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Oddly enough,
that
hurt the most.
I felt like it was
our
car. I’d been there when he bought it. I’d driven all across the Western United States with him in that car. I’d made love to him in the front seat on the salt flats in Utah, with the sun setting behind us like fire.
And now he was using it to take home an endless procession of sluts.
Sorry; sorry. They weren’t sluts, they were just women.
He
was the fucking slut. But that didn’t make it hurt any less.
You know in movies or books, where the wife loses it because her husband slept with somebody else in their bed? It felt like that. That car was special. It was
ours.
And he was tainting all my memories of it.
A phrase from church came to my mind:
the sanctity of the marriage bed.
We didn’t have a marriage bed, and I don’t think my college dorm room mattress counted, much less two dozen hotel suites… so that car was the closest thing I had to the concept.
And he had ruined it for me.
The one thing I noticed, though, was that Derek didn’t particularly seem to be enjoying himself. When he wasn’t bleary-eyed from booze, he had this thousand-yard stare going. It was often like the women weren’t even there – they were just a prop, a pretty bauble trailing in his wake as he stumbled through the dark.
That’s what I wanted to believe, anyway.
40
If Derek had wanted to sabotage any chance of a romance with Ryan, he’d done a masterful job at it.
I became obsessed with reading about him. Like a seven-year-old probing a sore tooth about to fall out, or a scabbed-over mosquito bite you just
have
to keep itching, I couldn’t stop myself. Every morning I got up and checked the website for whatever sleazy exploits he’d done the night before.
I hated him for what he was doing. More than that, I hated myself for giving in and reading about it. I saw how pathetic and weak I was being, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop reading about it, couldn’t stop the anger, couldn’t stop the jealousy, couldn’t stop the anxiety and depression and self-loathing.
Why couldn’t I get over him?
It was like being addicted to some horrific drug, but one that doesn’t bring any pleasure, only pain. I guess I needed a hit to keep me connected to whatever emotions and experiences I’d had weeks ago when times were good. Except now it was just torture.
Worst of all, I could see it was hurting my relationship with Ryan. I became withdrawn and depressed. I tried to hide it, but he was no fool. He knew it was Derek. He tried to draw me out of my torpor with horseback rides into the hills, with small talk, with music, but I just became more and more listless. The calm and easy joy I’d experienced on those two weeks before Derek showed up? All those feelings slowly eroded. The music didn’t console me, Ryan’s presence didn’t help… only the wine did any good as it numbed the pain.
I couldn’t talk to Ryan about what I was feeling, because I knew it would hurt him. So I didn’t really talk to him at all – which ended up hurting him even more.
When I say I didn’t talk to him, I didn’t mean I went silent. There was the polite chit-chat of meals, of our evenings spent in the same room but miles apart emotionally. All I could think about was Derek, about how he was doing this to get revenge on me, about how he was destroying himself, about what he was doing at that very moment.
And if Derek was all I could think about, then I couldn’t really talk about anything else of substance with Ryan. So I didn’t.
Because of that, we slowly descended into silence.
My depression grew.
And all the darkness that had seemed to recede since I got here began to creep back into my life once again.
