Resist (Songs of Submission #6)(30)

“Why did you want to see her?” he whispered.

“To try to lift her phone. But if I told you that, you’d just say no. And if I failed, you would have thought I was incompetent.”

He kissed my forehead, my cheeks. “You’re not leaving me?”

“No.”

“But you haven’t heard everything.”

“I don’t want a reporter’s research. I don’t want Jessica’s lies. I want it from your mouth. I chose to trust you, and I want you to choose to talk to me.”

Chapter 24.

JONATHAN

I held her silently for a long time, wondering if she could keep her promise to stay with me. I’d become so attached to that woman that her presence, somewhere in the world, comforted me. The connection, once I’d admitted it was there, was palpable, a rope of energy between us. Knowing what she was doing at any given moment was an almost religious experience, specific to her, and almost sexual in its purity. I knew she felt too, but she was a wild card. Her reactions never fit my expectations.

If she was going to leave me because of things I’d done, she would have done it already. The effects of unburdening myself could last indefinitely and affect me the way they’d affected me with Jessica, in well-timed words and the sense that I was trapped by her knowledge. But it didn’t matter any more. As of last night, I’d done enough to alienate Monica from me and more to bring her close. The tension between the two had to break.

So I formulated a way to express the narrative. It didn’t run in a straight line. It started on a rainy December night, took a left when I was twenty-three, came around the bend a year later, switched gears the previous month, and only began the previous night, with a death.

“Rachel died last night,” I said. She pulled away to look me in the eye. Even in the dark, I saw her confusion. “Well, I lied.”

I wanted to see her face, so I pulled her up to a straddling position. Her shoulders slouched. I brushed her hair from her shoulders. It was too dark to see her face clearly, but I knew I wouldn’t like what I saw.

“I’m sorry. There’s more. Do you want me to come clean?” I asked.

She put her hands on my shoulders. “Ok, go ahead.”

“Rachel required constant care. The accident left her in a vegetative state. She wasn’t even herself anymore, so little of her brain was functioning. She could have lived forever, except that when Jessica first met you at the Stock, the day with the cast on her arm, I panicked. I thought she’d tell you everything. I didn’t know why, and mostly, I didn’t know why I cared so much, but I knew I did. I needed time to think, so I moved her to another facility. She never fully recovered.”

“I’m sorry,” Monica said. “Are you sad about it?”

I felt myself smile, because that would be the question Monica would ask, not the thousand others. “Yes, but other things too. It’s complicated. I’d assumed she was dead between the accident and when I was about twenty-three. I’d done my share of grieving over it. But I found out she was alive, and Jessica and I found her and moved her.”

“Okay, wait—”

“Hold on, Mon—”

“You found her? Who was keeping her?”

“I said hold on, goddess, please.”

“Have mercy on me, Jonathan. I thought she was dead until a minute ago. You have no idea what’s been going through my head.”

“What?”

She put her forehead to my shoulder. “You killed her during sexual asphyxiation and covered it up with the accident.”

“You have a very vivid imagination.”

“So, that’s not what happened?”

“You know that’s not my kink. I mean… Jesus, I should have explained this sooner.” I pulled her up again and took her face in my hands. She looked very tired. I had no idea how to make this any shorter, but I knew we had to finish it, if she could stay awake for it. “I have to stop and tell you about my father.”

“The passive drunk you told me about?”

“One of the many lies I tell about him.”

“The one who seduced Rachel first.”

“Not a lie. That was the beginning of me learning the truth of who I am. He’s a sociopath. Clinical. He has no empathy. He only finds things interesting or not interesting, and hurting people is interesting. Young girls are interesting. Seeing my mother scream during childbirth? Same. My sister Carrie is a psychologist, and once she realized it, realized all the shit he’d done over the years, she moved to Italy. Swear to god. I see that look on your face. It’s not genetic.”

“I didn’t think you were a sociopath.”

“No, but I’m a sexual sadist.” Saying those words was hard, even though I knew how true they were. As much as Debbie had tried to remove all of my negative connotations from them, I still felt a pang of self-loathing. Monica didn’t seem perturbed, probably because it was just us on her porch. I knew that her shame was in how she was seen by strangers, not what we called each other when we were alone. “I thought for a long time that made me like him. That we were the same because I enjoy that look on a woman’s face when I squeeze a little too hard, or that I like to make her uncomfortable. I thought it was a part of him inside me.”

“And it’s not?”