“I’m not going to judge you, Ava,” he said softly. “I’m just listening.”
“I didn’t have to explain things to him about my family—all the weird things that no one else understands—so it felt good to be with him, and after a few weeks, it just felt like we were supposed to be together,” I had never admitted that to anyone, not even to myself. “But I knew there was something off about him. In the first couple of weeks we’d been seeing each other, he’d gotten arrested for fighting with another guy at a frat party, and once he was released from jail, he’d disappeared for a few days. When he came back, he just said he’d been ‘summoned home by the big guy,’ which was our code for when one of our fathers wanted to have a word with us. We lived in a cocoon; buffered by money and our shared isolation, but I liked him because he paid attention to me—close attention—and he was nothing like my father.”
As I’d begun telling my story, Brian had backed up and given me some space. He now sat with his back against the headboard, his arm resting on his bent knee while his other leg hung off the side of the bed. It was a constructed pose that was designed to look very casual and relaxed, but the tension in his jaw told me otherwise.
“It started small; he’d joke about summoning me home and I’d show up at his apartment.” I cringed as I began telling the story of the slow and steady descent into the darkness of our relationship. “But if I didn’t show up quickly, he’d pepper me with texts and phone calls asking where I’d been and who I’d been with. He said it was because he was worried about me and he wanted to make sure I was safe.”
Brian nodded as he connected the dots between his presence and my resistance to the whole safety routine. I wasn’t sure how much of the rest of the story I wanted to tell him, but when I looked up at him he said, “Tell the truth, Ava. Just tell the truth.”
“I was flattered by his attention. My whole life I had felt like an inconvenience to my parents. They’d shipped me off to boarding school in third grade, and I hadn’t lived in any house for more than a month at a time; often times, my parents weren’t even there. It was just me and the staff, and maybe a friend or two if they weren’t traveling with their own families,” I explained as the sadness crept up and wound itself around me. “Dominic was always there. He’d call me in the middle of the night just to tell me he missed me or he’d drop by my classroom to give me flowers or tell me a story about his day. There wasn’t anything menacing about it at all. He looked out for me and took care of me in a way that my parents had never done, and I felt…loved. I know that sounds ridiculous to someone who grew up with parents who loved them, probably like yours did, right?”
I looked over at Brian as he nodded slowly and then shifted his gaze away from my face. There was something going on, but I was too deep into my story to stop and find out, so I continued.
“Halfway through our second semester, I moved out of the dorm and into his apartment,” I shifted my body so that my knees were drawn up to my chest with my arms tightly wrapped around them. I felt as if I were standing on the edge of a terrifying abyss, as I had never told anyone what I was about to tell Brian. “Dominic was so sweet when I moved in. He took me shopping for all our household items and we picked out new bedding and sheets and towels. It was like we were married. And he was so attentive and kind in those first new days that I didn’t notice the change. Have you ever been to a lobster boil, Brian?”
“No?” he replied with a perplexed look on his face. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“If you really want to boil a lobster the right way, do you know how you do it?” I asked quietly.
“I really hadn’t thought about it,” he said.
“You put the heat on low, put the lobsters in the pot, and then gradually raise the temperature until the water boils,” I explained in a soft voice. “That way they don’t know what’s happening until it’s too late.”
Surprise and recognition flashed across Brian’s face as he processed the story I was telling, then he nodded and said, “I imagine it’s more humane for the lobsters, right?”
“Maybe, but I’ve always thought it was tremendously sad to betray them that way; to use what they are familiar with to end their lives,” I sighed. “It feels horribly sad.”
“Yes, I imagine when you look at it that way, it is sad,” he echoed.
“As time went on, he got more and more possessive, but I was too blind to see that it was because the temperature was being turned up all around me,” my voice broke a little. “I would come home and find him pacing the apartment, worried to death that something had happened to me, so I’d comfort him and make sure he was okay, and that usually meant having sex. I got to be an expert at knowing exactly what kind of mood he’d be in depending on the text or phone call, and then I’d know precisely what I’d have to do when I got home. In some ways it was really easy because he was so predictable, but that also made him so much more dangerous. About three months after I’d moved in was the first time he hit me.”
