Forbidden Love (2 page)

Maybe I would just like for him to
kiss my emotional scars and make me that way. That is what hurts
the most about being his friend. I’ve only gotten a portion of what
he has to offer. I keep wanting more of him.

Chapter Two

He once told me he was the ultimate
bad boy. He’s kind, caring, a good listener, has a job, great with
children, funny, sensitive, knows how to cook and clean, and has no
desire to be married. Among the other qualities he forgot to
mention were handsome, the ability to understand women, and being a
writer of romance novels.

When I first met him, he was just
starting out in the business. He was working for a small magazine
publisher in New York. In the beginning, I thought he was using my
mom as a way to advance his career through her various contacts.
His career did start to take off while they were dating. Looking
back on it now, I think she was helping him out because she loved
him and saw something in him. As much as he wanted to make it on
his own, being in love with her made him do things he wouldn’t
normally do, like accepting help.

When they first started dating, my mom
introduced him to people at parties and what not. He was treated as
nothing more than arm candy to the other moguls, socialites, and
social climbers. I couldn’t really blame them for treating him that
way. My mom’s past seemed to indicate a pattern of younger men
looking for more in life than what they had been born with. If she
was using them for sex, it was only fair they should use her as
well.

Jack, being the type of man that he
is, saw through the fakeness of it all, even if he allowed the
other women my mother’s age to believe they could ever be with him
if it didn’t work out between him and my mother. They would
introduce him to their husbands, who were bigger publishers and
people in the industry. He knew he was being used and felt
disgusted by it. The husbands played along as their wives wanted
younger men. If it kept their wives satisfied while they went after
younger women, what difference did it make? Youth and sex are just
as much a commodity as fame and fortune. Jack said, “It’s all just
a giant game of Monopoly where you make deals to get something else
that you want.”

At a party, I saw him work the crowd
and then step out on the balcony for a breath of fresh air. It was
like he couldn’t live with himself and what he was doing. I knew he
was at a moment of weakness, and I wanted to expose him for using
my mother.

I was calm and sure of myself as I
confronted him. He looked at me and said, “Have you ever loved
somebody and wanted to make them happy? Sometimes you do something
against your own basic morals because you don’t want to disappoint
that one person you care so much about. Somehow, you just can’t get
that person you are closest to to hear what you’re saying or how
much you are hurting yourself trying to make them happy. As you
continue to struggle with living with yourself, you ignore the
voice in your head that keeps telling yourself you are doing things
you promised to yourself long ago that you would never
do.”

He then looked at me with those
blue-gray eyes, which seemed to cut right through my
soul.

“No, I guess you wouldn’t. By the way,
how are things going with Rick?”

I don’t know whether it was his words,
his eyes, or the smile on his face letting me know he understood me
better than I thought that cut me the hardest and the deepest.
Before I could recover from the wound, he continued, “The saddest
part is you know what is inside of you that other people can’t seem
to see because they only see you as some sort of property on
somebody’s arm. But how does a watch tell its owner, whom it loves,
that it wants to be more than a prized possession without losing
the love of the person it is cherished by? Even being a watch and
being close to them is better than not being near them at
all.”

One time at my mother’s house, I had
seen him naked as he was getting out of the shower, but I had never
seen him stripped bare until that night. We stopped pretending we
were in control of our lives and we were happy with how our mid to
late twenties were going. We became friends. We didn’t judge each
other or any of our life choices. I was glad to have him in my
life.

A few months after that, he gave me a
manuscript he had written. All he said was, “I think you’ll like
this. It’s about a girl torn between a guy that looks like Channing
Tatum and a guy that looks like Adam Levine.”

He never said it, but I think he wrote
it about me. The Channing guy was Rick. I was blinded by his
classic good looks and muscular body. I couldn’t see everything
else he was doing to me. The pain was worth the pleasure of having
that body to comfort me. While I was dating the man I shouldn’t,
there was a less classically good looking man, who was really
hotter, standing in the wings waiting for me to make a decision
before he would save me.

Whether I was supposed to or not, I
gave it to a friend in the publishing industry. That’s when he
became famous.

I did it because I loved him. I
thought it would be my way of saving him. If he could escape being
just a watch and become an actual person, I felt like there was
hope for me, too. Life had another way of working it
out.

As his fame grew, he started to come
out of my mother’s shadow and be seen as his own person. Younger
women were hitting on him. They had fallen in love with the
character he had based on himself. The women my mom’s age started
to pursue him, too. When who you are with determines your value in
a society, he was a commodity that others wanted in order to
improve their own stock.

He tried to make things work out
between him and my mom. He says their relationship ended because
she destroyed the beauty he once saw in her. To compete with the
younger women, she turned to plastic surgery. He told her he liked
her the way she was. She couldn’t ever seem to hear the words he
was saying. He said that was what hurt the most about it all. You
love somebody, and you know they are doing something to try to
please you. But the person is so intent on what they think you want
and need that they miss the point entirely.

He told me, “I would have kissed a
million of her cancer scars to make her see the beauty I saw in
her. But there’s nothing I can do to make a woman feel beautiful
when she thinks she has to change to make me happy.”

He said he went from being a watch to
a golden statue of a god where unwanted sacrifices were being made.
He only wanted to be human and to be loved for being human. He just
couldn’t get anybody else but me to see him that way.

