Dark Secret Love Read Free Page B

boyfriend never found out about his lovers on the side). The job was mindless and I enjoyed working in the beautiful building, but I hated my life.
    Every time I drove my car under an underpass, I’d have fantasies about turning the wheel sharply into the concrete wall. During my forty-minute commute from the beach to Beverly Hills, I played Bowie incessantly—Ashes to Ashes, We Could Be Heroes, John, I’m Only Dancing—and cried for no reason at all. Although I told the people I most trusted that I was unhappy—my family, my friends—nobody believed me. Every single person told me that I was simply young (true) and had cold feet (false) about my impending wedding. I wanted to escape, but I didn’t know how.
    This was such a dark time that I don’t really remember a lot about it. I don’t even remember all that much about Byron, except for my constant “point” losses and his continual critiques. From the mundane to the extreme, he didn’t like it when I:
    wore my hair curly
    wore my glasses
    wore miniskirts
    wore pants without pockets
    drank beer
    read trashy magazines.
    I’d been a vegetarian the whole time we were together, and although he was a carnivore, he would not hear of me deciding to eat meat again. He didn’t like my tattoos, didn’t like it when I dyed my brown hair black, didn’t like the short stories I wrote. He was anal about everything but sex. That’s not true—he was anal about sex, too, but not into anything back-door or kinky. Sex had to happen in a specific lights-out, minty-fresh sort of way. The longer we were together, the less frequently and more lifelessly we made love.
    We never, ever fucked.
    Yet, although I seemed unable to please him, he didn’t want me to change in any way.
    When he was upset with me, which was often, he would refuse to speak, to acknowledge my presence at all. On the day of our engagement party, he was angry with me for some inconsequential error. Byron didn’t say a word to me all evening, didn’t look at me once until he gave a toast to his future bride, a toast that actually brought tears to people’s eyes as he professed this great well of love he had for me.
    Crazy. I thought I was going crazy.
    “See?” my friends said. “He’s lovely. Listen to how he gushes about you. I wish I had a boyfriend like that.” They didn’t know that he didn’t speak to me for three days after the party. Didn’t know that he would simply grunt if I was in his path. He had other cruel ways of punishing me: ridiculing me in front of his friends and so on. But the silent treatment was the worst. I’d grovel, trying to figure out how to make him happy, ultimately feeling like a failure twenty-four hours a day.
    I’m not trying to justify why I cheated. I’m only telling my side of the story. Unlike Byron, Connor appeared to adore everything about me (including my cigarette pants with no pockets—which he said made my ass look amazing—and my newly dyed black hair, which he thought was gothic, like Bettie Page). He started by sticking little Post-It notes on my windshield. “You look beautiful,” he’d write. Or “God, you’re so damn sexy.” I didn’t believe him right away. Byron never told me I was beautiful. (His evil “You’re so pretty” doesn’t count.) If I asked him how I looked before an evening out, he said I was fishing for compliments, which in his view was amajor sin. I stared in the mirror and saw the wrong hair, the wrong glasses, the wrong makeup, the wrong everything.
    Connor saw something else.
    He asked me out on a date, knowing my situation but not worrying about it. We met up for a movie in Century City and sat next to each other. We were both careful not to touch one another, yet accidentally, his arm brushed mine, my leg brushed his. Flickers of electricity flared through me. The tiniest touch was enough to make me shift in my seat, immediately aroused. I saw not one frame of that film.
    Over beers afterwards, we played that