The first time I saw him, he had been standing by a pool table in Bill’s Bowling Alley. He wore jeans and an army green hoodie. The hood was up, concealing his hair and the sides of his face. His hands casually tucked in his pockets, he seemed quiet, his eyes flickering up to meet mine. A slow, trickster smile played at the corner of his lips before his eyes dropped back down to the floor.
He wasn’t playing pool. Like me, he’d been dragged along with his friends. Mine were Louise and Kerry, two girls I’d met at Sunny’s, the place where I waitressed a few nights a week. They were closer to each other than they were to me, but they’d just kept on asking me to go out with them. After a while, I ran out of excuses.
But on that night things were different. Surprisingly, I was enjoying myself. It was the flutter in my stomach, the tiny burst of adrenaline that let me know I was attracted to Martin. For most of the night, we didn’t even speak. Both introverts, it took nearly a dozen drinks between us to knock the walls down and help us loosen up. By the time the lanes went dark and the bar closed, we’d forgotten all about our friends. We were in our own little cocoon and I couldn’t have shaken off that buzz of excitement, even if I’d wanted to. Faces around us, they all looked blurry and nondescript. No one else mattered but Martin and me.
I’d like to say it was “love at first sight”, but it was more like a craving. We had to have each other, and we both knew it before we even spoke.
There was something feral in the way he fucked. It wasn’t rough; more like, intense. Martin fucked like a frenzied animal, like he’d been waiting for this moment all his life, like if he didn’t have me he would die.
My friends loved him, but they still thought it was all too soon when I announced that we were getting married. It was crazy and rash, but I’d never been one to look ahead. When I was in the moment—that moment, that high—I couldn’t even fathom what the come down would feel like, almost like I was so high that I truly believed I’d never come down.
Martin was my drug of choice, and I craved him right from the start. Even the idea of getting married turned me on, and not in the romantic sense of the word. When I thought about marrying Martin, I thought about garter belts and lingerie. Steamy sex in Fiji and fucking on the plane ride home.
I didn’t think about all the other stuff, what comes after the high. I didn’t anticipate what would happen—Martin turning into someone I didn’t recognize.
Now I gauge Martin’s moods by the rise and fall of his shoulders. I know what sort of day he’s going to have, and what sort of day that means for me, within seconds of him waking up. At first, I thought it was just intuition, or maybe some sort of psychic ability springing to life, but then I realized it was the little things, things I’d barely even noticed, that alerted me to his moods.
The way his feet hit the hard wood floor beside our bed—if his feet smacked the floor heavily and if he walked just a slight bit faster than usual to the bathroom when he first got up, that meant he was angry already. Maybe it was from bad dreams, or maybe he was just bad in general, I don’t know. But he woke up pissed off at the world, and I suffered because of it.
When I was little, I was afraid of the dark. My father refused to play into my fears, not even granting me the luxury of a night light, or light from the hallway bathroom. One night I asked him, “How c-come you’re not af-fraid of the d-dark, d-daddy?”
“Because the dark’s afraid of me!” he’d cackled, body bubbling forward as he laughed and laughed. There was booze on his breath that night, and most nights, really. But I’ll never forget those words. Martin and Dad, they weren’t afraid of things, things were afraid of them.
If Martin sounded angry when he woke up, I busied myself immediately and tried to stay out of his way until his mood relaxed. I tried to coordinate the baby’s sleep schedule, so she’d sleep right through his morning routine. The boy from the bowling alley was gone, replaced by this edgy, unhappy man I felt afraid of.
“Your fucking half-sister woke me up! Why is she calling my phone?” He threw his cell phone at me, causing me to jerk in surprise. The cell phone, though light, stung as it smacked my left breast and clattered to the floor. I knew before he turned it over that the screen was going to be cracked. My own screen had cracked much the same way.
“Great! Now look what that bitch made me do.” Martin snatched up his shattered phone from the floor, pivoted on one foot, and threw it as hard as he could at the living room wall. This time, it cracked and split. I stared at the broken pieces on the floor and I recognized the slippery slope that was Martin Nesbitt. Now that his phone was broken, he wouldn’t be able to call me from work. And since I would be home alone while he worked, he’d tear the house apart when he got back, looking for “evidence” that I’d been cheating. It was a slippery slope indeed.
Suddenly, he wrapped his arms around my shaking body, gathering me into him. The walls were caving in around me, the world spinning on its axis…I crumpled into him. Not because I wanted him to comfort me, but because I wanted this tantrum to end before Lily woke up.
Lily…my perfect, beautiful miracle. The one good thing in my life. How could I protect her from this? How?
“I’m sorry for throwing the phone at you, sweetie. She just kept calling and calling! She knows I need my sleep. What do you think she wants this time?” The room swayed back and forth as I struggled to think of a reason. Most likely, she was calling him because she couldn’t reach me. I didn’t answer her calls anymore. If I did, Martin asked questions and got jealous; it simply wasn’t worth it.
“Can’t you text her and tell her to fuck off?” He gripped my shoulders now, squeezing tighter and tighter as he spoke. “If you don’t tell her, I will. And trust me, you don’t want that. You know how I feel about her.”
Martin stormed off, leaving me to pick up the pieces of his phone while he got ready for work. I’d already checked to make sure he had socks and underwear, his clothes laid out straight. Sometimes I missed something, and he didn’t yell or get upset, but then sometimes he got very angry. I’d started taking precautions, making sure ahead of time that I’d minimized anything that could set off the descent down his slippery slope.
If he had everything he needed, and nothing pissed him off, then he’d leave for work on time, and I wouldn’t cry for hours afterwards.
But today, was not going to be one of those days.
“These are the old socks! The ones with the holes in them!” I heard him shouting from our bedroom. I flinched as dresser drawers flew open and shut. Then a sharp bang from where he’d probably kicked my bookshelf again.
I heard several soft thuds. My books were falling. Yep, I was right about the shelf.
You see, it had nothing to do with intuition. It was learned behavior. I’m no better than that stupid dog that Pavlov taught to salivate when it heard a bell.
I’d learned to duck and dodge Martin’s mood swings by staying one step ahead of him. But there were some things I didn’t plan for well enough—like when he stole my birth control pills and got me pregnant on purpose or when he forced me to deliver my own child on the bathroom floor.