
But that Saturday, there he was again.
With more compliments and smiles, asking me about myself.
“Including, I might add,” I told Atlas. “My age.”
Atlas exhaled hard at that. “Let me guess, he wasn’t a teenager.”
At the time, I honestly wasn’t good at telling the ages of people who were older than me. It seemed like everyone in their twenties and thirties looked the same to me.
Though, yes, I knew he wasn’t in high school, that was for sure.
Maybe I should have also known that he wasn’t even in college.
But I’d been basking in the glow of his attention, eating up his compliments.
I found myself spending hours getting myself ready on the days I knew Joss would show up. When I got to work, I got all my side work done as soon as possible, so when Joss came in, I could spend as much time talking to him as I pleased.
Then, three weeks into his visits, it finally happened. He asked me for my number. And once he had it, he asked me out on a date.
Looking back, I wondered why my mom hadn’t asked me more questions when she’d seen me getting myself ready for the date, slipping on the casual dress I’d picked for the milestone.
But, of course, my mom was living in survival mode. And she likely just assumed that my date was of an appropriate age.
“How long did it take for you to learn how old he really was?” Atlas asked.
“The second month of dating,” I told him.
After that first date, my first date ever, where he’d taken me to dinner and a movie, two things I hadn’t been able to experience since I was little, and he’d kissed me—my first kiss—, he continued to come into the coffee shop on my shifts, but he also wanted to see me outside of work.
We were seeing each other every single day at that point. On the nights when I wasn’t working, I was out with Joss.
And two months in, he took me to his apartment. Where he showed me his old STEM trophies he’d earned in high school.
They’d been dated, of course.
And I’d been left to do the math.
Which told me that Joss was thirty-two.
“Jesus Christ,” Atlas said, shaking his head.
It didn’t occur to me at the time that he was nearly twice as old as I was, that he’d lived twice as much life as I had.
All I could think was that, here was this guy. He was mature and accomplished. A full-on adult. And he wanted little old me.
I’m sure it didn’t help that he’d spent months at that point telling me how mature I was for my age, how no one understood him like I did.
“Yeah,” Atlas interjected, “because women his own age saw him for what a loser he was.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, trying not to let that sting. Because I’d come to that conclusion many times myself. It was just the first time I heard someone else say it. Because this was the first time I ever told anyone about Joss.
And we hadn’t even covered the half of it yet.
That night was the first time Joss took me to his bed, stripping me without much seduction, climbing on top of me, and taking my virginity.
It was a nightly pattern after that.
And while the pain subsided, there was never any of the pleasure I saw in TV shows and movies.
Once, back before he’d gotten too much of a chance to beat down my spirit—aside from telling me I was ‘too fat’ and that while it wasn’t as noticeable when I was dressed, it was ‘not attractive’ when I was naked, which led to months of me starving myself to lose the weight—I’d asked him about our sex life, about orgasms for me.
His face had gone tight.
Then he’d told me that he ‘didn’t have all day’ to get me to come, and I could just figure that out on my own, if I wanted.
If I wanted.
As if sex wasn’t supposed to be something mutually enjoyed.
It was maybe the first time I learned that all that Joss cared about was, well, himself.
The thing was, I was young and naive. He was my first boyfriend. And I was, I thought, in love.
Over the next year, things continued on for us. Sneaking around because, I realize now as an adult, he knew what he was doing was wrong, and that if my mother found out how old he was, he could be in trouble.
The second I turned eighteen, though, I was moved out of my mother’s house, and into his.
That, of course, was when it really started to get bad.
The isolation was first.
My mother and I weren’t all that close at the time. She had also found herself a man, one who—once she was free of me—let her move in, which allowed her to work less.
But little by little, Joss ‘forgot’ to tell me that my mom had called or stopped by. Until we weren’t really even speaking anymore.
And then he came for my job.
“I make more than enough for the two of us. I’d rather have you here, taking care of the house. It’s a mess since you moved in.”
I’d quit my job, no questions asked.
And dedicated myself to keeping up the apartment. But no matter how much I swept, dusted, mopped, and straightened, he always found something out of place to mention.
“How did you not see this, Amy Jane?” he’d snap, tone sharp and disappointed, chipping away at that confidence he’d slowly but surely helped to build inside of me.
Food came next.
“Would it kill you to have a hot meal on the table for me when I get done with work?” he’d snapped. Although he’d never mentioned it before.
I found recipes and dedicated myself to having dinner ready for him every single night.
But the lasagne was never like his mom made. And the pasta noodles were too chewy and the meat was overcooked and For the love of God, how hard is it to make something halfway edible?
So I tried and tried and tried.
And failed to meet his expectations every single time.