Once Bitten, Forever Smitten

He called me 'punkin' again. I rolled my eyes and threw a pillow at his face.
"What?" he asked. His eyes sparkled with his laughter, blue and dancing. His hair was a mess around his face. He rolled around the bed until the sheets came loose around the mattress, while I inched away from him, sitting on a corner of the bed.
"Jeez, Jason," I said. "You're so pathetic."
"Why?"
"Well, in the last twenty minutes you've slipped twenty I love yous and four punkins into the conversation. It's making me ill."
"Oh, Jeanne," he said, rolling over til he sat up and looked at me. "One day, I'm going to do the same thing to you that you do to me."
I rolled my eyes. "God, I hope not. If I start to act that way, put me out of my misery!"
"Oh, really," he said, raised an eyebrow. Then, before I could react, he lunged at me and grabbed me around the waist, pulling me down to the mattress with him. I tried to wiggle out from him, but he was bigger and stronger. He laughed in my ear as I fought. "Give," he whispered. "Go on, say it."
"Okay, okay!" I said. "I give." I could feel him breathing against the back of my neck.
"Jeanne, Jeanne," he said into my ear, one arm still thrown over my shoulder, holding me there. He reached up with one finger and traced the scar over my eye and eyebrow. I closed my eye, breathing in.
Jason always smelled like ivory soap and fresh air. "You're such a pain in the ass," he whispered to me, "but I love you anyway."
"Likewise," I said. We were going to be late for dinner with his parents if we didn't leave then. We didn't care.

The two weeks that followed dinner at his parents' house were hard. His brother fell ill in Ireland, and was in the hospital. Jase left immediately. I would have gone with him, but I had just started teaching a class of Kindergarteners, and it was mid-September. Fresh out of my T.A. days, and I had to save sick days to take care of my own sick mother, whose health was failing at the time.

Jase came to my apartment around 7 o'clock, without calling and fresh from a cab from the airport, nearly tripping over the pair of two-inch black heels I had abandoned at the front door. I had learned that day, the hard way, that heels weren't the prefered footware for chasing after five-year-olds for six hours.

"I miss you," he said, arms snaking around me to hold me. I found my face burning, and I couldn't look at him. He seemed confused by my reaction. For some reason, he pulled down the collar of my turtleneck - I wore it despite the unnatural bout of heat the city was having. And he saw the perfect ring of teethmarks around my collarbone and throat.

It would have been easier if he had just started to scream at me. At that moment, I wished he would hit me, call me a whore, tell me he wanted out of our relationship. Hell, he could have just marched out the door without a word and made things easier on me. Instead, he just stood there staring at me, like there was nothing else he could do.

I was cheating on the man who called me angel while he made love to me, with the man who called me bitch while he fucked me.

I am a cunt.