Wendryn Doubt

Another week of the Indie Ink Writing Challenges. This week I challenged Lazidaisical, and my challenge this week came from Mare. My challenge is at the end of the post. This one is all fiction.

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Having mild OCD has its benefits at times. I can tell when someone has gone through my stuff. Today, I got home and everything was just a little off-balance. The books on the coffee table didn’t line up perfectly. A drawer was slightly open. The sugar and flour tins were switched. They have their places and they don’t get put back wrong. Once something is in the right place, it stays there. I called the cops and explained what I was seeing. They sent out an officer, but he seemed rather bored.

“So nothing was taken?”

“No. Things were just moved. I’ve looked through everything and it’s all still there.”

“I’m not sure what to say, ma’am. Unless something has been taken or damaged, there isn’t much we can do. Does anyone else have a key?”

“My mom, but she wouldn’t go through my stuff.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, though I could tell that he really wasn’t, “I can’t help much. We’ll keep this on file for you, though, in case anything else comes up.”

I bought new locks and had them installed that night. For the next week or two, there were no more strange events, so I chalked it up to the universe messing with me.  Then a friend of mine called and asked what story I was going to be in.

“What?”

“A reporter was over here asking questions. He said he was writing a story about you and needed some background information.”

“I’m an accountant and I don’t do anything particularly exciting. Why would anyone do a story on me?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m calling. He seemed nice enough. I didn’t tell him anything really private or anything, just that we grew up together. He knew where we grew up and what some of your old jobs had been, so whoever he is, he sure does his homework.”

“I really don’t know. Thanks for calling, though. Hey, want to get lunch sometime soon?”

The conversation wandered to other topics, but I was thinking about the filing cabinet that held all of my historical information: jobs, addresses, notes from friends. I knew where he’d done his research. After we got off the phone, I checked the cabinet. The files showed signs of having been examined.

The next day at work, my boss said that they didn’t generally encourage interaction with the press, but he was excited to hear what award I’d be getting. He asked if I was allowed to tell him.

I stepped into his office and sat down, shaking a little. I explained everything that had happened, including the fact that I wasn’t, so far as I knew, winning any awards or having anything written about me. My boss looked concerned.

“The cops can’t do anything unless something is really wrong, and I don’t know if anything is. Everything is just getting weird.”

He asked me to keep him up to date, said he’d call me if the reporter came back. I said that I was pretty sure he wouldn’t, but I certainly appreciated the thought.

This went on for another week, people calling to ask what was going on, excited about the prospect of knowing someone famous. The descriptions of the reporter varied, but all of the changes were things I knew could be done with makeup. There was always one feature that stood out, so the rest of his face was not memorable. A big, crooked nose dominated his face in one case and prominent cheekbones in another, so I didn’t actually know what he looked like.

I started worrying that I was being followed. I was afraid of my own shadow. I installed more locks, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was always nearby. It had been a month since someone had come into my house and looked through all of my things, and all I knew was that he was doing everything he could to get to know me better without actually talking to me.

I came into work a little early one morning and found a single red rose on my desk. That did not improve my day. The next morning it was a typed note. “You look good in blue. You should wear that suit more often.” He was talking about the suit I was wearing right then, which meant he saw me coming out of my house and he got to work before me. I called the cops and they dutifully bagged the evidence, but they didn’t find fingerprints or even any useful smudges.

Every morning there was something new. Coffee, made just as I like it, from my favorite coffee shop. A bagel with lox and cream cheese, freshly toasted. Tickets to a play I was considering attending. He was beginning to anticipate my moves, and I was beginning to be very afraid.

The final moment came just a few days ago. Sting’s “Every Breath You Take” was playing from my computer as I got to work, earlier than usual, hoping to catch him at whatever he was doing. Someone touched my shoulder, and as I turned I felt a blow to my head.

He took me with him to his house. He has me locked in a small room. I still haven’t seen his face, but that damn song, forever to be known as the stalker song, at least in my head, is always playing. He feeds me well, talking from the other side of the door about the idea he had for the food and how he makes it especially for me. He tells me I’m beautiful, that he can’t keep his mind off of me.

I asked why he hadn’t tried to get me to come on a date. He said, sadly, that it didn’t work that way.

