Sweet Convictions (10 page)

Ensuing
three tormenting months of solitude, after leaving my previous duplicitous prick for a boyfriend of two and a half years; followed by a brief dabble with online dating acquainting me with a nice enough guy but who turned out to be far too full on and in my face until I bolted; I had finally achieved reaching a juncture in my life where I could stop rocking back and forth in a corner, sobbing my heart out and wondering when I’d meet my next boyfriend. I was finally okay with being single. It just so happened to be the very same night that out of the haziness he appeared—The One.

It was one of those
heart-wrenching, adrenalin-pumping moments where you clock each other from across a crowded dim lit room, locking eyes whilst in the back of your mind, contemplating whether or not you’re imagining it all, or worse, that he’s actually looking straight past you at the girl behind you, whilst still trying to remain focused and at least appear interested in a conversation with your friends, as you smile shyly at each other hoping the other would soon make the first move. It was an uncontrollably awesome feeling.

After
a few more drinks, a crafty game of hard-to-get and a few stolen looks from a distance, he caved and approached me first.
Hehe, I won!
Fortunately my wine goggles weren’t too excessively distorted. He was even more gorgeous than he was when he was stood twenty steps away. He was tall, shaven head, stubble, stunning smile – he had those fang-like teeth that protruded a little more than the others. Such mesmerising eyes and just plain sexy—as sexy as plain can be of course. Oh my god the butterflies!

We
instantly got talking and within around thirty minutes of some ballsy banter, I had somehow managed to divulge nearly every major secret I had—from being divorced, to having a threesome, to having a drawer full of toys, even the fact that I was bisexual. What the hell possessed me to unveil such private facts so haphazardly to a random guy is beyond me. The thing is, he was really easy to talk to – to the brink of feeling almost powerless in his presence.
He was my kryptonite! Shit, thinking back, I could have scared him into a futile soberness and right into the drunken arms of the prettier petite woman I was cunningly shielding behind me.
I guess, now I almost wish that I had.

That night consisted of flirtatious exchanges,
many drinks, soft touches and his hands dipping into my jeans and ripping my thin stringed panties right off of me then dangling them in my face as he grinned. Surprisingly, to myself, as turned on as I was, I still didn’t invite him back to my place to fuck mindlessly. You’d have thought we did with all the teasing and taunting but instead, I took back my torn lace underwear, he ushered me into a cab, we kissed and I went home alone. And boy was I proud of myself! Horny but immensely pleased I had not appeared slutty. That, funny enough, turned out to be the reason he gave me the time of day and ended up going out with me.

Disastrously
, Glen turned out to be incredibly closed and psychologically detached. He couldn’t even help me decide which colour shoes to wear or answer whether or not I looked pretty in an outfit before going out, never mind express his feelings towards me. He was undeniably an impassive vacant-eyed, pokerfaced, time-wasting, passion-slaughtering, emotionally constipated mind-fuck. It was so bad that even birthday cards, Christmas cards, Valentine’s Day cards or any occasion cards were as simple and loveless as ‘Dear Gemma...from Glen’. That’s it. Not even a ‘love Glen’ and indeed not even a kiss at the end. Shit, one teency-weency little ‘x’ would have done!

I
, on the other hand, would buy out the shops, get home and decorate the fuck out of the house; so much so it’d look like Cupid just puked up every furry heart-shaped fairy light, candle and chocolate. Hearts and fluff everywhere! And do you know what he did? He’d laugh and tell me I was silly as he happily munched away at the lovely romantic dinner I’d cooked for him, then head to the sofa to watch TV.

Whilst my
heart ached daily to be loved by him, I knew even eight months in that I’d never receive it. Still, I talked myself into believing I could change that - that I could make him see how easy I was to love and how worth his love I was. I was foolish enough to tell myself that if he never ever paid me a compliment, or if we never did anything as a couple together, I’d have stopped asking him for those things and simply accepted the way he was, so long as he told me that he loved me. But, despite our numerous talks and my begging and pleading and my constant distress of not knowing where I really stood in his life, I continued our relationship living in false hope.

Two years
into this and I decided enough was enough. I wanted and needed to be loved – to be looked at adoringly, to be missed when I wasn’t around and appreciated for everything I did. So what better way to get that, than from reliant, fluffy, cuddle-craving little critters? So I decided to adopt two cats and they gave and still give me all the love and adoration a girl could need. And honestly, as hair-brained as that sounds, it bloody worked like a sparkly charm. I started to become less interested in relationships in general and it was no longer essential for me to have a man to fulfil my life.

Another year and a half later
, I realised I was on tenterhooks and holding out for the impossible, so I started to push back my feelings for him. I hid them so far back in my mind and my heart that eventually I reached a point of feeling numb towards him. I no longer cared. I stopped wanting anything from him and distanced myself entirely. When I eventually reached breaking point, I told him I was leaving. As usual, he showed no sensation at all. I mean, as numb as I had managed to become towards him, I still bawled my eyes out. It ripped my heart to shreds and at no point did he even fight for me.

Most nights I’d cry myself to sleep or down the phone to
Karl, who at the time was just a good work friend that I’d become quite close to. Coincidentally, he too was going through a separation from his wife. I had known Karl for over two years and we’d become really great friends. At the time of our mutual despair we’d spend most of our lunch times together talking and cheering one another up. Funnily, one afternoon, he confessed to how he often used to try and flirt with me. It just goes to show how totally and utterly blinded by love I was with Glen.

