Furious banging on the windows shocked me awake at 6 am.
“It’s happening. My worst nightmare,” was my first thought.
Jared, my on-and-off lover, bolted awake just seconds later.
Stark naked, he fled down the stairs at warp speed.
I could hear him confront her outside, her screaming, his screaming.
I didn’t dare look.
“Fuck you, Jared! Fuck you!” I heard again and again, amid his desperate pleas for her to calm down.
Then they were inside the house, in the entryway, and shoes were clattering against walls as she hurled them, then picked them up to beat him some more.
“Fuck you Jared!” She yelled as she beat him.
“But I love you!” He protested in a small voice.
“Yeah right, asshole!” She answered before demanding, with increasing urgency:
“Where is she? Where is she?”
My heart sank. Shame burned me alive from within.
Should I bite the bullet and face my fate? I wondered, vacillating.
She knew how to call me out of hiding.
“Does she know about Jessica, the stripper?”
On one hand, I wasn’t surprised. Jared loved female attention, and being a broken man, he loved attention from wherever he could get it. He was small in stature, but also roguishly charming and ruggedly handsome, a ladies’ man.
On the other hand, I’d drunkenly let him undress me the night before, the first time in many months that I’d caved to his drunken siren call.
So naturally, being a woman, I got pissed.
I grabbed Jared’s heavy work boots and Levis and raced down the stairs, suddenly almost eager to meet my fate.
“You!” She screamed accusatorially as soon as I appeared in view, down the staircase.
I threw the pile of clothes and shoes at Jared without so much as a glance.
I was focused on her.
I rubbed my blurry, sleepy eyes, thinking I was seeing her wrong.
She seemed to glow, like an angel: a yellow aura, halo-like, moved about her.
My foggy morning brain tried to rationalize what I was seeing. Was it Botox? A full face of makeup at 7 am? Was the rising sun hitting her at just the right angle?
“You!” She bellowed, shimmering with rage. “You’re the worst of them all! You knew all about me! For years!” Her voice broke with a pain that felt ragged, like a dull knife on flesh.
I nearly crumpled in shame. She stepped closer, scrutinizing me.
“I remember you. I saw you once. You used to be fatter.”
As I’d been trying to lose weight recently, I took this, wrongly, as a compliment. “Oh, thanks!”
Jared looked surprised, as if he’d expected a cat fight, or at the very least, hurt feelings. He was standing in a semi-circle with us, ears pricked.
I felt instantly that this dynamic pleased him — that we were fighting each other, instead of him.
“Did you know he slept with that lady Mel?” I inquired.
“Yes!” She cried out.
Suddenly, Jared shrunk out of view, skittering around the corner.
“He’s got a serious drinking problem, you know,” I continued.
“Tell me about it!” She yelled, suddenly looking guilty, like an accomplice-in-crime.
We continued briefly in this fashion, discussing Jared’s wrongdoings, but I felt suddenly that he was listening in on us, and when I peered out the front entrance, I saw his shadow shrink out of sight around the bend.
She must have seen me look for him, or perhaps she spotted his flickering shadow same as I did.
“You want him?” She asked me. “Take him! He’s yours!”
As soon as she said the words, Jared slipped into view, remaining at a distance, listening, waiting, sidling closer.
Her golden aura had faded, and I felt a strange sensation, like being someone else, in some other place. I was at once in my body and hovering far above us, staring down at three people who were us but also distinctly not us.
I could see Jared inching closer out of the corner of my eye. This frightened me, because he looked just like he did in his old childhood photos: a child’s frame, a child’s face, small and vulnerable. I resisted staring. I didn’t dare fix my gaze on child-Jared, lest it prove my own insanity.
He was child-Jared and she and I were not ourselves but his parents — mom and dad — arguing over who would have to deal with him: the troubled menace.
I wondered which parent I was.
It seemed to me that I was his mother and she his father, or maybe we were both different versions of his mother, or maybe it didn’t even matter who was whom, just that neither of us wanted him.
“You want him, he’s yours,” she repeated, as if goading me.
Child-Jared was staring intensely, back and forth, shoulders hung in shame but eyes full of hope.
He looked so infantile that I couldn’t bear for him to see me “reject” him, so I slipped back into the shadows of the hallway, away from his penetrating gaze, where I shook my head weakly and mumbled an excuse.
She seemed satisfied, almost relieved, that I hadn’t wanted him after all. She turned and made her way out the door.
Quickly, I asked what I’d always wondered, all those long years.
“Why didn’t you ever leave him?”
She looked surprised, then answered angrily: “I’ve been trying to!”
This response worried me, made me think that this time maybe she really would leave him, a heartbreak that I feared Jared, a weak-willed man, would not survive.
I worried also that I might be the one obliged to pick up his broken pieces, compelled by a sordid mélange of love and shame after the events of this morning.
Then, suddenly, they were gone, both of them, having disappeared quickly though the gate, each to their own vehicle, each headed to the same place, to the home where they’d lived together as domestic partners for the past decade.
I returned to my bed, dazed and horrified, where I laid for some time until the shock turned to numbness and I drifted into a light sleep that was full of questions about the future.
To learn the backstory of my relationship with Jared, please read my “viral” piece below!
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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