Chapter 9: The Things I Did Anyway

I got under the blanket like someone who intended to sleep. I closed my eyes. I tried not to think about Justin, which did not work. I changed positions, trying to get comfortable, but ultimately trying not to think about Justin was just thinking about Justin with worse posture.

The parking lot replayed itself in higher-resolution nighttime always gives bad memories. I thought about everything I had done to be a better girlfriend, the list that looked like love when I was inside it and looked like a series of concessions now that I was on a couch that did not belong to him. He had pressured me into sex. I had given in because I loved him and because I did not want to lose him, which is a sentence that can dress itself up as devotion and still be fear. He wanted me to look better, dress better, and take care of myself more, and I did those things because that was what he wanted, and I felt like it was the price of keeping him in my life. Life without him had felt like a room with the lights off, and my life already had enough of those rooms. I had a mother who worked all the time to keep the bills paid. A father who had been gone for two years and who I hoped would stay gone. Justin had been the part that showed up, and initially he had been sweet and caring, gentle and loving. I had built my life around that person. Once we started having sex, for him, once or twice a week had not been enough. He had refused, every time it mattered, to make the sex better for me. It was almost like he heard what I said and then just did the opposite. Because of his size, it was not just uncomfortable; it was painful. He went too deep and too fast with a huge cock he was proud of and a technique that was mostly speed and power.

In the parking lot earlier today, he had had the gall to tell me that other girls would die to have a boyfriend built like him. I told him size didn’t matter if you didn’t know how to use it. I still could not believe I had said it out loud. He claimed he knew exactly how to use it. I told him I had never had an orgasm with him. Not once. I was proud of that sentence in the moment because I knew it would hurt, and I wanted him to take home a piece of what he had just done to me. He said I was lying. I did the fake sounds I had learned from a movie once, the ones I had used in the dark when I wanted the thing to be over, and I wanted him to feel like it had worked. He got angry and said it wasn’t his fault I was broken.