Chapter 22
CHAPTER 22
C orinne. Sunday
How was it even possible? How could what should have been the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me have become such an absolute nightmare?
I had been “saving myself” for was a man special enough to allow him to do it, a man who made me feel special enough to let it happen with him. And, I honestly believed, or let myself believe, that Elijah Bennett was that man.
Elijah Bennett was more than I could ever have hoped for, or so I thought. Not only was he the single most beautiful man that I’d ever seen, he belonged to a world where everything was good and beautiful and the best that it could possibly be. With what he’d made of his life, Elijah had to be special enough to let it happen. He had to be wonderful enough to give him my first time. Being a billionaire, I’d thought, must mean Elijah’s whole life was bright and clean and shiny.
I felt like the stupidest person who ever lived. Money does not make a person’s whole life bright and clean and shiny. Money is just the rug under which someone sweeps the dark things, the dirty and ugly things.
But, he was so perfect. When he took his clothes off for sex with me, he was like every beautiful dream I’d ever had, turned into flesh and muscle and offering himself to me. I’d accepted the offer — eagerly, wholeheartedly, excitedly, joyously. I’d accepted his body. I’d accepted his cock and his balls and his ass. When we went down on each other, and when he fucked me — oh God, especially all the times he fucked me and came inside me, pouring out his cum into me — I was transformed.
After learning who Elijah really was, though, I was transformed again, this time into a mass of tears. Was I wrong to judge him for who he used to be and reject the idea that he’d changed? Was it really a mistake not to believe him, to turn away any and all trust in him? Perhaps I should have tried to find it in myself to trust him just a little more.
All I could think of, though, was how my image of him was completely shattered by that… creature from his past. I couldn’t even bring myself to think of Kane as a person. He was a creature, a thing that crawled out from under the rug of Elijah’s life and tried to get me, to attack me, to… I couldn’t even bear to think the word, but I knew what he wanted.
If Kane represented the kind of life that Elijah really came from, if his past really was full of creatures like that, tanked-up on Lord knows what illicit chemicals, wanting to put their paws all over a girl and do that, and expecting her to want it and like it… If Elijah Bennett came from a world full of people like that, I couldn’t see him having any place in my world.
Elijah had my virginity. I’d given it over to him freely and happily. And now, I had to live with the fact of who he was, even if he swore he wasn’t that person any more. I didn’t care. I’d handed over my virginity to an illusion before reality came pounding at his door.
And, that was what made me cry all night.
I took a shower Saturday night as if it would wash the whole experience from my life the way it washed the physical part of it from my body. I went to bed feeling clean only physically and cried myself to sleep.
I took another shower when I got up, as if to wash away the memory from my mind. Of course, it didn’t work. I got out of the shower feeling fresh and clean only in body. In my mind and my heart, I was all cried-out, but I was depressed. Sadness clung to me in a way that dirt could not. I needed reassurance and comfort, a reassurance and a comfort that I couldn’t get from washing up or from anything that Cincinnati had to offer me.
No, what I needed was at the end of a long drive to the northeast.
At first I thought it would make me feel better to listen to Daddy’s weekly sermon. But his face on the screen and his words on the speakers of my computer would not be enough. I didn’t need just my father’s face and voice. What I needed was him. After making myself eat some toast and sausage for breakfast, I packed a bag and headed out to my car, bound for Youngstown.
I was on the road all day. Traffic was light, but I still took my time getting home, pulling over when I needed to. Once I went into a rest stop, not because I was hungry or thirsty or needed the restroom, but because thoughts of everything that was growing farther and farther in the distance behind me were mounting up on me and I was overcome with needing to cry again. I sat behind the wheel and cried, then got out and went into the rest stop to splash some water on my face before getting further down the road.
But, at the end of that road lay the town where I’d kept my virginity, and in that town lay the street with the house where I grew up feeling safe and secure. And in that house was my father, surprised but happy to see me.
He was sitting in the living room in his favorite chair, watching an old Western movie on the TV, when I walked through the door, bag in hand. He was so wrapped up in whatever Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper was doing on the screen that he almost didn’t notice me at first.
The thought of Daddy watching Westerns gave me a familiar, warm feeling. Those old horse operas were his favorite movies, reflecting simpler ideas, a simpler time, and what people still remembered as a simpler way of life, whether it really was or not; a life where right and wrong were easy to point out and questions seemed easy to answer. It was probably never really that way, at all. But, it made a good myth.
What I needed was simple comfort, like what Daddy found in those movies — and what I found in his smile when he looked up and over from the chair and saw me standing in the hall.
Daddy’s hug felt so wonderful, so safe and filled with assurance, that it made me want to fold him up, stuff him in my bag, and take him back to Cincinnati with me.
“Sweetheart,” he said with my head on his shoulder and my arms wrapped tight around him, “you didn’t say anything about coming home today. I didn’t make anything for dinner; I was just going to pull some leftovers out of the fridge. You know what? We should call Leanna and the three of us should go out and eat together. How does that sound?”
When I pulled out of the hug and he saw the beginnings of new tears on my face, his fatherly enthusiasm turned to concern.
“Uh-oh,” he said, tapping me under the chin the way he did when I was little and something upset me. “What is it? What happened?”
My voice cracked at him a little bit. “I’m not ready to talk about it yet, Daddy.” I was hit with the full weight and import of what was upsetting me. My father had always loved and supported me unconditionally, but the thing that had brought me all the way back home now — how in the world could I possibly tell him that?
The words formed in my head and I couldn’t even begin to speak them.
Daddy, I had sex for the first time with my boss and he turned out to have this awful past full of awful people, and it scared me so much that I had to get away from him, and I don’t know what I’m going to do…
I realized I was in no way prepared to put those words out for my father to hear, at least not now when I’d barely gotten my foot back in the door.
So I only answered him with, “It’s been a long drive, Daddy. I’m not ready to talk about it…yet.”
With his usual understanding, my father said, “Fair enough. Whenever you’re ready to talk, I’m ready to listen.”
“I love you, Daddy.” I was ready as always to tell him that.
While I took my bag upstairs to my room — the room where I once used to lie in bed wondering what it would be like to let a boy do to me the secret things that I’d let my boss do, the things that I’d driven so far all day to get a distance away from — Daddy called Leanna to tell her of my surprise visit and have her come over. “We’re all going out to eat,” Daddy told her, and I heard him mention The Magic Tree, where we would all go for steaks when we still had Mom, and other old familiar feelings stirred up in me.
But, they were nothing like the feelings that someone else had given me, feelings as strong as the pain and confusion that came in their wake.
When Leanna came over, she would see, as Daddy did, that something was wrong with me, and she would be concerned just like he was. I would be just as unable to tell her what had so unexpectedly brought me home.