Exposed

A NOVEL BY

Jessica Love

Published by Green Darner Press

9600 Stone Avenue North

Seattle, Washington 98103

Copyright © 2014

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing of the copyright owner.

Cover design by Madelene Martin

Typesetting by Enterline Design Services LLC

ISBN: 978-0-9884784-8-0

Library of Congress Control Number: pending

Printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book

or for more information please visit:

www.greendarnerpress.com

Who am I, “really”?

Interesting question, especially phrased that way. Why did you add, “really”? What is it you sense, what did you see, with those piercing eyes of yours?

My name is Jessica Love. Rather, that’s what it used to be. We’ll clear that up later, and you’ll see why that’s important to me. My parents, James and Janet Jones, named my older sister Jordan and planned on Justine or Juliette for me. They thought all those Js would be cute, I guess.

My French grandmother vetoed both of those for reasons she never explained to me. She never explained anything, that much. Jessica was the compromise.

I grew up in a small town an easy drive from where I live now, in Seattle.
No,
I’m not going to tell you where, because I value my privacy and there are people who are unhappy with me. Don’t bother with a deed search. All of that is held through various lawyers in different cities. I had the best help money can buy in putting that all together. You’ll learn about them.

One of them advised me that writing this book was a mistake. Maybe. But living close to the edge doesn’t scare me anymore. If something happens, it happens, and perhaps it will require me to head in a new direction. That’s not a bad thing, and, in a way, that’s what this book is about, too.

I’m writing this because I’ve been asked so often why I’m not married, why I do what I do, how I started and what does it “mean,” even though that last question is pretty meaningless.

And I’m writing it to make money. Duh. A friend of mine, a fellow lawyer — yes, I’m a lawyer, too — says that self-interest is the only thing you can trust when dealing with others.

So, you need to know while you read this that I’m writing it out of self-interest, and that most of the things I do are out of self-interest, even though I’m most successful when I convince others that’s not the case.

Actually, that’s not always true. Some people like it when my self-interest is the first and last thing on my mind. But that’s getting ahead of my story.

• • • •

First off, forget your clichés. I had a normal childhood with nothing more than the usual traumas suffered by a smart, pretty girl full of curiosity. My parents are good-enough people, even though we no longer have contact.

That’s primarily because I don’t have much respect for my father, and my mother is one of those women who, even in this day and age, opted for domestic tranquility over being true to herself. Well, maybe my childhood wasn’t completely normal. I was raised mostly by my paternal grandmother, and I’m sure that had a lot to do with why I never really fit in with the kids in my hometown.

My father’s mother was born in France. She fell in love with my grandfather during World War II and came back with him to Washington. She had thick dark hair and an olive complexion, different than most of the people in the area. She never lost her thick French accent, which made her exotic to my friends and me, and I thought she was beautiful.

My mother often said I looked more like my grandmother than anyone else in the family.

My grandfather died when his fishing boat sank in 1965; my dad was 15 and already dating my mother. When my dad got back from his second tour in Vietnam, he and mom got married. Everyone said that his time in Vietnam changed him. I don’t know, as I never knew him before.

My mom later said he’d lost his sense of joy, that it had been replaced by something that smelled burnt and tasted bitter. I asked her why she went ahead and married him. She said that women marry men thinking they can change them, men marry women thinking they will never change.

That sounded like something my grandmother would say, but probably in French.

My grandmother lived not too far away in the same town, and she walked over to take care of me when I was little and my mother was at work, or I went to her house after school and my mom would pick me up on her way home. I spent a lot of time at my grandmother’s house.

Once I asked if she ever wanted to go back to France and see her family there.

“When I told them I would marry your grandfather, they were very disappointed, angry. They told me if I went through with it
,
I was leaving the family and should never return.”

“But that was so long ago!” I remember saying. “Maybe they changed their mind!”

“C’est ma vie,”
she said to me, her eyes looking into mine. “This is my life. We make choices. We live with them.” That was one of the most important things she ever taught me, though I didn’t know it then.

Another was how to play backgammon. Often we would sit at her kitchen table, surrounded by herbs from her garden drying in the window. Fruits or vegetables, depending on the season, were ready for use in bowls on the counter.

She often argued with the manager at our supermarket about cuts of meat and the quality of produce, discussions that often ended with her giving a shake of her head and a sigh and walking out with nothing.

“Better to do without,” she’d say, if what she saw did not meet her exacting standards.

She bought at the farmers market when she could, looking for apples that crunched when I bit into their crisp sweetness. She disdained corn, saying it was fit only to feed animals, but carefully selected phallic zucchini with nettle-like spines to mix on the stove with tomatoes so plump they were about to explode.

She explained that there are special places on the backgammon board, about what to occupy and how to preserve strength, but more importantly, when to wait. Later she taught me by simply asking, “Are you sure?” when I would make a bad move, which then turned to a look over the top of her glasses, asking with her eyes.

Eventually, when I was winning most of our games, she would just smile whenever I made a mistake. And pounce.

She taught me to use the doubling cube, and how I could use it to take advantage of apparent weakness — my own or my opponent’s — because our fear of loss is much stronger than hoping for a gain.

So I was well-cared-for by a loving family. I wasn’t molested by a bad uncle or gang-raped by the local football team. I lost my virginity when I was fourteen with a boy about my age, and it was one of those typically awkward, messy first times for each of us. No big deal, and I won’t go into details.

It was a bigger deal when I got caught having sex a year later. “Sam” was nineteen. He’d missed a year of school because of illness but lied to me and said he was seventeen. I’d lied to him, too, and told him I was seventeen.

