Forbidden Love Read Free

night. We stopped pretending we
were in control of our lives and we were happy with how our mid to
late twenties were going. We became friends. We didn’t judge each
other or any of our life choices. I was glad to have him in my
life.
    A few months after that, he gave me a
manuscript he had written. All he said was, “I think you’ll like
this. It’s about a girl torn between a guy that looks like Channing
Tatum and a guy that looks like Adam Levine.”
    He never said it, but I think he wrote
it about me. The Channing guy was Rick. I was blinded by his
classic good looks and muscular body. I couldn’t see everything
else he was doing to me. The pain was worth the pleasure of having
that body to comfort me. While I was dating the man I shouldn’t,
there was a less classically good looking man, who was really
hotter, standing in the wings waiting for me to make a decision
before he would save me.
    Whether I was supposed to or not, I
gave it to a friend in the publishing industry. That’s when he
became famous.
    I did it because I loved him. I
thought it would be my way of saving him. If he could escape being
just a watch and become an actual person, I felt like there was
hope for me, too. Life had another way of working it
out.
    As his fame grew, he started to come
out of my mother’s shadow and be seen as his own person. Younger
women were hitting on him. They had fallen in love with the
character he had based on himself. The women my mom’s age started
to pursue him, too. When who you are with determines your value in
a society, he was a commodity that others wanted in order to
improve their own stock.
    He tried to make things work out
between him and my mom. He says their relationship ended because
she destroyed the beauty he once saw in her. To compete with the
younger women, she turned to plastic surgery. He told her he liked
her the way she was. She couldn’t ever seem to hear the words he
was saying. He said that was what hurt the most about it all. You
love somebody, and you know they are doing something to try to
please you. But the person is so intent on what they think you want
and need that they miss the point entirely.
    He told me, “I would have kissed a
million of her cancer scars to make her see the beauty I saw in
her. But there’s nothing I can do to make a woman feel beautiful
when she thinks she has to change to make me happy.”
    He said he went from being a watch to
a golden statue of a god where unwanted sacrifices were being made.
He only wanted to be human and to be loved for being human. He just
couldn’t get anybody else but me to see him that way.
    As his relationship with my mom was
imploding upon itself, I was having issues with Rick. We had been
dating for two years. I knew the relationship wasn’t perfect. I saw
how imperfect it was once I read Jack’s manuscript about me, even
though he wouldn’t admit it was about me. He could point out how I
went on diets just to please Rick, or how I would accept his
cheating on me because I wasn’t a good enough girlfriend. Two years
of my life had been spent with Rick. I didn’t want to throw it
away, especially when I thought it could still be fixed.
    Part of me also didn’t want to admit
that Jack saw me and my relationship for what it really was. He
came from a middle class income and didn’t attend any of the best
schools. In a lot of ways, he was very common, even if he held
romantic ideals about being a gentleman.
    As my mid-twenties were starting to
become my late-twenties, time became more important to me. There
was a part of me that thought getting pregnant might help push Rick
towards the marriage issue. Instead it was more like the nail in
the coffin.
    I was single and pregnant. Jack was
single, successful, and playing the field. He made sure I knew
that, even though he was there for me throughout the pregnancy. He
would go with me to doctor’s appointments and other things. When
the doctor or the nurse would think he was the