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But I know that this kind of confrontation will only make matters much worse.
I’m beginning to realize just how big of a mistake it was to trust Aleksander with anything at all. I should have pushed him off me when he tried to have sex with me. At least then I wouldn’t have to be tied to him for the rest of my life with a kid.
We find our train, refusing to speak with each other for the entirety of the ride there. I’m up to my eyeballs in anger and stress at this point, and I’m tempted to ask someone on the train to help me have Aleksander arrested so I can be sent home to the US. I’d rather face the feds than deal with him for one more moment. All the allure he once had has been stripped away, and now all I see when I look at him is a loose cannon.
I feel like I’ve ignored a whole bouquet of red flags since the day I met him, and now I fear that I’ll be forced to keep him in my life my way of threats. If he wants to be in his child’s life, he’s going to give me hell if I try to enforce any boundaries at all.
If Dana was here, or even my mom, they would both be so disappointed in me for allowing my loneliness to get me into this situation with such a dangerous man. I wish I could apologize to them, to my baby, and to myself for the damage this whole thing has created. I don’t even have the physical space to run away and hide in the bathroom until I can control my emotions better. I’m just trapped here with him, and there’s nowhere to go.
25
Faye
We still have another hour before we make it to our destination, and my nerves haven’t calmed at all. I’m sitting next to Aleksander, trying not to touch him at all even as the train jostles us forward and backward with every stop. I’m so agitated that I have to pinch the skin between my thumb and forefinger to avoid crying every twenty minutes or so. I doubt he even realizes how upset I am, and why would he?
I’ve been staring out the window trying to avoid looking in his direction for the entire ride. I can feel his eyes on me, watching and waiting for the moment when I inevitably cave in and admit to him thatIwas wrong, it wasmewho should be apologizing. I’m certain that he believes he’s completely in the right, and no amount of arguing with him is going to change that. So why bother? I’ve known far too many men who believe that their beliefs are gospel and that anyone who disagrees is delusional and weak. It would appear that the father of my child is just the same.
“You know, I was just trying to protect you,” he whispers, nudging me a little bit in order to reestablish contact between us.
The wordprotectfeels so ironic and misused when he uses it like that. I’m seething on the inside because he hurt an innocent man, and all he wants to talk about is how he was defending my femininity or some other bullshit like that. He has such antiquated ideas of what women want from their boyfriends and husbands. Will I have to worry about every single interaction that I have with another man? Will he be able to tolerate the idea of me being around men at all?
I hadn’t thought about it like that before, and now that I’m connecting the dots, I realize that Aleksander has never had to endure watching me talk to any other men. I’ve never had the chance to see what he’s like when he’s jealous, and it looks like he might be much more jealous than I had initially given him credit for. There’s a good reason why women aren’t supposed to allow men into their lives this intimately so early on in the relationship. Yet, here I am.
“You don’t need to protect me, Aleksander. I’m a fully grown woman who can stand up for myself, and that man back there meant no harm at all. You’re just obsessed with projecting your... manliness onto other people to assert dominance, and quite honestly, it’s weird to me,” I reply, holding nothing back. A trip into the city isn’t enough to justify this behavior, and I won’t let him guilt me into believing otherwise.
“You need to understand where I’m coming from, Faye. In my old neighborhood, I had to stand up for my sisters all the time. Against their boyfriends, against men on the street, against my dad, everyone. Why would that turn off when I’m standing up for the woman that I love?”
Love?
I want to ignore the word so badly. Under the circumstances, he could be saying it just as a way to distract me and fill me up with warm fuzzy feelings when all I want is to throw a brick at his head. He won’t be able to manipulate me like that, not right now.
“Maybe you should have seen what my reaction was before you decided to fly into a rage. If I was hurt or upset, then maybe I could understand, but I wasn’t. This has nothing to do with how you feel about me. This is all about your ego,” I reply bitterly.
He sighs, staring out the window where my gaze is following the horizon. “Maybe you’re right, but I still feel like there’s something that you’re intentionally not getting. You have to understand that I need to defend my family.”
There it is.Family.Another loaded word.
It’s getting harder to avoid the landmine of important terms that he’s using, and I’m willing to bet that he’s expecting me to address them at some point. I can’t, not right now. He needs to understand that he crossed a line and that’s it. I don’t need to justify shit to him.
“Maybe you should consider the emotions of the people around you when you choose to overreact like that. Maybe your sisters appreciated it, in fact I’m certain they did, but I need you to see me as being just a little more capable than that,” I say, my tone detached and cold.
We sit in silence for a couple of minutes, and I’m waiting for him to say something else when I decide to speak up again.
“You scare the hell out of me, and not in a good way at all. This kind of thing doesn’t help me feel safe. It makes me feel like you can’t control your anger, and that worries me a lot.”
His eyes flash a bit before he takes a deep breath. “What do you mean by that? What are you trying to say? Do you really think I would take out my anger on you or the baby?”
I’m not sure how to respond. I doubt there’s a good answer here. What he wants is for me to lie, to say that I believe such emotions can be both expressed and compartmentalized at the same time. This is so far from the truth that I’m shocked I can even come up with a rationalization for him, but I don’t doubt that this is how he feels.
I don’t say a word. All I do is continue staring out the window, brushing my hair out of my face and pinching the skin between my fingers again.
“Okay, fine. You’re not going to talk to me? Whatever. I thought you were the one who wanted to communicate about shit and work it out.”
That’s when I snap.
“Are you fucking serious? I want to communicate when there’s a lack of communication. You’re just being completely disrespectful of me and my wishes,andyou’re pretending that I don’t know what I want in a relationship. I’m old enough to know that I need someone who isn’t going to embarrass me every time he feels threatened.”
The way he’s looking at me as I say this is absolutely mind-blowing – the vacant, misunderstanding stare, the disbelief, waiting for his turn to speak.
