Love Me To Death. Steve Jackson
Читать онлайн книгу.
to sleep on. That’s some platonic relationship, she thought, but he told her again that there was nothing more to it. She wanted to believe him, so she did.
There was one quirk of his that bothered her. They’d be walking down the sidewalk, or in a mall or restaurant, and he’d see a woman in a short skirt or low-cut sweater and would mutter, “Slut.” Or a pretty woman would smile at him and he’d sneer after she passed and say something like, “She’s a whore.” The comments were always made under his breath, so only Wilson could hear, but it embarrassed her and she’d ask him to stop. He’d just walk on as if he’d never said a word. But the next time another woman passed, whether it was that afternoon or a week later, he’d be back to muttering, “Slut. Whore.”
As a lover, he was imaginative and into experimentation. He wanted to know her fantasies. Had she ever thought about sex with another woman? What about with two men? Wilson told him, “Sure, I’ve thought about it; everyone has fantasies.” But that’s all they were to her, fantasies that she would never have acted on.
However, there came a time when he took her to a lodge in the mountains for a romantic getaway. He didn’t do drugs but knew that she liked marijuana and brought some, along with a little cocaine that he lined out. He had her slip into a negligee and opened a bottle of champagne. She was getting all warm and fuzzy, anticipating the rest of the evening, when the telephone rang.
“Who was that?” she asked after he spoke quickly into the receiver and hung up. She didn’t know that anyone even knew where they were.
Neal explained that he was trying to help her fulfill a fantasy, making love to two men. He reminded her that she’d admitted thinking about it. In fact, he’d asked her what sort of fantasy man she’d want and since he was blond and blue-eyed, she’d told him, “Maybe someone with dark hair and green eyes.” But it had been a joke.
Apparently not to Neal. The person on the telephone was a friend of his, “Jesse,” he said, green-eyed, dark-haired, and waiting in the room next to theirs.
“My God, what are you doing?” she sputtered. She didn’t want two men in her bed, only one, him. She was so angry that she started putting on her clothes, getting ready to leave. Then the telephone rang again. He picked it up and simply said, “No,” and hung up.
Later he told her that she’d passed a test. “If you had said yes, our relationship would have been over,” he said. “We’d have had a good time first, but it would have been over.” I passed, she thought, and I didn’t even know I was being tested.
There would be many more tests over the next two years, many she wouldn’t do as well on. But first he talked her into moving to Houston, Texas, with him in 1984. He said that he had a good job waiting and that’s where his mother lived.
It wasn’t long before the red warning flags were at full staff and flapping in the breeze. When they arrived in Houston, he had her lease their apartment in her name. He said he didn’t want the woman at the rental office “knowing we’re having relations.” There wasn’t a job waiting for him, but he made sure that she got one as soon as possible as the assistant manager at an import store.
Still, she ignored the little voice in her head, especially when, ten days after they arrived, he took her to a justice of the peace and they got married. In her mind, she was marrying her fantasy man. But she failed a second test on her wedding night, and this time she met a side of Neal she didn’t know existed.
They were in their room when he said he wanted to play a game of sharing deepest, darkest secrets. He went first, admitting that he’d had sexual relations with other men. Then he asked her a question. Had she ever slept with a married man? “Yes, once,” she said. “It was a mistake, and I’ve regretted it ever since.”
Suddenly the game turned violent. He knocked her to the ground and was quickly on top of her with his hands around her throat. “Liar,” he screamed in her face. “You whore!”
Wilson was terrified. Why is he doing this? she thought as she fought to remove his hands. This isn’t Bill. She’d never seen him violent before. He’d talked about getting into fights with other men, but only when he had been in the right. He’d also told her that he had a black belt in karate, even had the uniform and a samurai sword, and was pretty good with his nunchakus. But he’d never exhibited a temper around her; he’d always been as sweet as pie.
Neal finally let her up. He didn’t apologize; she’d done a bad thing and that’s the way he saw it. He made her call the wife of the man and confess what had happened.
Under his tutelage, she soon had herself convinced that it was her fault that he’d attacked her. She’d done something wrong and that’s what provoked him. She’d have to be more careful.
Life went back to normal, and Neal was his old sweet self. A few days later, he announced they were going on their “honeymoon” to a place called Canyon Lake. He’d found a romantic little cabin in the hills where they could see the lake from the front porch. She was excited that they would be spending a whole ten days he’d somehow arranged, despite their lack of money, which seemed to have dried up when they left Washington, D.C.
The night they got to the cabin, though, he wanted to play the questions game again. He asked her another question about her sexual history. A small matter really, but she should have known better than to answer him honestly. Except that’s the way she’d been raised, and he’d said that for their relationship to work, they needed to always be honest with each other. So she answered truthfully, and this time found herself pinned against the wall with his hands around her throat before he pulled her to the ground and continued to throttle her. She got loose and ran from the bedroom into the living room where she hid behind the couch in a little ball. She heard him come out of the bedroom.
“Where is she?” a deep, angry voice asked. It was Neal, but a Neal she had never heard before. She quaked in fear. Not seeing her, Neal went out onto the porch and smoked a cigarette as he paced back and forth. She was obediently waiting for him, hoping he’d calmed down, when he came back in. Indeed, he acted like nothing had happened as far as what he’d done to her. It was all her fault; she had gotten what she deserved and would have to deal with the consequences.
Most of what she suffered through was emotional abuse. If she was five minutes late coming home from work, he’d want to know “who you’ve been fucking.” If she went to the swimming pool and a man stopped to talk to her, he’d somehow know and accuse her of having an affair. He was constantly testing her, but also setting her up to fail the tests. Sometimes he wanted her to doll up when they went out for a night on the town dancing. But if another man so much as said, “Hi,” and she responded, Neal would grab her by the arm, hard enough to bruise, and escort her out. “See how you are?” he’d sneer.
He’d cuss her for the smallest infractions, but it wasn’t always just talk when he got angry. He’d slap her with an open hand or shove her roughly. He couldn’t trust her, he’d say. But he had a quotation, something he’d read: No matter what she had done wrong, or how far she had gone down the wrong road, she could always turn back. “Turn back,” he’d tell her after she’d been punished for some new transgression.
Life with Neal would always have its ups and downs. Most of the time, so long as she did what he said and followed his rules, he was sweet Bill. But break his rules and there’d be hell to pay. The way he controlled all aspects of her life was insidious. He told her how he wanted her to dress. How to wear her hair. What to cook and when to cook it. He moved her like a puppet, but blinded by love, she took it as concern for her well-being.
Of course, none of the same rules applied to him. He came and went as he pleased, and once he got settled in, always seemed to have plenty of cash, though his only job was as the apartment complex’s maintenance man. That job seemed to take him out of the apartment at all sorts of strange hours. He’d get a call and say that he had to go fix some woman’s toilet. Later he’d come back, snickering about how the tenant met him in a negligee. “She just wanted to get in my pants.” She never asked if he had let her; she always trusted him. But as far as he was concerned, she couldn’t