The most annoying and tremendously confusing part
of all of this...other than the wasted, tear-filled, psyche-fucked years of my life...was that according to Glen, I was the perfect girlfriend – the best girlfriend he’d ever been in a relationship with. Now, unless he lied previously about how decent his exes were or at least weren’t, and instead every one of those women was actually awful in every way or he was extremely delusional - someone please explain to me how anybody in their right, albeit cold expressionless mind, could let go of someone so perfect? I know I’ve never been able to figure it out. And this isn’t even the mind-fuck part of it all!

The
utter mind-fuck moment wasn’t even the day Glen at last showed his first real snippet of emotion as he cried—yes, he fucking cried. However, this was only after I handed him his keys and put the cats into their carrier. And do you know why he cried? Not because I was leaving, or because it was the cataclysmic end of what could have been an ideal relationship, had he given half a shit. Oh no, no, no. It was over the fact that I was taking my cats.
The fucking cheeky bastard!
I left that night and didn’t look back and I felt good for it. I mean I felt like utter shit that I had lost my One due to his uncomprehending, adolescent, insensitive ways but good because I finally took a stand and irrevocably stuck with the hardest decision of my life.

             
Time quickly passed. Approximately three months or so went by after that harrowing day. I was on track with moving on from my dead end relationship when I received an early morning call just moments before leaving for work. Three months later! Three...not one, not two, but three months after I walked out the door!

It was Glen.
He was crying down the phone to me. Have I mentioned this was three long months of no communication, no attempts to win me back, nothing?! He decided to call and tell me how much he missed me and how he realised that he was wrong. But wait, it gets better!

T
he words I will never forget him saying:
“I’m sorry, I know now that I was wrong. I do love you and I do want to marry you and have children with you.”

Every
ounce of blood rushed from my head down to my toes. I turned dizzy and cold and sick. Forget the cheek of three months. This was what I’d been waiting three and a half fucking years for. Years of anticipation, hope and pleading—just as I’d come to terms with it all – he decided to grow some balls, revive his cold-blooded heart and pipe up.

J
ust at a time I’d finally allowed myself to be intimate with someone, and literally two days before Glen’s call. I had after all wasted enough time hoping he’d encounter some miraculous epiphany and wake the hell up. Also, the actuality that I hadn’t heard a peep from him the entire duration. I was ready and entitled to move on and do what I wanted and needed. And I most certainly needed to be shown some care and respect. To be taken care of and looked at like I was the most gorgeous woman on the planet, even if it turned out to be all lies, which thankfully it wasn’t. Glen had taken so much away from me – my self-worth, my pride and worst of all, my confidence.

No
matter how numb I’d managed to brain-wash myself into believing I felt; at that instant, after hearing those words, every feeling and every fond memory I had walloped out of my head, overpoweringly bare-knuckle sucker-punched their way back into my mind, head-butted my brain and KO’d my heart into a love-struck stupor.

I had imagined
for so long how I’d feel and react if he’d ever told me he loved me. Instead, I felt nauseous and the words ‘I love you’ wrenched my heart out through my throat, slam dunked it onto the ground, stomped and smashed it into a puddle of mush and drop kicked it into oblivion.

Then
, as if that wasn’t enough and although he had said what he said, and after we spoke in great length about it, on numerous occasions, all he was interested in, before he was to consider trying again was whether or not I had slept with someone else. I mean come the fuck on dude! What do you think I was going to do; become abstinent and hold out until you decided you were ready to grow a heart and feel something? Talk about fucking delusional. Anyway, that still wasn’t the mind-fuck of mind-fucks!

T
he ultimate psyche-twisting annihilation was that a brief version of a much longer and more mortifying story of reopening myself to even further condemnation, is that he still had the audacity to reject my suggestion of starting over – and this, because he wanted full disclosure of what I had been doing since we had split up. Idiotically, thinking clean slate and fresh, honest start, I agreed to spill everything. I confessed that just days prior to his overdue decision to get in touch with me, I had indeed allowed myself to be intimate with someone else, whilst politely reminding him that it was after all he himself who’d made it abundantly clear he couldn’t give me what I wanted in the first place.

Following
about a week of added tears, drawn out conversations, further thinking and wasteful hoping,
yet again
, I was honestly of the notion that we were getting somewhere, but instead, his narrow mind remained as it had always been – shut—and he declared that he was still unable to bring himself to being with me after I’d slept with someone other than him. The worst part about just that was that it was mainly because the guy I had dared share a bed with me was not white! Can you believe that shit?! So I then newly discovered he was a tad racist on top of being an unloving twat!

Then
...then...just two days following that, he invited me over for dinner. This was shortly followed by exactly what he said he bring himself to doing – sleep together. Evidently, this very much led me to believe, and why the hell wouldn’t it, that he’d somehow gotten over his parochial ways and changed his mind realising that he could in fact be with me and at least try starting over again. But oh no, instead, it turned out his ego went into override, his brain became mashed potato and his cock decided to do his thinking for him. He merely wanted ‘ex-sex’.

Basically, h
e fucked me—unfortunately, not in the climaxing kinda way – all over again. Holy fuck-balls can you believe the cheek of this detached, mind-torturing, ill-treating, advantage-taking, heart-mashing dickhead?!

Anyway
, rant over. It’s taken me an obscene number of years to get over him, or at least reach of point of peace with all of that. And even to this day, it still plays on my mind—thankfully, just not every second of every disconcerting thought-filled day.

So
how I think of it is...after that relationship alone – and don’t even get me started on the shit-stain for an ex-husband—I think I most definitely deserve an insatiably audacious adventure, an impudent taste of freedom, and a dash of intrepid promiscuity to help melt away all of my prudent inhibitions.

My
uncontrollable thoughts begin to bring me down so I call my mother.

             
“Mom, I feel so alone and helpless; as completely hopeless as a used moth-eaten pair of undies.” She laughs endearingly at me.