Chapter 5 A Controlled Life #2
Fresh out of undergrad, I married Greg Matherson, a music producer from Nashville who swept me off my feet and promised me everything. He was fifteen years my senior and worked alongside my parents for most of that time.
I grew up as the child of bluegrass legends, David and Ophelia Wilde.
Both musicians, both singer-songwriters, they traveled all over the United States with me in tow, eventually spotlighting me on their stage.
Me, a brave little girl with a mandolin and mighty voice, who sang alongside country music’s greatest. We were on Austin City Limits and we even played at The Grand Ole Opry.
I’ve been to holiday parties at Dolly Parton’s house, and watched Shania Twain’s television while she folded laundry next to me.
After I married and moved away, my parents continued to work and tour with artists like Billy Strings and Ed Sheeran.
At eighteen, I left my family on the road and attended college in California. Greg consistently checked in on me, inquiring about my studies and urging me to stay focused and avoid distractions from boys. Or girls, my closeted mind would add.
I obviously saw it much too late that he was grooming me.
To the untrained eye, he was always a safe, appropriate distance away.
But I always had butterflies for him, and he knew it.
He played into them and teased me for having a crush on him.
In my naivete, my infatuation with him never felt wrong, but inevitable.
Somehow, Greg’s charm and promises still swayed me, despite my rich childhood filled with music and tour buses.
He knew exactly the things I wanted at the time—to rest from travel and touch grass, literally in this case.
He saw my love of nature and encouraged a teenage Renée to find her passion in biology.
My parents, equally encouraging, supported this too.
We married the week after I graduated college. And sure, he kept his promise and moved us into a beautiful home right there in Nashville. He paid for both my master’s degree and my doctoral degree so that I could teach the very thing I loved.
But as time went on, he wove lies into my head about my parents.
He insisted they were manipulative and abusive for parading me around like some prize horse, profiting off my talent.
It didn’t matter that my parents set aside all the money I earned.
It didn’t matter that I once loved playing the mandolin and singing my heart out.
He convinced me the only way to get back at them was to cut them out of our lives.
Then, without telling me, and seemingly out of nowhere, he bought a house in West Chester, Pennsylvania. We didn’t know anyone, and I left my brand new job because he made this decision for us. When I questioned how he was going to do his job, he said his clientele would come to him.
But when I saw our new house, a fraction of the size of our last one, I knew something was wrong. There was no studio, no grand foyer. There was a single-lane driveway off a main road and a kitchen so small we had to hang pots from the ceiling.
There were nights of endless, unanswered questions, and demands as proof of love. “If you really loved me, you’d give me babies,” he would say. “If you really loved me, you’d support me through this career transition and work full time.”
Over time his demands became less and less loving. Disdain and anger reigned supreme and I didn’t know how to handle that. I had never grown up around such aggression and violent words.
The day he found out I had an IUD implanted in secret, things became exponentially worse.
“EARTH TO RENéE,” Amber exclaims, throwing me back into the present.
I shake my head. “Sorry.”
“You okay?”
“Just went down a rabbit hole.”
She watches me carefully, knowing where my mind wanders. I wish I could erase everything about Greg and restart. She wishes that too.
“Do you wanna talk about it?” she asks.
“No. What were you saying before?”
“Jonah, our new neighbor. You can’t seriously tell me you’re going to ignore him when he’s so clearly your type.”
“I don’t have a type.”
“Tell that to the all the submissives you’ve painstakingly selected and fucked over the last year and a half.”
I sigh, because she’s not wrong. Amber is a server at Maple Ridge Golf and two, meet up with one of my subs to roleplay a scene where I catch him cheating on his nonexistent wife. A little public fun—nothing that could get us arrested—followed by a night at the hotel down the road.
But when he bailed at the last minute, sending a flood of apologies, I set my sights on Jonah. And nothing, and no one, has ever been as satisfying as fucking Jonah Johanssen’s mouth.
“You’re really not gonna hit that again?” Amber asks, taking a bottle of white wine out of our fridge and pouring each of us a glass.
“It was wrong of me to do it.”
“It’s not like he’s your student anymore,” she shrugs.
Memories of his time in my class all come back at once, and I roll my eyes. “He’s young, and dumb, and he has hotter, younger, dumber people to hook up with. He does not need or want my attention.”
“Wanna bet?”