Or even worse—what if they report me to the police?
Tommy’s a cop and a police sergeant at that. If I show up on some station’s arrest report, he’ll track me down and then….
I flinch, remembering the closed fist he slammed into my chest after he found the birth control pills I’d kept hidden in my tampon box.
Tommy had hit me for no real reason before, but this time he had the right to be mad. We’d been living together for almost two years, and I’d never gone off birth control like I said I would when he proposed.
I hadn’t meant to lie to him for so long. I guess I’d been waiting to feel more certain about our relationship. Waiting, as if that warm, secure feeling I’d always dreamed of was a train, due any day now into my station.
But that train had never arrived. And when Tommy found out I had only been pretending to be off birth control, he completely lost it.
He always made sure not to touch my face when he hit me, but he must have done something to knock me unconscious this time. Or maybe I’d just passed out from the pain. Whatever the reason, I’d woken up the next morning battered and bruised. And though nothing was broken, I found it hard to breathe.
Bruised ribs, I figured out later via the internet.
Tommy had come home from his shift that night, his eyes full of tears and apologies. He’d tended to me and ordered us Chinese food, even though he didn’t like it. After dinner, he put me in a bath and helped me get dressed in one of the lacy camisoles he’d brought me.
Then he kissed me gently and…I guess you could call what happened after that, making love. It had been so long since we had sex, it was hard to tell what was love and what was apology.
Tommy was too stressed out a lot of times to make love. Unlike me, he had a job. He was usually drained by the end of the worked day, and on weekends, he just wanted to veg and watch sports. If I pressed him too much for sex, he’d turned me down. Or say things like, “That’s what I get for proposing to such a slut.”
I hated it when he called me that.
Sometimes Tommy acted like I was the greatest thing that ever happened to him. He loved taking me to parties and dinners and pretty much anywhere he could show me off to his friends. In public, he kept an arm around my waist, made sure my drink cup was always full and played the part of the devoted boyfriend. In public, he said and did all the right things.
That was why I’d been so excited when he dropped down to one knee and held out a ring two Christmases ago, right after I gave into his ultimatum about quitting my job at Magic Peaches.
Tommy had a steady career and an eye toward the future. When we met, he already owned a three-bedroom house in a great school district. And he’d told me on our first date that he wanted to fill it with a large family Just like the one he had growing up.
“You ain’t real Boston Catholic unless you got at least two people living in every bedroom of the house,” he’d joked.
It had just been my Canadian mom and me after my dad abandoned us, so Tommy’s childhood had been the exact opposite of mine. And I loved the idea of becoming a mother to a squad of at least four kids. Family…somehow I came to treasure Tommy’s vision even more than my own dream of becoming an interior designer.
So, it had felt like a fairytale ending when Tommy proposed to me. And yeah, sure, a lot of angry fights had preceded that moment. Tommy yelled a lot and whined even more when he didn’t get his way. Cynda had called him “controlling as a big dog” in that direct Missouri accent of hers on more than one occasion. To the point that I stopped telling her and my other best friend Billie Tommy stories.
They hadn’t understood why he was always getting upset with me. I thought Cynda, who didn’t really do boyfriends for longer than a month or two, was just being judgmental. He only yelled and became enraged on a dime because he was passionate and insecure when it came to me. That’s what I told myself. That’s what he told me.
“I don’t know what I did to have a beautiful angel like you fall into my lap,” he admitted to me when he was apologizing for one of our earlier fights. “I mean, you were a state beauty queen. You got all these guys panting over you. Sometimes I just find it too hard to believe you’d be faithful to a tool like me.”