Life Begins (18 page)

Jack's strength has never been
physical. He was a troubled pregnancy and was born small. He won't
tell you this, but he is currently 5'9' and 112 pounds. He weighs
less than me, which I partly hate him for. He can't gain weight,
even though he wishes he could. I know that he feels like less of a
man because of this. I have done things to continually insult his
manhood as he was going through puberty. Just when he was feeling
awkward, I felt that it was best to make him feel worse about
himself. Again, that made perfect sense at the time that I was
doing it. I'm not sure why.

Although I didn't start out dating
Brian because I knew that it would make Jack jealous, I did find
this aspect useful once Jack and I started to mess around. I don't
know what he was expecting to happen the night that he wanted to
practice kissing with me. He didn't seem to want a relationship,
but yet he...

I think Jack was just as confused
as I was about what he wanted out of me. Maybe he knew what he
wanted and was just too afraid that he would be rejected. As much
as we could not have been a couple in kindergarten, I think my
rejection of him during that time had hurt him more than I would
have thought.

It's not that I didn't think that
I deserved better than Brian. I knew that I did. I even knew who I
wanted and how I wanted him to rescue me. I had a sick, twisted
little fantasy of Jack being so upset by another man having me that
he would just f#ck me in a violent rage. But Jack... For some
strange reason, Jack has as much of a problem raping me as he does
watching me getting smacked around by another man. I think you can
see why my father thinks I am no good for Jack. I have to agree
with him a lot of the time.

Like I said when I first started
to talk about the abuse, I don't want to justify it. I only want to
explain how... Sometimes you know something is wrong, but you still
find yourself accepting it for other reasons. Sometimes something
that should be so simple turns into something complex. Looking back
on it, you can see the millions of things you should have done
differently, but when you were in the middle of it, everything you
did seemed to make perfect sense.

One night, after Jack and I had
actually gotten together, we were in bed. I was trying to get him
to have sex, which I knew that he would refuse. I then asked him if
he minded if I pleasured myself. He said he didn't as long as I
didn't mind that he was going to be pleasuring himself as well. I
pointed out that this was kind of counterproductive and that we
should just go ahead and pleasure the other person properly. That's
when he said, “Honey, our entire relationship has been built on us
working against the other while trying to achieve the same goal.”
He then smiled that smile that I hate so much and kissed me before
he rolled over.

I mention this here because that
was really why I put up with the abuse. Although Jack and I wanted
the same thing, we were going about it different ways. He wanted me
to make a decision. After everything that I had ever said or done
to him, he wanted some sort of confirmation that I wanted him for
something other than sex. And after everything he had ever done for
me, I wanted him to love me completely. I wanted him to make the
ultimate decision, the decision that could never be undone once it
had been made.

I don't know how long I would have
put up with the abuse. I liked the fact that I was dating a popular
guy. We made a cute couple. My father liked him. I was fooling
around with Jack on the side, which actually caused the majority of
the fights that I had with Brian. If I lost the fights against
Brian, it was not that I didn’t try. I was fighting for Jack’s
honor. I was fighting to make sure that Brian believed that nothing
was going on between me and Jack. I was fighting to make sure that
Brian didn’t try to beat up Jack. It seemed like a good idea at the
time. I was willing to take on a few rounds with a man, who was
stronger than I was, if it meant protecting Jack.

In the end, despite Jack's refusal
to save me as I would have wished for him to, he was the one that
did save me. All of his pleading to my intellect had done nothing
to persuade me to breakup with Brian. But as the fights became
greater, I found myself spending more time with Jack and less time
with Brian. This, of course, did not go unnoticed by Brian, which
increased the fighting, which increased the amount of time that I
spent with Jack.

At the Super Bowl party at my
father's house, I was spending time with Jack. Maybe Jack was extra
flirty that night. He has never enjoyed football and does not
understand the game. When he gets bored he finds ways to entertain
himself. I don't think he would have come to my party if it had not
been for me. I think he would have protested the game by reading a
book. That is what he usually does. I don't know if he came to the
party because he knew that he could keep an eye on me and defend me
if Brian tried to hit me. All I know is that Brian started to hit
Jack this time instead of me.

If I have ever had a weak spot, it
has been when other people have hurt Jack. When we were in middle
school, some of the bullies would try to pick on him because he was
smaller and well-liked by the girls. He would spend the majority of
his time hanging out with girls really. He hung out with Arthur and
Leopold, but those were really the only guys that he would hang out
with. Anyway, Jack would get picked on, and girls would come to his
defense. I was part of this, but I wasn't the only girl.

There is just something about Jack
that makes girls want to protect him. I know that I'm probably not
the right one to explain it considering that I have hurt him so
much over the years. I think it is partly that he is sweet and the
kind of guy that you know you should date. He's just... He
understands women and actually listens to you. He is one of the few
guys who seems to notice when somebody is wearing their hair
differently or did an especially amazing job on their makeup. Even
if he is not the most “masculine” guy in the world, there is
something appealing about a guy that would rather go shopping than
watch sports or hang out with his friends. Even if you aren't
dating him, he seems to give any girl that he is just having a
casual conversation with his undivided attention.

And I don't want to make it sound
like Jack isn't a man. He's just a different kind of man. This one
time I went shopping with him and a few of my female friends. We
were probably sixteen at the time. He was the only guy in this
group of girls as we were shopping for new clothes. Most guys would
have been bored. Jack wasn't. He was... He was doing typically Jack
things and giving all of the girls advice on what clothes they
should buy. But here's the thing, he was actually truthful. If an
outfit didn't look good on you, he told you so. He wasn't going to
tell you that he liked it on you because he knew that you really
liked it.