I don’t know what he wants or what he’s waiting for, but I don’t think it’s going to be good for me.

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My challenge was “Someone wants to get to know you better, whether you want him to or not.”

In general, I try to respond fully to Indie Ink Writing Challenges. If one approach is not working, I try another tack until I can come up with something that works. This time, though, nothing really worked well, so I am just going to respond without trying to be creative or particularly interesting.

I challenged Head Ant, and my challenge this week came from Manju: “You stumbled into a time machine. What would you do?”

Short answer: destroy it.

I’ve read a lot of science fiction and fantasy over the years. There are basically two ways of looking at time (at least from the SF/F end of things). One is that every choice you make branches off another timeline, so every possibility exists in some alternate universe/timeline. It makes more sense if you think of it as tree branches, every fork in the branch being another choice. The other option is that there is only one time, only one truth, and that any changes you make will affect the world in ways you cannot imagine or comprehend. This is the idea that forms the basis for so many stories; someone goes back in time, changes a tiny thing, and when they come back the world is completely different.

In the first case, the tree branches, what you do with a time machine won’t really matter. You’ll be jumping to parallel possibilities, but another you will still be enduring whatever it is that you used the time machine to escape from. That has never made me very happy. In the second case, you can’t predict the changes that will occur when you “fix” something, and you may end up with a worse outcome than you had originally.

“Go back in time and kill Hitler before he can start the Holocaust!” What if another dictator pops up, even worse? “Stop the nuclear meltdown!” It could happen again, worse for the delay. “Warn people of the earthquake/tsunami/hurricane!” Ever heard of Cassandra? That didn’t work out too well. “Go back in time and make lots of money!” That would change my life in huge ways. It might be fun, but, at the same time, my life right now is good. It might hurt at times, and it is not perfect, but this is the life I, we, have built, and I don’t want to change it, especially not in unpredictable ways.

Nature abhors a vacuum. So does power in government. Unless you plan to keep going back and tweaking one tiny thing at a time, you don’t know what you’ll be changing or who you will be hurting by changing the past. You can’t see every sparrow fall. You don’t know if the overall picture will be better or worse. How do you know if you’ll have the time machine to go back and fix things once you return to the future that you’ve just changed?

Perhaps I am a coward, but I think we should deal with the world we have. We should do as much good as possible in our lifespan. Futzing with the past might change the present, but it won’t change human nature, and that is generally more dangerous than anything else.

The Indie Ink Writing Challenge this week had me rather stumped.

I challenged Sir, and my challenge this week comes from Cope. “A story written in the second-person about a day at work.” Luckily there wasn’t too much specificity; a day at my work would probably be good bedtime reading.

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You get dressed for the day, coveralls over basic clothes. Nothing fancy for this job. You drive to work, park, and walk inside.

The noise and smell hit you hard. The piles aren’t too big this early, but they always leave a stench behind. The trucks are starting to move out, engines roaring to life, workers clinging onto the sides, comfortable though slightly precarious looking. You head over to your truck, say hello to the others, and swing up to your position. The truck rumbles out the huge bay door and the day has begun.

You’ve gotten used to the smell over the years; the only time it gets to you is right when you walk in. Once you are on the truck, though, it isn’t too bad unless something really awful comes along. You yell over the engine to talk to your buddy standing next to you.

“How was your weekend?”

“Not bad. I caught a baseball game Sunday. They lost, and the umps were idiots. They called a guy safe when everyone saw that he wasn’t! What about you?”

“Normal stuff. Yardwork. We had a barbeque with a couple of my wife’s friends from work.”

The truck slows and stops, and you both jump down. You grab the can, hook it up to the lifter on the truck, and jog to the next one while your buddy puts the first can back. This street isn’t too bad today. The pile of diapers on top of one can is pretty nasty, but you’ve seen worse. One of the houses was just foreclosed and the fridge must have been full because there’s a mess of slimy stuff in one can. At least it’s done fast. There’s a torn up mattress by one can, a $20 pinned to the top, and you drop it in to the driver before dumping the mattress in. Nothing exciting so far.

You see a shining arc of glass bottles fly in from the next can and swear a little under your breath. That’s what the recycling bins are for, but some people are just too lazy to use them. They fill up the piles, though, and they could be reused. It always makes you a little angry that people can’t be bothered to take a couple of seconds to
rinse out a bottle and dump it in the container.

