Cary Read online

  “Faith and purpose wasn’t what you found in Mexico?”

  “I found Raúl.”

  “Shit. A story is never good that starts with a man, is it?” he asked, trying to give me a smirk, but it fell quickly.

  “Not in my history anyway,” I admitted.

  “How’d you meet Raúl?”

  “I was getting lunch,” I recalled.

  I’d only been in the area for six weeks. I had barely managed to learn enough Spanish to actually order my favorite types of food, but not enough to help me understand what the lady behind the counter was trying to tell me about what I’d ordered.

  All I could do was apologize and get more and more anxious about being that person, the one who expected everyone to accommodate her, to speak her language even when I was in their country.

  “She is telling you they are out of salsa,” a deep, rich, masculine voice had said at my side, making me turn to find a handsome tanned-skinned, black-haired man in a suit, despite the heat, looking at me. “And asking if the Pica de Gallo is okay.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a problem. But I just… I don’t know the difference,” I’d told him.

  “How is it a problem to not know what you like?” he’d said, shrugging, making me immediately feel like less of the pain-in-the-ass foreigner. “They’re basically the same ingredients,” he’d gone on. “But salsa is more liquid. The Pico de Gallo is just finally chopped instead of pureed.”

  “Oh, okay. Then yes. Sí,” I said, giving the lady at the counter a smile. “Gracias,” I added, first to her, then to the man who’d helped me from embarrassing myself further. Or, in lieu of that, having an empty stomach because I couldn’t figure it out.

  What can I say? I was a recently divorced woman coming out of what turned out to be a loveless marriage with a man who only saw my worth as a home keeper and a womb to carry his children, not as a woman, least of all a person.

  So when this stranger, this handsome and seemingly kind stranger let his gaze do a slow once-over of a body that had mostly been a source of shame and disappointment, I couldn’t seem to stop the way not only my body—but my mind—warmed.

  I’d never really experienced before the way my skin flushed under his inspection, like each inch of my body got a slight sunburn from the intensity of the heat in his eyes.

  In quiet, bitter moments in the years that followed, I tried to convince myself that the flush, that the warmth, was simply from the chronic mild sunburn I’d been sporting since I arrived in Mexico.

  But I knew the truth.

  That, in the beginning, I’d been really taken by the man who would turn my life into a living hell.

  I’d been naive.

  I’d been wounded in ways I hadn’t fully acknowledged—let alone worked through—yet.

  And there was Raúl.

  With his calm, confident demeanor, with his deep voice and good-looking face.

  And, most of all, his interest.

  He’d been interested in me.

  Not as a womb or a homemaker.

  As a person.

  As a woman.

  I knew from my raising that I wasn’t supposed to like that, to be happy about it. The body was a vessel for the soul; it was sinful to take too much pride in it, to want attention for it.

  In my little world I’d been raised in, the only pride you were supposed to feel about your body was the kind of pride that came with keeping yourself clean, healthy, and modest.

  Sexuality was only something to feel within the confines of your marriage. And even then, not too much. We women were taught to be “open” to “receiving” our husbands on demand, no matter how we felt. But we were also told that sexual intimacy, for us, was something to be endured, never enjoyed.

  My marriage proved that to be true.

  Within a week after our vows had been spoken, anything close to attraction or sexual interest I’d once felt as a healthy young woman disappeared.

  Sex, to me, had been uncomfortable and embarrassing at best. At worst—and there were many times that it was at worst—it was painful and degrading.

  There had been more than a few times when my husband had rolled off of me mid-deed with a loud grumble as he declared that I “didn’t feel good.” I was embarrassed to admit that I had no idea what he meant until I did some discreet research when he hadn’t been home and realized that when a woman was ready to receive a man, her sex got wet and slick, making things feel better for him.

  The problem was, I couldn’t help that I didn’t have those feelings for him, that my body didn’t just automatically do what he wanted it to do.

  Those same articles said that artificial lubrication could be used. I knew better than to even suggest that. First, because I wasn’t even sure I could form those words. Second, because a part of me was terrified that he would think I was saying he was doing something wrong, and I didn’t want to know what the consequences would be from that.

  The other option the article suggested was to do a little… self-touching before your partner was ready for sex.

  That was out as well since it went against our beliefs to masturbate.

  So I was stuck with my husband and the uncomfortable or painful sex that seemed to dissolve anything sexual about my being.

  Until Raúl looked at me like he was a hungry man and my body was a feast.

  Despite my upbringing and the beliefs that had very much been a part of me at the time, there was no mistaking the way my body trembled inside when Raúl’s hand had grazed my lower back as he held the door open for me with the other, leading me out toward the seating area out front, and dropping down across from me without being invited.

  “He’d spent the afternoon asking me all kinds of questions about myself,” I told Cary, only half in the present moment, a part of me stuck in the past, in the bittersweet memories of those early days. “No one had really been so interested in me before.” At the strange throat-clearing sound Cary made, I shook my head. “Aside from you,” I agreed. “But face-to-face, that had been a first for me.”