And here's another thing about
Jack when you take him shopping for clothes. He makes you feel
beautiful. When you step out of the dressing room and ask him what
he thinks about the outfit, he checks out your entire being. He
notices how the color works with your eyes or makeup.

And he can say things that you
would hate most men for. He is the only guy I know that can make
you feel beautiful when he is telling you that an outfit makes your
ass look big. I was a little hurt the first time that he did this,
but he does it by saying that it's the cut of the fabric and not
your body.

When I was shopping with my
friends, he made all of them feel special. He looked at them like
how a guy looks at girls. He noticed what the clothes do to your
breasts, if they make it look like you have a bit of a pooch around
your midsection, if it makes your ass turn heads, or makes your
thighs look fat. He makes you feel good about areas that you are
insecure about. A man like that needs protecting from other men who
want to beat him up for being different.

So when Jack started to get into a
fight with Brian, I had to step in. And when he tried to diminish
Jack's masculinity in gym class, I had to break it off with him and
publicly humiliate him.

It is one thing for me to get
beaten up. I have never thought of life as something pure and
beautiful. I have always known that life was hard and that people
were terrible. If I was smacked around a little, I did feel that I
partly had it coming for the terrible things I had done. Jack, on
the other hand, has a beautiful soul that can't help but to make
you think that there is some inherent good in the world that is
worth preserving.

After I had broken up with Brian,
Jack and I started to change our relationship again. He calls them
the Peace Accords. I don’t know what he is actually referring to.
We never signed any deals or even discussed anything about our
relationship during this time. I have never really pressed the
issue with Jack. He can call them his Peace Accords if he wants.
All I know is that we started to spend the night together around
this time and that we were not a couple. I continued to go out with
other guys.

I'm not sure why we started
spending the night together at this time. As I remember it, he
declared his love for me. I told him I wasn't looking for a
relationship. He said that he wasn't talking about a relationship
and gave me the impression that he was talking about sex. Since I
knew that he was offering himself to me, I thought it was kind of
tragically beautiful. I started crying. He started comforting me,
and we fell asleep in my room. I think we started spending the
night together after that.

He is honestly the only guy in the
world that can get the crap kicked out of him and still be
concerned about me. I wanted to nurture him and take care of him
that night. He will ignore his own needs to try to give me what I
want. Damn it! Jack was right. We spent the night together for the
first time the night of the Super Bowl party. I hadn't broken up
with Brian yet. He was arguing with me about this when he was
writing his section of the book. I told him that we had not started
to spend the night together until after I had broken up with
Brian.

I don't know how he remembers the
exact order of everything that we have ever done together. I know
that he has a keepsake box of things he has gathered from our time
together. Some of them will remind him of good things. Others will
bring up some not so nice memories, but he will still treasure
them.

Okay. So what does he mean by the
Peace Accord? He had gotten beaten up. I told him that I wasn't
going to break up with Brian. He declared his love for me. I looked
at him with his face a bit of a mess and tried to get him to just
take it easy. He needed to recover. He then started to put the
moves on me, which I normally would have enjoyed. It was just that
this time, he was so badly hurt that I wanted to take care of him
instead of take advantage of him. I started crying, and he started
to hold me. There was no peace. We didn’t even discuss anything. We
just…

It's a good thing I love him
because he really pisses me off sometimes. Not only was he right,
he won't tell me what he meant by the Peace Accords because he
thinks that it will hurt me if I know the truth. I know that I have
hurt him. He just refuses to see me as something evil.

Anyway, we started spending the
night together on Friday and Saturday nights when my mother was
home. Jack didn't spend the night on weekends that my father was my
guardian. We have gradually increased the nights that he sleeps
over. When we first started dating, it became almost every weekend.
We stopped caring about my father and what he would think. Lately,
Jack has been spending almost every night with me.

Our parents don't care. They know
about it. They just don't care. Jack's mom thinks it is good for
him to be doing this. She says that he needs to unwind. I think she
might have a problem if she didn't know that Jack truly loves me.
If he was just sleeping with me because he was horny, she would
object. I really wish there was a term for what Jack and I do in
bed. Sleeping together doesn't quite cover it because it implies
sex. That's the one thing I can say that is not going on at night
when he is in bed with me.

Anyway, my mom doesn't have a
problem with it. She thinks I deserve to be happy. Jack is a nice
boy. It makes me happy.

And my father. My father has been
nicer to Jack lately. Let's just say that I have made an agreement
with my father concerning Jack. I basically get to enjoy Jack as my
boyfriend without my father interfering. In exchange for this, I
had to promise that I would give Jack up after high school. Jack
doesn't know this, and he's never going to find out. He just thinks
my father is trying to be nicer to him because of me. So in
exchange for my father not being as mean to him, I agreed to break
Jack's heart after high school.

Don't judge me, or think that I am
terrible. Jack and I can not last. I am going to enjoy what time I
can with him.

Jack and I spent the next couple
of years spending the night together. I would go out with other men
and then spend the night with Jack, teaching him some of the new
techniques I had learned from my “flavor of the month” as Jack put
it. I don't want to say that this time of my life wasn't fun. I had
the best of both worlds. I got to go out with really hot guys, and
I got to be with Jack in an almost purely sexual way. It's not that
Jack wasn't more than a sex toy. We did talk about important stuff
at this time. It's just that... Well, despite him saying that it
would be okay for me to go out with other men, I knew that it still
was hurting him. It caused a lot of sexual tension between us. It
was fun and thrilling.