I found out the hard way

He would show me off. I wasn’t used to that. No man had ever done that before. Out in front of the bar, off smoking somewhere completely unaware of his gaze, he’d tilt his chin in my direction and say, “I’ve got that” to his buddies. He’d brag about me. I never thought I was a catch but he’d make me feel like one. Tell them details, so many that they knew what it was like to have sex with me. What I did well, maybe even what I didn’t. But then he’d pull me to him and make me look him in the eye.
“Look at me,” he’d always say. “I want you to look at me. What we’ve got, it’s real. You know that, I know that. Tell me you understand.”
“I understand.”
“Tell me you agree.”
“I agree.”

I liked it when he told me what to do.

He’d tell me he was a terrible liar and then lie to my face immediately after. Sometimes I knew, sometimes I didn’t. And sometimes he’d be shockingly forthcoming. Like when I noticed the blood stain on his sheets was finally gone; he told me he had to wash his sheets because he pissed the bed. “Don’t worry, I flipped the mattress,” he assured me. He would try to hide the drugs from me, then confide in me he ate speed every day. He tried to hide the drinking and then whispered in a lost moment, “No one knows how much I drink. They think they know, but they have no idea. I am going to die soon if I don’t stop.” He said he didn’t answer his phone because he was on a bender and he didn’t want me to see him like that but then I’d hear he was out with another girl. I started to question everything he told me. Had he even pissed the bed? Maybe he lied about that, needing an excuse I wouldn’t question for washing the sheets when he swore he would keep them like a trophy. Maybe he washed them because someone else was sharing time on that dirty mattress on the floor. His roommate kept forgetting my name even though I was there four or more nights a week. Maybe she was confusing me with someone else.

When it came to it he told me there were others and that he hoped I knew and I lied and told him there were others too but in truth I only went there when I was sure he already had.
“I wonder if I should be discreet when I am out with other girls. I wonder if you’ll find out and it will hurt your feelings but then I wonder if I am worrying about your feelings and sneaking around with other girls that would make you my girlfriend. And I don’t want a girlfriend.”
“I hear things. People tell me things, when they see you with someone else.”
“I wish they wouldn’t.”
“So do I, I’d rather not know.”
“And you’re okay with it?”
“I have to be.”
“You don’t have to be, but it’s not going to change. I told you I was fucked up.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
“If I were to ask you right now to be my woman would you say yes?”
“No. I wouldn’t be your woman. I’d never trust you and you’d never do right by me.”
“So why are you still here?”
“Why do you want me here?”
“I don’t know why I need to go out with other girls. To take some stupid girl out to dinner who I don’t find interesting or even that pretty when I’ve got the most beautiful girl I’ve ever been with dying to spend time with me.”
“Maybe it’s because I’m always there when you want me.”
“What kind of girl is okay with her man fucking a bunch of other girls?”

I could feel every twist and turn, every thoughtful manipulation, every appeal to my vanity. “They other girls, they don’t look like you. They don’t fuck like you either.”
Devilish whispers in my ear, tightening the reigns to maintain control just before the release which was imminent. I stayed obedient, kept it coming. Kept holding on to the bedroom. Needing my emotions to find a release through my body and he could bring that release like no other man I’d known. Fucking away from one kind of pain and into another. Night after night after day after day. Hours into hours, he’d be so fucked up he couldn’t come but he’d always get it up. And he would be determined and I’d let him until I couldn’t walk straight the next day. But I felt the punishment was fair and I was deserving. And when he wasn’t around I’d turn on myself. And I would go inward to find that pain, releasing everything my body had taken in, trying to find salvation but only finding exhaustion.