“I haven’t been the past two years because of Ray and how things were with him, but they’re good parents. I had a good childhood.”
I take another bite of food.
“He got in the way of a lot, didn’t he?”
Before I can answer, he speaks instead. “We’re having a nice meal here, so I won’t ask you questions about your relationship with him because not only do I not want to ruin your meal, but I also don’t wanna feel like I need to walk away from this meal to go find him and beat his fuckin’ face to a pulp, but I gotta say it surprises me you spent three years with him.”
The anger vibrating off him has me trembling suddenly.
And my appetite is just… gone.
“Sorry,” he waves. “So much for me not ruining your meal. I apologize.”
“It’s okay. I have a lot of stuff to work through. In the beginning, it was like … awesome. He was great. But he changed. Or… it was an act and he eventually stopped acting. I … I let him gaslight and manipulate me. You know what I mean?”
He nods. “I get it.”
“I don’t know how it happened. It’s like he methodically changed me. And not in a good way. First, it was like a love story. He was too good to be true. So sweet and kind and doting. Right in there with talking about the future, about the amazing life we were gonna have. But it wore off when he started with these…moods. And everything with him was always going wrong and it took me a bit to come out of denial, to realize he was the problem, you know? Then he dragged me down. I got to where I’d try to be a chameleon so I wouldn’t draw any attention to the flaws in my relationship with him and it was easier to withdraw, I guess. I fiercely defended him in the beginning when people started to tell me they saw things they didn’t like about him. How he couldn’t hold a job, how he screwed up with financial stuff. I always fixed it. Fixed whatever he broke. In the beginning, he was so sweet to me and we would have these long talks where we’d build castles in the sky and I believed we’d do it, too. I believed he had a string of bad luck, until it got too hard to believe that someone would just keep having that much bad luck, that there was just always excuses, too. Excuses for why he spent money outside the budget. Excuses for why we couldn’t go to my cousin’s wedding or my parents’ for Easter or why he didn’t want me hanging out with my friends, and just… constantly breaking things and hoping I’d fix them. And the moods got worse until he just got… like… permanently grouchy, probably because I started running out of ways to fix his problems.” I take a big breath. “In the early days, he was always trying to defend himself for things he thought people were saying and it got my back up with people who hadn’t even done or said anything wrong. He’d tell me they’d try to tell me I was too good for him, that he was afraid I’d believe it. And I was all, ‘fuck them’ and I was mad at them when they didn’t even do anything wrong because he’d get in my ear about people and plant these seeds. And then when they did start to say something at first I was so defensive because it was like he knew and would say things to me that they were thinking because he knew they were right. Only, I didn’t know that back then. He’d get in front of it and put my back up with everyone. He hid it well for a while and slowly, I backed away from everybody in my life because of him. I didn’t wanna hear it from them. And I hate that I let him do that. It was how he felt about himself that projected all over everything, and I … I just feel really stupid that I let it happen.”
“Stupid? You shouldn’t feel that way.”
“I cared about him. In the beginning, I loved him. He fooled me into thinking he was a good guy with a long string of bad luck. Maybe he was a good guy, or trying to be a good guy. He had a lot of insecurities. His family life really messed him up, I think.”
“That’s no excuse for mistreating you. That’s no excuse for being a waste of space, leanin’ on you to take care of everything for him and then treating you like shit because he felt shitty about what a loser he was.”
“Yeah. I didn’t see it soon enough. And then, I felt stuck. And I… I dunno… was convinced it’d go really bad if I didn’t find a way out of it carefully. Just…” I swallow and shake my head.