The morning goes fast, the rhythm of the work unbroken. You talk while you ride the truck, don’t bother when you’re pulling cans. You switch off every block so you aren’t always pulling the full ones.

Lunch. You strip off the top half of the coveralls and sit outside. There’s a picnic table in the middle of the dump. The trucks are offloading, getting ready for the afternoon run. Your sandwich is pretty good today, steak from the weekend barbeque.

The afternoon gets hot, the sun beating down. You’re working an upscale neighborhood now. You wonder sometimes about the stories behind the junk. The bloodstained towel, the rocking chair in pieces, the random bits of things that people throw away. You can tell which houses have children, dogs, vegetarians, meat eaters, drinkers, and people who like to cook by what they throw away, and you wonder if anyone ever thinks about the stories told by their garbage.

The day ends and you head home. There’s a plastic cover on the seat so you don’t have to think about the smell staying in the car. You drive with the windows down, enjoying the fresh air. You pull into the garage, lock the door, strip, shower, and drop your clothes in the wash. Just another day.

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My little brother used to love garbage trucks. I’m not sure why that matters.

Another week in the Indie Ink Writing Challenge! Nicollette challenged me this week. I challenged Miss Ash.
If you’d like to be part of the Indie Ink Writing Challenge, go to this page and sign up – we would love to have you involved!

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She sat on the porch, rocking, drinking cold lemonade. The glass was sweating under her fingers, and it started to slip as she tightened her fingers. Her granddaughter reached over and set the drink on the table.

“Smells bring back such vivid memories.”

“What are you remembering, grandma?”

“Every spring we’d go down to the creek at the bottom of the hill. The water was so cold that my teeth hurt when I stepped in. The first nice day of spring all of us and the cousins would finish morning chores and take off at a dead run to get there first. We’d wade in knee deep, watching our feet start to turn white, and we’d stay in until we couldn’t stand it. We’d run out and flop onto the bank, our feet aching with cold. I loved our first day of spring.”

“It isn’t spring, though. What summer memories were you thinking of?”

The old lady sighed. “One year there was a murder. Matt’s head…well, it wasn’t pretty. All of us found him. There was blood drifting through the water. That’s what we saw first. Then he was there, under water, eyes open, rocks scattered over him. We knew it wasn’t an accident. We stood on the bank and stared until Carrie started crying. Jimmy went to get help, then. We just sat down, not touching the water. We didn’t know what else to do.”

“Who killed him?”

“My brother.” She sighed again. “He was in love with Matt’s sweetheart, Em. Matt knew it and kept at him about it. I guess he pushed too hard. My brother was at home, doing his chores, when the police came. He went with them easily. Mama’s face was anger and sorrow and fear all wrapped up. They decided it was temporary insanity or some such. I didn’t see him again for years. Mama visited every week. When he came back he was very quiet.”

“You mean great uncle Jason? He was always so gentle, though!”

“Yes, Jason. The other boys just stayed out of his way. They used to look up to him, and I think when he came back and didn’t have that anymore it hurt him.”

“You stayed close.”

“I’m the only girl and he was always my protector. I never got over that.”

“What smell triggered this?”

“The scent of cotton blossoms. It always takes me back to blood in the creek.”

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My challenge this week was “The scent of cotton blossoms.”

My Indie Ink challenge this week brought up some difficult things. I wrote this as fiction because I can’t write it well as anything else yet, but this is pieces of reality from years ago. I was challenged by A Lil Irish Lass with the line “That was something you were never supposed to see.”

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“I just walked in on him. They were in our bed. How does he think that’s okay?”

“You’re in an open relationship. What’s the problem?”

“Apparently it’s possible to cheat in an open relationship. One of the rules we have is that we always know what’s going on with the other person. If he’d wanted to sleep with her and he’d talked to me about it, it would have been all right. I wouldn’t have understood, but I wouldn’t have objected. She’s tall, yes, and young, but not very bright, and her teeth are awful. Of course, so are his, so I suppose that doesn’t matter to him. I’m rambling about teeth while my boyfriend is screwing someone in my freaking bed.”

