Confidential(23)

Adam never used the word love, but it was implied. I felt it coming from him, reverberating through my body, syncopating with my own. Love, love, love, love. How it pumped. How it drove me. Contorted me from a girl who’d always done the right thing to one full of dreams and machinations, who would scheme against her own mother.

I’d put all that distance between Mom and me because I couldn’t live with myself otherwise. I reminded myself of how she’d basically abandoned me years ago when she was on drugs, and even though she’d become an exemplary mother since then, it was too late. She’d made her bed, and I was going to lie in it.

When I first told Dr. Baylor, it was excruciating; now our talks were a kind of freedom. All these years, I’d been feeling like an evil person when really, I had been under the spell of an evil person.

I couldn’t wait for Adam to die.

Dr. Baylor said that my self-absorption and tendency toward rationalization while in the throes of first love and hormones were completely understandable, given the developmental stage I’d been in. “Adolescents can seem immoral, but really, they’re amoral. It’s like morality is on pause because there’s so much else happening in your body. In your life. That’s all it was. You were a teenager who was led astray.”

The day I turned eighteen, Adam and I were finally ready to consummate our relationship. I recalled the day so vividly: the new bra and panties I’d bought, the perfume I’d worn, the anticipation, the release. It hadn’t even hurt; I was so primed to be with the man I loved.

Adam had insisted we wait until I was of age. He said that I needed to be legally able to consent, which entailed a level of premeditation that Dr. Baylor was quick to point out. “That’s not about conscience,” he said, “that’s about calculation.”

I was such a fool. We had sex the one time, and I thought it was magical, though of course I had no frame of reference. Adam must have felt otherwise, because he told me that we—he—couldn’t do it anymore. I was leaving for Berkeley in the fall (it was a feat that I’d managed to get in, given how much space Adam occupied in my brain), and he told me, “I’m an old man. What will your new friends say?”

“I don’t care about friends. I care about you!”

“Shh,” he said. “Your mother’s sleeping.”

“I don’t care! Let her hear. Let this be out in the open. We have nothing to be ashamed of.”

It was a ridiculous contention. We had everything to be ashamed of. But in that second, it seemed true. How could love ever be wrong, regardless of the circumstances in which it had been born? We belonged together.

He shook his head like he couldn’t believe how impossibly naive I was, all that I had to learn. But he wasn’t planning to teach me, was he? He’d put in all that time, three years of foreplay, and I’d turned out to be a lousy fuck, so he was done with me.

I slapped him across the face, shocking us both. I’d never once been violent toward another human being. The rejection was so acute, like a blade through my stomach. He’d had me once, and now he didn’t want me anymore.

“I’m going to tell her,” I said.

“Then I’ll be gone for good, and your relationship with her will be shit forever. Is that what you want?”

He was what I wanted, and now I couldn’t have him. We would occupy the same house for another four months until I left for Berkeley. He’d be tantalizingly across the hall but completely out of reach. He’d made sure of that. For the remainder of our time under the same roof, when I tricked my mother into leaving the house, he went with her. He wouldn’t allow us to be alone.

But then one day he was home sick. Mom went to work. I went to school just for a couple of periods, and then I headed back to the house, snuck in the bed beside him, and kissed his feverish head. I stuck my hand in his pajama bottoms, and he shook his head no, but his body responded. “Yes,” I told him, climbing on top of him like I’d seen women do in the movies. It was only my second time; what did I know? But he began to move with me, almost against his will, and I pushed my face against his neck, letting his sweat wash me clean.

Then he mustered his strength and threw me across the bed. He was shaking with anger, and it would have been funny, the sight of it: his red face, his still-erect cock. Only he was glaring at me with what felt like true hatred. “You are one fucked-up girl,” he said. “Stay away from me.”

“I love you. I just want to be with you.”

“You know what they’d say if you were the guy? They’d say you raped me.”

“No, I just—”

He closed his eyes. “Get out of here.”

“Please, Adam. You can’t do this to me. I’ve never loved anyone; I’ll never love anyone else. I need you.”

“Get out. Stay out.”

Afterward, we could barely look at each other. He was right: I’d basically raped him. He’d shaken his head no, but I was too intent on what I felt I needed—no, what I deserved. They say rape is about aggression, not sex, and truthfully, I’d been furious with him. I felt like he’d thrown me away, and I wasn’t going to let him get away with it. The fact that I also loved him, that I also wanted our relationship back, had been secondary. That had been revenge sex.

I’d never been comfortable with anger, but I knew that I was capable of rage. That I was capable of violence. That continued to scare the hell out of me.