  “So, you two started something up,” Cary guessed, his gaze going down to my plate then up again in a silent demand that I continue to eat.

  “So, we started something up,” I agreed. “Though, at the time, I’d tried to tell myself that I was trying to, you know, teach him about my faith, bring him into the fold.”

  It was the most half-assed lie I’d ever told myself. Because I knew that we never once actually discussed faith or religion those long, lingering afternoons when he would take me to lunch, then walk me around the area, showing me the sights and buying anything that had caught my interest.

  I’d never received a present from a man before.

  That would have required my father or husband to have actually thought about me when I wasn’t standing right there in front of them. And, well, both those men in my life were of the strong belief that you should never “spoil” your wife or children.

  I’d become particularly obsessed with this little necklace he’d gotten me from a little shop. They’d had a million of them hanging in the window. Just thin black strings with a single bead hanging from them. A blue circle with a white inner circle and a little black dot.

  To ward off the evil eye, he’d told me, a strange light in his eyes that I hadn’t really understood at the time. In fact, I’d convinced myself it was just joy at gifting me something that I’d been so appreciative of.

  “It took a long time for me to realize that he’d thought of it as a joke of sorts. Since he was the evil in my life. And no little amulet was going to keep him away from me,” I told Cary, sighing.

  I didn’t tell Cary, because it was just a bit too humiliating to admit, that I would curl up on my side in bed at night and stroke the pad of my thumb over the eye while I thought about the man who’d given it to me.

  “It wasn’t long before he started to lay it on thick. So many compliments. So much interest.”

  “Love-bombin
g,” Cary cut in.

  “Yeah, exactly.” I hadn’t known the word at the time, or what it meant, or that abusers almost always did it at the beginning to get you hooked, and then often after each abusive episode, to keep you with them.

  But it was the perfect way to describe it.

  Love-bombing.

  If you had asked me then, I would have told you that I was pretty sure no man had ever been as infatuated with a woman as Raúl had been with me.

  So much so that I threw all of my upbringing and personal traumas and insecurities out the window one night on a blanket under the stars and let him undress me, let him be intimate with me.

  It hadn’t been like it had with my ex-husband. Yes, there was insecurity. And, yes, uncertainty. But for the first time ever, my body had warmed and grown ready. There hadn’t been pain or even discomfort. There hadn’t been any sort of fireworks, either. Raúl proved just as quick a partner as my ex had been.

  Despite that, though, it had been a sort of revelation for me, despite the fact that I hadn’t experienced that so-called pleasure that they claimed a woman could feel with a man.

  It didn’t matter. It hadn’t felt bad. And it had felt intense and intimate.

  That had been enough for me.

  I was pretty sure I fell head-over-heels for him when he rolled off to my side, curled me into him, then stroked a hand through my hair as he murmured things to me in Spanish that I only half-understood. But I knew enough to know they were sweet words, ones of praise and adoration.

  I’d eaten it up.

  “I moved in with him not more than two weeks later,” I admitted to Cary, feeling the food lose its taste in my mouth.

  Had I just been a little more careful, a little more patient. Maybe all that happened after could have been avoided. Maybe he would have shown me his true colors before it was too late for me to get away.

  “Hey,” Cary said, waiting for my gaze to lift to his. “You can’t blame your past self for not knowing any better. You didn’t have those kinds of tools then.”

  That was fair.

  But I wasn’t quite as forgiving of myself as he was willing to be of me.

  “I should have seen the signs.”

  “Love, maybe there weren’t any signs,” Cary suggested. “Serial abusers get to that point because they are good at it. They’re master liars. They know all the right things to say and do. To their victims, they would just come off as a man in love. And to a woman who hadn’t really known that, can you really blame a much younger version of yourself for wanting to believe it?”

  “You’re right,” I said, exhaling hard.

  No one had given me a relationship common sense toolkit. Because, to my family, my future was always going to involve me settling down with a man they approved of. And then nothing that happened to me at that man’s hands was any of their business, was well within his rights as my husband. Up to and involving mental, physical, and sexual abuse.

  That was just how it was, how it had been for generations.

  No one taught their daughters to be on the lookout for a good man. Our fathers would do that for us.

  “To be kind to that version of myself,” I went on, “things were good at the beginning. Raúl, as it turned out, had a massive home and sprawling grounds, had everything that money could buy.”

  “Fuck,” Cary hissed, reaching up to rub a hand over his beard. “I think I know where this is going.”

  “Well, I didn’t,” I admitted. “To me, he was just a successful businessman. I didn’t even second-guess all the bodyguards around with guns. I figured that if you were a man of so much wealth, of course people would want to come for what you had, would be a threat to your safety.”

  In the beginning, I’d been vain enough to think it was a sign of my own worth, to be attached to a man like Raúl.

  “Did you ever ask what he did for a living?” Cary asked.