“They didn’t stop?”

“He looked up at me, more angry than anything else, got up, walked over to the door, shut it, and as he shut it, said, ‘That was something you were never supposed to see.’”

“That’s not good.”

“Would you please help me pack? I am not staying, and I know how bad he can get if he’s in a temper and doesn’t have an audience.”

“What do you mean? He’s always so sweet to you. I’ve seen you overreact a few times, but I’ve never seen him angry.”

I turned around and pulled up my shirt. The welts from a few nights ago that he’d applied so carefully after I had embarrassed him in front of his friends were still there, more bruised than red at this point. “He’s not sweet unless there’s an audience. I thought I could be good enough. I thought I was the problem. I thought, if I just worked hard enough, cooked well enough, was smart enough, he’d stop hurting me. In public he’s so nice. I thought it was my fault.” I pulled my shirt down and turned around. “I just realized how much I’ve come to depend on him for my sense of self. I’m with a man who can cheat in an open relationship and then get angry at me for it. If I go back without someone else coming along, I’ll pay for it tonight. I don’t think I can do that again.”

“I don’t even know what to say. I can’t imagine him being abusive to anyone. He’s so gentle. Everyone knows how kind he is!”

Tears were starting to leak out. “Where else would I get welts like that? It’s an open relationship on his side. The only times I’ve done anything were at his direction, and if I even flirted without his say-so he flipped his lid.”

“I just don’t believe it. You’re too smart to stay in an abusive relationship. The only people who would do that are stupid or desperate. He’s not that kind of guy, either. He’s sweet and sensitive and cares about people. I can’t believe you’d say that about him!” She left, angrily, slamming the door behind her.

I sat down on the floor, suddenly aware of how alone I had become in the years that he’d been separating me from my friends and working on his to make sure they had a particular view of the relationship. I probably wasn’t supposed to see that, either.

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Karla V. answered my challenge here.

I’m participating in the Indie Ink Writing Challenge, and this week Mean Girl Garage was my challenger. I, in turn, challenged Michael, who responded in a very interesting way.

My challenge was “Then the rain came down…” and this is what came out. I am rather enjoying writing fiction lately, so you get another odd little story.

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The water elemental rose up in front of her, knocking her off her feet. She scrambled up, knowing immediately that she only had one shot. She knelt down, aimed carefully, and held down the trigger. The adapted flamethrower erupted, covering all but the highest point of the elemental in flames. The elemental immediately disappeared into a cloud of steam.

She sighed, looked around, untangled her horse from a nearby tree where it had gotten caught while trying to run away, and rode into town, flamethrower securely stowed. The problem with using a car around an elemental was that so many things could go wrong. Horses were just easier.

Once the horse was settled and she had packed away all of her gear, she went to find food. The townspeople were eager to hear how she had vanquished such an impressive foe. She started by telling them of other elementals, how each needed to be handled differently, and then told the story of tracking this one and hunting it to its death. She had actually never taken down a water elemental before, but, as she had guessed, fire worked well. She finished talking and said she would be getting on her way.

As she left, she noticed that the clouds were darker than they had been earlier in the day. She shrugged and decided to ignore it. Having good raingear took care of many discomforts, and it was not more than an hour’s ride to home.

She saddled up the horse, packed up the gear, made sure she’d stay at least mostly dry, and headed out.

Then the rain came down…

No ordinary rain. This came in sheets, seemingly focused on her. She felt the water getting into every possible opening, and within a few minutes, despite being covered in the best rain protection she could buy, she was soaked. The horse was twitchy, clearly unhappy, and kept shifting and jumping.

“Easy. Not too far. We just have to get home.”

She was feeling somewhat uncomfortable, not in any definite way, so she decided to get off and walk the horse instead of riding. It had been a long day for him, too.

As soon as she got off, he settled down. She began slogging through the mud, and soon her feet were wet, too.

She felt an odd tightening on her skin, as if she were wearing too-tight clothes everywhere. Even her scalp felt like it was being compressed. The water began to move on her body, and she realized, suddenly, that steam was also a water elemental’s form. She hadn’t stopped it, just slowed it down a little.

As she fell, writhing, into the mud, she dropped the reins. The horse watched her without curiosity for a short while, then ambled towards home.