“He hit you?” Brian’s voice was calm, but his jaw was tight and tense.
“He did, but he always made it seem like it was my fault. He would explain it as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and I’d find myself agreeing with him,” I said. “The memory of that first night is the most painful one because, in retrospect, I can see where it was all headed, but at the time, I was too naive and trusting. He’d followed me around campus that day, and he found me in the quad talking with a guy from my Chem class. He wasn’t someone I’d ever talked to before, and we had been double-checking our study guides because we had an exam coming up. Dominic showed up on the quad and ‘caught’ us. I introduced him and told him what we were doing, and he was so incredibly charming and funny that I didn’t give it another thought. In fact, I remember thinking how lucky I was to have a boyfriend who was so friendly and warm. What a fool I was.”
“So, he shows up and acts all nice to the guy, and then what?” Brian probed.
“When I got home later that afternoon, all hell broke loose,” I looked down, dropped one arm, and began picking at the bedspread. “He was in a rage. He interrogated me about the guy on the quad—Dave? Doug? I can’t even remember his name now. Anyway, he accused me of sneaking around behind his back and seeing other guys. I was shocked because that had never even occurred to me. Not once. I was happy with him, and happy in our home together, and I told him that, but he refused to believe me. He went on and on about how I was betraying him while I tried my best to show him all the ways in which I wasn’t. That’s when I started to get mad and tell him that if he didn’t believe me, then maybe I should leave. Big mistake.”
“Why? What happened?”
“The minute I said I was going to leave, he lunged at me, grabbed my arm, and gripped me so tightly that I had an imprint of his hand on my bicep for a week. He shook me and told me never ever to tell him that I was leaving again. He said that I couldn’t leave him, that he was the only one in the world who would ever love me this much and that no one else would want a girl whose father didn’t love
her because it meant that she was damaged and worthless.” My voice was shaking as I repeated the words that had played over and over in my head for the past year. I’d never told anyone what Dominic had said, but I’d played his voice back again and again, wondering if he had been right about me. “When I started crying, he yelled at me to shut up and stop being such a stupid baby, and when I didn’t, he…”
“He what, Ava?” Brian’s voice was low and gentle. “What did he do?”
“He slapped me across the face and then told me to go wash my face and get dinner started or there would be hell to pay.” My breath was coming fast and rapid as I remembered. “It was the first time Dominic had shown his ugly side, but it was far from the last. And it got worse; so much worse, but after every episode, he’d cry and apologize and tell me he only got jealous because he loved me so much and was so afraid of losing me. He would shower me with gifts and flowers, and we’d take a trip together or go shopping for something new for the apartment. He was always so incredibly kind and sweet after one of his outbursts, and I was confused. I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong because I wasn’t doing anything. It got to the point where I didn’t even want to go to classes anymore because I was afraid of what would happen if someone tried to talk to me in class. I was scared and paranoid and totally dependent on him.”
“What a total asshole,” Brian quietly fumed. “He blamed his own insecurity on you and used it to keep you prisoner.”
“You know, this morning we were talking about Stockholm Syndrome in my Psych class, and I felt this cold wave of fear wash over me. That was me. I totally identified with him and felt sorry for him because he’d had such an awful upbringing,” I explained. “He’d been raised by a father who was practically a drill sergeant, and who had terrorized his kids with exercises at dawn and long runs in the middle of the hot California summer. It was brutal, and he had been totally traumatized by it, so I felt bad for him.”
“Lots of people are traumatized by jerks like his father,” Brian grumbled. “But they don’t become psychopathic abusers.”
“Look, I’m not excusing him, I’m just saying that he had problems to begin with, and I made the perfect target for his rage,” I continued. “It got worse, to the point that there was a period of about month when I didn’t leave the apartment at all. I curled up in the bedroom and ignored everyone except Dominic, who would call or text every 15 minutes just to make sure I hadn’t gone anywhere with anyone.”
“Jesus, he kept you a prisoner!” Brian shouted as he jumped off the bed and began pacing the room.