As his relationship with my mom was
imploding upon itself, I was having issues with Rick. We had been
dating for two years. I knew the relationship wasn’t perfect. I saw
how imperfect it was once I read Jack’s manuscript about me, even
though he wouldn’t admit it was about me. He could point out how I
went on diets just to please Rick, or how I would accept his
cheating on me because I wasn’t a good enough girlfriend. Two years
of my life had been spent with Rick. I didn’t want to throw it
away, especially when I thought it could still be fixed.

Part of me also didn’t want to admit
that Jack saw me and my relationship for what it really was. He
came from a middle class income and didn’t attend any of the best
schools. In a lot of ways, he was very common, even if he held
romantic ideals about being a gentleman.

As my mid-twenties were starting to
become my late-twenties, time became more important to me. There
was a part of me that thought getting pregnant might help push Rick
towards the marriage issue. Instead it was more like the nail in
the coffin.

I was single and pregnant. Jack was
single, successful, and playing the field. He made sure I knew
that, even though he was there for me throughout the pregnancy. He
would go with me to doctor’s appointments and other things. When
the doctor or the nurse would think he was the father, he would
tell them he was just a friend. When they left the room, he would
turn to me and say, “’Friend’ sounds a lot better than ‘almost
step-father’ or ‘man that was screwing my mother’.”

I wasn’t sure what he wanted us to be
during that time. He was more than a friend, but he would never say
he was anything more.

When I was six months pregnant, I
attended a wedding alone. Jack was there with some random girl he
didn’t really care about. She was young and beautiful. She liked
him for his name recognition, and he knew it. He said it wasn’t
against his morals to use somebody when she was using him. He said
it was an unspoken understanding. Anyway, it gave him the freedom
to ask me to dance, since he had no real commitment from the woman
he was dating.

He didn’t just ask me to dance. He
came over to me and held out his hand for me to take. He kissed it
and said, “May I have the honor of dancing with the most beautiful
woman in the room?”

“I’m the most bloated woman in the
room and could possibly be the fattest woman in the
room.”

“Yes, well, you know my weakness for
mothers.”

His smile and eyes were
dazzling.

I got up and started dancing with him.
He held me close to him, but he held me and danced with me like he
was doing the waltz while everybody else was just slow
dancing.

“I’m already knocked up, Jack. We
don’t need to dance and bring attention to ourselves.”

He leaned in close to me and
whispered, “I’m dancing with the knocked up daughter of my
ex-girlfriend. People are already going to be talking. The least we
can do is show them how elegant we are while they continue to live
their own sordid little lives.”

I wanted him. It was not that he was
just kind and funny and handsome. He was charming and graceful. He
was the last of a breed of men who could be called a
gentleman.

“If I hadn’t been with Rick the night
you met my mother, would you have chosen me over her?”

“Well, now, Miss Catherine! That is a
loaded question. If I didn’t know you any better, I would say your
hormones are out of balance. Is it true the female sex drive
increases during pregnancy?” He smiled at me as if he was playing
dumb to any feelings he might have for me.

“Why? Are you thinking of moving from
older MILFs to younger MILFs still with child?”

“Maybe. Thankfully we live in a
depraved and immoral society where women are getting pregnant out
of wedlock and men aren’t stepping up to the plate to take care of
their children. I might even be able to find a website that caters
to such sexual desires.”

“Do you have such sexual
desires?”

I look him in the eyes. He looks back
at mine. He chooses his words carefully.

“I have rules that supersede carnal
desires. Since I was with your mom, I can’t be with you in the same
way.”

“But you can be my friend and draw
attention to us by asking me to dance?”

He smiled. “If the pregnant woman
would rather sit alone at a table and prove to the world she is a
social outcast, I can take my humanitarian efforts
elsewhere.”

Even though I knew he was joking,
there was a truth behind his eyes. I gave up on him being a
substitute father to my unborn child, or at least on us being a
couple.

“No, I would rather have you
stay.”

He kissed me on the forehead. “Good.
You truly are the most beautiful woman in the room. I don’t think I
could put up with everybody else’s attitude tonight.”

We continued to dance, but we talked
less. We were enjoying the feeling of being able to touch each
other and what could have been if we had made other choices in
life.

My son will be five this year. Jack
has always been there for me and my son. He has taught him to play
catch and to pee standing up. He has been closest thing my son has
ever had to a father. He’s changed dirty diapers and given me
breaks when I needed to sleep or just relax from taking care of
somebody else. He was also there for adult conversations when baby
talk started to take its toll on me.

I pointed that out to Jack one time.
He said, “You’re my best friend. I help you take care of your
child. And we don’t have sex. That might sound like marriage to
you, but I see no reason to make it legal and get the government
involved in our lives. It will just screw up
everything.”

I can’t tell what he wants. Maybe he’s
conflicted and wants something that violates his rule. I only know
I haven’t dated anybody else. I don’t want to be in a relationship
if he should ever change his mind.

Even with the women he has dated, I
don’t know what he wants. I haven’t met a woman yet who doesn’t
think he should be in a relationship that would lead to marriage.
Knowing his independent streak, he could be resisting marriage
because it is what everybody else wants for him. Why should they
know what would make him happy?

Chapter Three

He got drunk on his thirtieth
birthday. It’s not just that he got drunk. He got drunk and drunk
dialed my mom. She called me and told me to pick him up.

I had seen him earlier that night. I
had gone out to celebrate with him, but I had to leave because
being a mother doesn’t really allow me to take a night off.
Apparently, that was the case with the rest of his friends,
too.