It’s time again for the Indie Ink Challenge! We started out with just the editors challenging each other, but decided that it would be more fun to open it up and see who wanted to join in. Ever week we are challenged by a different person. This week I’m being challenged by Andrea. I’ll post the prompt at the end of the story. I’ve never been much on writing fiction, but this was rather fun. My Plaid Pants answered my challenge on her blog.

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“Let us go somewhere romantic this weekend. A lake. Somewhere quiet, where it can be just us.” Her heavy Russian accent still charmed him.

“I think that’s a great idea, honeypie. I’ve got a tent and we’ll pick you up a sleeping bag. Y’know,” he wiggled his eyebrows suggestively, “one that’ll zip up with mine.”

She smiled at him. “Of course. If I am to be your wife, we need to get to know each other better. Too many people here.”

The next weekend they went camping. It was a beautiful spot, a small, quiet lake without too many mosquitoes, even in the middle of summer. She stayed wrapped in a voluminous dress with a large hat until sundown, and then she took off the dress and hat to reveal a swimsuit that covered everything necessary but no more. He looked at her in wonder.

“You look awful purty!”

“Thank you. I do try to take care of myself.”

“When I went on those internets to see if I could find me a wife, I kind of expected that she’d end up bein’ one of those gap-toothed ugly women, y’know? Somebody like you…damn, I hit the jackpot!”

She smiled, that same slightly reserved smile, but he didn’t notice.

“You go swim, and I’ll get the tent set up. Then you can show me how a good Russian wifey cooks for her man.” He wandered off in the direction of the truck, humming tunelessly.

After he set up the tent, he came to check on her. When she saw him coming she walked out of the water slowly, making sure that he was paying close attention. She dried herself off and began to work on dinner.

“That ain’t enough for both of us. I eat a lot. If you want food, you’d best make enough for yourself.”

“I will be fine. I am not terribly hungry. Yet.”

“Whatever. Just don’t think I let people take my food.”

She finished cooking and made sure he was settled in, packing away the food like he was starving.

“I’m going to get clothing on. I am slightly cold.”

“Whatever.” Still shoveling the food, he paid no attention as she walked away.

When he had finished eating, he leaned back in his chair, let out a satisfied sigh, and burped loudly. “Hey, you ain’t half bad as a cook. Maybe I will keep you around.” He patted his lap, looking around the campsite. “Come on, baby, time to get to know each other better.”

She was suddenly beside him. “Of course,” she purred. She settled onto his lap and twined her arms around his neck. “I am looking forward to my dinner now.”

He looked at her blankly. “What?”

“You are going to be my dinner. I am going to suck your blood.”

“Baby, if you want something to suck, I got it for you right here!” He grabbed his crotch suggestively, somewhat impeded by the fact that she was still on his lap.

A trace of irritation showed on her perfect features. “No. I will open your jugular and drain you. I am a vampire.”

He smiled broadly. “Oooh, you like playing games? I think you should be my teacher and hit me with a ruler. I don’t much like blood games.”

She snarled a little. “You are not sharpest marble in flock, are you? I am going to kill you by drinking your blood. I have never met a man so stupid as you!”

His grin started to fade. “You wanted to marry me. You don’t want to kill me, honeypie. You’re a sweet little thing.”

“Not sweet. Not at all. I did not live seven thousand years to be stopped by stupid man. I need food, and you are prey.”

A dawning realization began to creep across his face. “But…but…” he sputtered. He grabbed her, threw her away from him, and ran for the truck.

She laughed. “All tires are slashed. You will not go anywhere.” Her accent was getting thicker. “Come back, stupid little man. It is dinnertime.”

He ran for the woods, but she was suddenly there, still laughing. He lunged for her throat, hands outstretched, and found himself on the ground staring up at her. That sweet face was not quite human anymore, and she looked very hungry.

“Ah,” she said as she leaned down and traced her very sharp fingernail along his vein. “I have heard that here, you eat wife when you want her to be happy. I do not know what that means. In Russia, wife eat you.”

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The prompt was “Write a horror story or a comedy that includes a lake, internet dating, flat tires and bleeding.”

Some days.

Some days the exhaustion catches me unawares.