  “Of course. He’d told me distribution,” I admitted with a little snort. “That had just gone over my head. I was more than a little taken with all the lovely things around, all the fancy dinners, the nice clothes he got for me. It didn’t even faze me that he slowly but surely started to choose all of my clothes, and tell me which ones to wear.”

  It didn’t even occur to me, either, that he also took control over my diet. I think, at the time, I figured the chef at his home just made what he made, and that was what we all ate. It took me months to realize everyone else was getting eggs and meat and potatoes for breakfast. While I had nonfat yogurt and fruit. Maybe, if I was really lucky, a little granola to go with that.

  “The weight started to fall off within three months of moving in there. And I didn’t want to rock the boat, so I never complained about being hungry.” Though, yeah, a part of me knew there was no way he didn’t hear my stomach growling all the time.

  “Why do you think he starved you? Just for control?”

  “I’m sure that was part of it. But I think it was more than that. He liked small and delicate-looking women. Maybe it made him feel more manly. I don’t know. But I also think, to an extent, keeping me thin and frail and weak made it easier to control me, made it harder for me to get away if I ever decided to.”

  A muscle in Cary’s jaw started to tick at that as his gaze slipped away for a moment. “When did it take a turn for the worse? As if starving you wasn’t bad enough.”

  “That’s hard. I think it was little things peppered in over a long period of time. He spent less and less time with me. He found more and more faults in me. But not so much that I immediately thought he was a jerk.”

  “Just enough to start wearing down your self-esteem.”

  “Exactly. And I didn’t have a whole lot of that to begin with. Really, most of what I had originally had come from the love-bombing stage with him. So I associated all my good with him. Which made it harder to think of him as the one at fault. I blamed myself for not looking or acting a certain way. I bowed and kowtowed to all his wants and needs and demands. And that went on until we hit the year mark.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know what the turning point was. I don’t know if the milestone somehow made him think he’d finally ‘gotten’ me or what, but it was right after that when he hit me the first time. It was over something stupid, too. I’d questioned the dress he’d picked out for me. It was really revealing and I didn’t feel comfortable wearing it in front of his business associates. He’d backhanded me across the face for questioning him, then told me to Put the fucking dress on.”

  “So you did.”

  “So I did.” And he’d paraded me around half-naked to men with leering eyes who made all that exposed skin feel slimy, who made my stomach flip over.

  In bed that night, after our first sexual encounter that felt a lot like it had with my marriage, he’d pulled me to his chest and asked me why I made him hit me, why I’d emasculated him, why I’d hurt him that way.

  And so the cycle started.

  Prolonged periods of relative peace, followed by an outburst that left me bleeding or with scars. Immediately after would be the shift of blame for the incident and then a period of love-bombing.

  “Until, eventually, he didn’t feel the need to even bother with the love-bombing anymore. He had me. He knew he did. There was no way for me to get away.”

  “By the time you realized what was going on…” Cary said, waving a hand out.

  “Exactly. There was nothing I could do.”

  “When did you realize it?”

  “Honestly? I’m not sure there was one moment of clarity. I think it was like waking up from a really deep sleep. I noticed things little by little.”

  Like the fact that there weren’t just guards stationed around the house to look for threats. No. I had my own team. Who watched everything I did, then reported it all back to Raúl. Who would then punish me for anything he didn’t like.

  Like there were cameras all around. In places where there didn’
t need to be cameras. Like my room. Like my bathroom.

  I never got a moment of peace.

  Eyes were always watching me.

  “And then I tried to test my theory,” I admitted.

  A part of me had been so sure it was just paranoia, that I was losing my mind a little to be thinking so many conspiracy theories about this man that I thought I loved, that I thought loved me.

  But then I tried to walk down the driveway one day.

  Not only had guards closed in, but they’d called Raúl home.

  “I’d been quick enough to spin a story about how I was just trying to take a walk, that I thought I needed some more fresh air and exercise.” I even told him that I wanted to get more fit to please him, though I felt a little too disgusted at that to even admit it to Cary. “But it confirmed my growing fears.”

  I tested it a few more times over the next months and years, finding that with each attempt, Raúl seemed to get more and more suspicious of me. Which made him watch me even more, which made his disapproval and punishments of me ever-more severe.

  “Sometimes there wasn’t even a cause anymore. He just used me to vent his frustration.”

  “I’m sorry, love. No one should have to go through that.”

  My gaze darted down to my plate as my eyes started to glisten.

  God, how long had it been since anyone had shown me a shred of kindness? A drop of sympathy?

  Too long.

  Hell, maybe no one ever had.

  “It got bad enough that I started to plan an escape. It took a long time. In movies and TV, they always make it seem so easy to monitor the comings and goings of guards, figuring out the cameras, getting the timing perfect. In reality, it took me months for each task.”

  I carefully stored away all the information, repeating it over and over to myself so I didn’t forget a single thing since I couldn’t write anything down.

  “But then it started to occur to me how difficult it would be to get out of Mexico. Let alone away from him for good. Raúl might not have ever loved me the way I thought he had, but he absolutely saw me as his. He could never allow me to get away. It would be a weakness for him.”