Sean

It was a peck on the cheek. It was a sting on the cheek. The red welt of the wasp kicked in and the rosy color spread across the side of her face.

I was afraid then. So afraid of him whom my heart loved. I had picked up a knife and tried to stab him to stop him.

How could I? A five-foot mouse against a six-five monster on a tirade. It ended swiftly, deftly, with a slap to my face so sound that it rang across his kitchen.

Why had it become like this with him? When had he gotten like this? His house had been my sanctuary, a reprieve from the abuse at home, a vacation from the vacant rooms I was trafficked through, and the bullying at school.

I rested like refuse in a little heap on that linoleum floor. A whole hornets’ nest and knife chest sat stabbed in my breast. His mother told me she didn’t care if he had gone too far. It was what men do.

He told me to stop writing. He told me to stop being a feminist.

“Why do you think I am one?” I asked. “It’s because you treat me like this.” I spat out.

The taste of iron is a kind of venom that seeps into every hateful word we bleed out in an argument. The first sting of heartbreak. The first pangs where my canines clipped the inside of my cheek.

I am, when I wanted to be, quite persuasive and, at times, easily moved people’s hearts, but his cold, steely heart had remained unmoved and at last, I had hit a wall and realized there were some objects that could remain unmoved: no matter how hard you pushed.

I decided then that that was the end. I thought if not, I would die. It wouldn’t be him opening a cold oven and slamming it on my hand; it would be as warm as the swollen fingers I cradled after he had done it.

He was screaming something and walking away; arguing with his father and mother like I wasn’t even there anymore. His father was telling him he should go back to his ex. She didn’t complain if he hit her. His mother was silent.

We would no longer be taking turns with the icepack. I would no longer see her tears at midnight, when Sean was asleep, after his father had beaten her and Sean had beaten me.

The curly haired girl he cheated with when he was with me (and whom he cheated on with me when he was with her) would hold that place. Before now, I would have envied even that position to be with him, but so many weeks or months; and so many times on and off, I couldn’t care anymore.

I didn’t see him again after that, except in church, and only when walking past him to get communion.

One day, in passing, he leaned out of the pew and kissed me as I was walking up; she was standing right next to him. How many Sundays he did that before she noticed, I do not remember anymore; it is two years shy of twenty since I walked blushing up the aisle to receive communion that way.

Our mothers stayed friends and, after his father died, they took us to Rome and Venice.

Every day, in the morning, he would pick me up from where we stayed and kiss the back of my neck. I shivered with the heat and with its retreat, the bitter touch of autumn cold.

It felt different, so I tried again, but it was the same thing all over again. A ——— wrapped up in sweet promises of:

“I’m sorry. I’m better now.” He said he wouldn’t touch me again. “I love you.“

“No. You don’t or you wouldn’t have done it. Ever.” I said. 

It stood there, in the street, unsaid between us two:

I had told him a year or two before, hoping to stop his fists, that I felt the way I felt for him because he was the first of the male sex (unrelated to me) that I had ever seen. I could not say no to him because I did not have the power to not love him. All I thought about was how for the first two weeks of my life, my best friend would ask to see me every day, stare at my face, and without thinking, I would grab his small hand in my smaller one.

I regretted it so deeply because he treated me lower than nothing after that.

He told me that if I let him do it every day those two weeks, he would convince our mothers to let us stay on in Italy for a third one.

The two of us, alone, together. I felt like Queen Elizabeth. I was a frozen fawn that wouldn’t thaw to say, “No.”

It was the same once more; a rehash of him bashing me in the face and cheating.

For the next two years, I dated other men; he went to therapy to talk about what his dad did to his mom and how to manage his anger.

From time to time, he still asked. A date in and a punch in, and I checked out. It still hurts. Not my face, but my heart with how he could withdraw his affection so quickly and return to that curly haired poodle of a girl when he was so important to me.

More therapy. And he came back with so many lines. His mother and nana had told him if he really wanted me, he should change.

So, we tried for a final-ish time my senior year of high school, his freshman and only year of college. He had a ring and my new friend didn’t like him.

I loved him and even though he had gotten better, I listened to my new friend and broke up with him.

He didn’t understand why I would choose the opinion of a guy I barely knew over his.

“Because I was on the floor in that kitchen and it was cold. You raped me. You had sex with your other girlfriends in front of me. When she passed me in the hall at school and beat me, you said nothing. You were selfish enough to love me only when you were on top of me. And it would destroy me if you cheated again because I love you so much.”

He went back to dating that curly-haired poodle. I kept writing and she kept secretly reading because she was afraid he was with me again, but that time he was with someone else.

I studied foreign languages and left for Czechia, Austria, Germany, and Nederlands on tour; then to Kyrgyzstan to ride and hawk; on tour again from Greece and India to Japan; to Scottish games of playing Shakespeare in a castle; and to the arctic on an artist residency where I met the man I would marry.

I kissed him at the end of the aisle in front of the priest. On our honeymoon, we coral gardened in French Polynesia and took a pitstop on the west coast for a day to swim through the kelp forests; and then another to see the sequoia.

I taught acting classes and writing workshops when we got back to the States.

He doesn’t message anymore, but we have a cold snap here in August on the east coast and I looked him up yesterday to see what he’s doing now.

He looks much the same. He already had a kid or two the last time we spoke in our twenties. I saw an obit for his nana.

It still hurts and autumn’s nostalgic sadness and anger mixes its brocade until I cannot distinguish one thing I’m feeling from another. 

I want to cry out for the wrong he did me. I want him to die. I want him to go away. I want him to come back to me. I want him to do it all over again without the beatings and the strangeness of it all. I want him to undo everything, to leave his wife and kids and marry me. I want to be a girl again, but one he treated more preciously.

I wanted the slow rise and fall of his sleeping anger to disappear, so I could look at his dreaming face without fear of arousing his wrath. Without jumping at the flick of the white in his eyes in dark, a specter to haunt me with my tears and wailing late into night. I’m jealous of the ghost.

I’m sure on some nights, his wife must think such things and must wish he treated her better while gazing at that face.