We’d been kissing and touching for a month, but neither of us had had an orgasm. At least with each other. I’d masturbated myself to one, of course, and I’m sure he had, too.

That night we’d gone to a dance at the high school. One of his friends had given us a joint, and another friend gave us hits from a bottle of vodka a bum had bought for him in Everett. So we were a little high, pretty relaxed, and like most kids that age, very, very horny.

We parked down in the cul de sac of a subdivision that hadn’t yet been built. Sam had already unhooked my bra, and my nipples were so hard they hurt. Every time his fingertips brushed them, a little zip zap of electricity shot from my pelvis to my brain and back. I finally said fuck it, I wanted him right then and right there. I crawled out of my jeans, even after he asked, “Are you sure?”

I got his pants down to his knees and sat on his lap facing him. I slowly slid myself down over him. Oh, God, did that feel good. I pulled my sweater off and the bra came with it, so I was naked in the car, and even that was so hot and erotic, every nerve in my body was on fire.

Sam got off, and then, feeling his cock pulsate like that, knowing he was filling me, filling me, I came right after he did. That’s when the cops shined the flashlight into the car.

When they saw our IDs, they took us to the station instead of the customary warning they usually gave other teens. While waiting for my parents, the woman cop, her name was officer Deborah Riddle — I’ll never forget that — talked to me about consequences, older boys, alcohol, and all that. Then she started asking questions, and by the time my folks got there, she had changed my story into something approaching rape.

For a long while I repeated the story — to myself and everyone else —
that
I was pressured into it, that it was almost rape. Sometimes I even hinted rape was what it was, for the drama.

I knew deep down it wasn’t true — and that I was the instigator — but somehow figured it really didn’t matter.

Even so, my father kicked me out of the house two weeks later. I was angry enough at him for my own reasons, so I was happy to go.

I ended up where I always did, at my grandmother’s. Grandmama did not judge me. S
he
did not scold me. All she said about the episode was something about “These Americans, obsessed by what they fear, fearing their own obsessions,” or something like that; she said it in French, so I didn’t understand all of it.

I liked living with Grandmama, far more than with my parents. Grandmama didn’t ask — ever — if I’d done my homework or tell me what time to be home from a date. My parents’ house would have been silent if someone wasn’t nagging.

Still, I was aware of what Grandmama expected, so I did my homework, was home on time, and helped her in the kitchen when she would let me.

I ran into Sam the summer between my junior and senior years. He was in town, back from his posting in the military, having lunch at Billy Bob’s Burgers. He looked great, a lot of muscle, taller, straight shoulders, every inch a “man.” I quickly found out my “little lie” had caused a lot of damage to a very lovely boy.

I walked up to him — honestly glad to see him, but yes, I was flirting.

“Hi, Sam,” I said.

He looked at me, startled, then stepped back. “What do
you
want?” he said to me.

“I was just saying ‘hi,’ ” I said, surprised by his response. He looked around like demons were about to crash through the door.

“I get caught talking to you, I go to jail,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, and he told me about the hell he’d been through since we were “caught.” Interviews with psychologists. Restraining orders. Threats from my family that I knew nothing about.

He said my lies — about my age and that he’d forced me to have sex — changed his life.

“But I didn’t say you ‘forced’ me. I said you talked me into it!”

“Same thing, and that wasn’t true, either,” he said.

“I know, but everyone at the police station was asking why it happened, what we were doing, what was I thinking, making me feel it was wrong, giving their own reasons why it wasn’t my fault. It just seemed to be what I had to say!”

Turned out that Sam had lost a scholarship he needed to go to college. He ended up in the military, “which isn’t a bad thing, all things considered,” he said.

My heart sank. “Oh Sam, I didn’t know!” I told him. “We can fix it! I’ll tell the truth!” He just shook his head, looked at me like I was dog shit, and walked around me and out the door.

I cried most of that night from a blend of loss and shame, though I don’t know what I thought I’d lost. I cried even harder six months later when I learned Sam had been killed in an attack on an American base in Afghanistan.

You know that feeling you get when standing on a concrete floor and something fragile and important slips out of your hands? That moment between when you know it’s going to break but before it actually shatters?

Once when I was a little girl, my grandmother was showing me a cup she brought over from France. She handed it to me, but I wasn’t expecting something so delicate to be so heavy. I dropped it, and it crashed to the floor.

I remember looking up and into her face to see if I was in trouble. What I saw there was far more devastating. It was a look of pure pain, pure loss. I burst into tears.

“It’s not your fault,” she whispered, as she went to get the broom. When I tried to help, she shooed me away. Replacing the pain in her face was a grim determination.

When I asked for forgiveness — what I really wanted was relief from that awful feeling — she just kept sweeping and said in her heavy French accent, her lovely mouth set against the possibility of tears,
“Tout passé, tout lasse, tout casse.”

Everything passes, everything wears out, everything breaks..

That phrase shaped who I would become….

• • • •

I did well in high school and had my pick of colleges. I wanted to be as far from my small hometown as I could get, so when a good private school in another state accepted me (no, I won’t tell you where, even what state) I was ready to put my childhood behind me.

Well, there
is
one other episode you will want to know about.

I got drunk at a party celebrating high school graduation. I was dancing by myself, really into the music, and Steve Wilson, who I thought was hot but couldn’t figure out how to get to the top of his list, said “dance on the table!” So I climbed up on the table and danced to some song I don’t even remember.

Then Steve said “Take off your sweater!” I did. Then someone suggested I take off my jeans. I did. Then someone suggested that since I was nearly naked, I might as well get completely naked. So I did.