I work with children who are hurt and broken, who desperately want to feel loved but are terrified of it. I work with children who scream, kick, claw, bite, and are sometimes borderline feral. Not babies, not little ones, but 6, 8, 10 years old. They can do damage if you aren’t careful.

I drive home in the quiet at night, holding close the knowledge that I go home to peace. I have a hard time staying awake sometimes.

I get home to others needing things, but these are things I can do without thought. Feed the dog. Water the lawn. Wash dishes. Then my needs: brush teeth, braid hair, sleep.

If it hasn’t been too long of a day, I can read a little. If it has, I can barely keep my eyes open.

These children. Other peoples’ children. I love them, want them to be happy, but someday they will go home. I will most likely lose track of them then. It pulls the life out of me to watch them hurt so much, to watch them wish so hard for the people they love to pay attention to them, to think about them, to care about them.

I know the parents resent me. I spend time with their kids. I teach them to read, to cook, to enjoy little things, and they come back to their parents proud of what they’ve done. What parent wouldn’t resent that a little? These parents aren’t quite stable, sometimes, so the resentment comes out in nasty barbs, said to their children, aimed at me, thrown at me when children are angry. I know where they come from, but still, they sting a little.

I hold them, sing to them, make sure they know someone cares. I can give them that. I pay attention to who they are, what they like, how they interact. One is mostly only angry when tired. Another gets afraid and lashes out. Another just wants silence and can’t find it, even when there is no noise.

I can only help so much. I could not do this all the time. I need to be able to sleep away from their pain.

Sometimes the exhaustion catches up and I turn on the shower, sit down in the hot water, and let the warmth wash away the tears I shed for them. I sit sometimes until the hot water runs out, letting their stress and pain and anger and unhappiness run off of me.

I can’t build walls. They need to be loved. I am hurt without walls, though. I can only do this for so long.

I sing “Dona nobis pacem” to them. I tell them that it means “Grant us peace”. They don’t know that. Sometimes it is the only way I can reach them, holding them and singing until they can stop screaming and start remembering how to be calm again.

Their injuries are not on the surface. They are terrified of being left, being hurt, being shamed, being yelled at. They are afraid of being wrong, because wrong got them in trouble. They want so much to be accepted, but believe that they are unacceptable people.

There’s only so much I can do. I hope they remember the peace and that someone, somewhere, cares about them. I don’t know what they will remember, though. I can give them a joy in books, the pleasure of making something that tastes good, the knowledge to be able to come up with something to do when they are bored, and, possibly, a small bit of peace when they hear certain pieces of music, even if they don’t know where the peace comes from.

I let them go. They are not mine. I can just give them a little part of myself, and that will recover. They pull at my heart, though, even when they have gone home.

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

Worst line from a movie. Ever.

The reason it’s the worst line from a movie is that there are people out there, both men and women, who actually believe that. They think that love is all about forgiveness and forgetfulness, especially if it’s the other person doing the forgiving and the forgetting. If you ask them to forgive or forget, though, you are asking too much.

I can kind of get behind forgiveness. I mean, people are people, and people screw up sometimes. You can remember something, though, without having to grind it in every day. You can’t completely forget something without running the risk of becoming a doormat.

I have a story to tell. About a friend. Yeah, I know. “A friend” is about as transparent as it gets. This is a conglomeration of people, though, not just one person, and not just me. I was in a bad relationship for a long time. I left. Life is very good now. That’s all that matters, for the purpose of this story.

I’m going to go with the guy being the abuser. It doesn’t always work that way, I know, but it’s the easiest way for me to tell it. I have heard a lot of these stories, and some of them end well. Many, though, don’t.

Girl meets boy. Boy is much more experienced. He seems very sweet at first, woos her, pays attention to all of her likes and dislikes, and makes sure not to push too hard. He asks her to move in with him. She refuses at first, then eventually gives in. Life is wonderful for a little while. After the honeymoon period is over, he starts getting more critical. He isn’t necessarily critical of her, at least not at this point. He’s critical of her friends. He doesn’t say they are bad. He just suggests that maybe she could do better. He points out any deficiencies, tells her they are not really good enough for her, and makes a point of complaining about any time she spends with them. If he spends time with them, too, he is the center of attention or he is not happy, and when they leave, he tells her all of the things they did that were unkind to him.

If he’s good at it, he undermines all of her friendships. If she’s really lucky, she keeps a few friends.

She loses touch with her family. Every time she wants to call them, there’s something he urgently needs from her. If there isn’t something he needs, sometimes he’ll just ask for sex, saying it has been a while and he misses her. Over time, she will not talk to her family much.

When she is sufficiently separated from her support structure, he begins tearing her down. He compares her to his previous girlfriends, and she always comes out badly. He compares her to people they meet, people who still have the glow of newness and unfamiliarity on them, and she never comes out looking good. “Why can’t you be more like…” becomes the beginning to a lot of questions, and she doesn’t have an answer. She thought they were doing all right, but she begins to doubt, thinks, perhaps, that she is not doing enough.

He wants her to quit her job. She has support there, too, and it threatens him. Maybe he offers to help her get through school, because school and work are hard to do well at the same time, and she could do so much better with more education. If she refuses, he starts complaining about the time her job takes away from their relationship. He tells her their friends look down on him for having such an uneducated girlfriend. He pushes constantly, calls her at work, says he misses her, and the quality of her work starts degrading, just slightly, because she can’t focus like she used to.

Maybe she’s one of the strong ones. She keeps her job, her lifeline to feeling less lost.

If she goes back to school, that, too, will eventually take up too much time. Either that or it will be a waste because her grades aren’t perfect and he doesn’t see why he should keep paying for it if she’s not serious. If she tries to do homework at home, he tries everything to distract her. “Let’s go out to dinner!” “We haven’t seen our buddies in ages – let’s go play pool. It won’t take long, you’ll have time to study.” As soon as she sits down, he comes up with something. If she objects, he gets angry, says she clearly doesn’t care as much about the relationship as he does. He’s putting her through school and now school is more important than he is. He works to make her feel indebted to him even more.

If she stays at school to study, he is not supportive. He says she doesn’t feel like the house is home, clearly, as evidenced by the fact that she doesn’t want to study there, to spend time with him at the same time she’s studying. Oh, and the house is never clean enough or decorated nicely enough, which is her fault, because she clearly just doesn’t care enough about the relationship. It’s always something.

The pattern, no matter the specifics, are that he gradually pulls control away from her, gets rid of all of her support, and then makes sure she feels unsure and afraid of everything. He sets himself up as the only sure thing in her life, even if his presence constantly hurts her. She believes that she isn’t doing something well enough. If she could do things right, he’d be happy.

That’s the key to this whole thing. He gets her into a position of wanting to please him, then he is impossible to please. He has power. She doesn’t. If she makes the mistake of being proud or happy about anything, he tries to make it look useless. He works on making her feel like nothing she does is good enough.

This is where the story stops, because it can go a few different ways.

One: she gets help – family, friends, a therapist, whatever. Someone gets through to her that she’s better than this, that he’s cruel and controlling.

Two: she stays, and eventually he has complete control. No one knows her as anything other than his shadow, and she has nowhere to go.

Three: it gets worse. He starts hitting her, and she defends him. He makes fun of her in front of other people and she supports him. Eventually, perhaps, she ends up in the hospital, or worse.

This last bit isn’t a story.

You may know someone in an abusive relationship. You might not know it, though, because abusers are very good at hiding who they are. They can look like perfectly nice people.

If you have time, volunteer at a women’s shelter. Help out at a crisis call center. Become part of the solution. If you see yourself reflected in this portrait of an abuser, get help. It’s possible to change, but you have to want to change and stop hurting people.

Most important, though, if someone asks for your help, try to give it to them. They may need you more than you can imagine.

He watched her wrap her tongue around it, licking it, clearly relishing the sensation. She made a noise of enjoyment deep in her throat and he shivered a little.

She sucked, licked around the base, then sucked again, passionately.

She stopped, took a deep breath, licked from the bottom all the way to the top, then back down and around and up. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her.

She breathed in as she licked, slurping a little. His breath shortened.

She started sucking in earnest, stopping now and again to lick the base and wrap her tongue carefully around its rigidity. His breathing grew rough.

She finally finished, licking up the last few drops.

She looked up at him between her lashes, teasingly.

“What? I like popsicles!”