A Delicious Torment
A Memoir
Chapter One: Prelude to a Disaster, Part 2
When you break up with someone, you automatically believe that you will be done with them. Both will move on with their lives, separately. This was not to be the case between John and I. Since he had no income, he begged me to allow him to live in the living room until he could find a job and/or another place to live.
We sat down and drew up a contract of sorts. He promised to supply his own food (he was on food stamps by this point), do his own cooking and clean his own dishes. He would keep his belongings in the living room and neither of us would enter the others general living space (meaning I wouldn’t go into the living room and he wouldn’t come into my bedroom). French doors separated the living room from the foyer which is where my studio was located, and a second set of French doors separated the living room from the bedroom. So privacy shouldn’t have been an issue if we put up heavy curtains. I gave him one month to find a job and he was to move out within two months. I figured he could save up enough money in one month for a small apartment or to share living space with one of his other friends.He agreed to all of these conditions and signed the contract.
Six months later, he was still living with me. I felt like my life was on hold. It was difficult to date because men wondered who the strange man was who lived in my living room. I stopped saying, “Oh, that’s my ex” because the men got suspicious that we weren’t really over and done with. And they weren’t entirely wrong. Prior to our separation, John and I hadn’t had sex in months. After the separation, every time I turned around, he was coming to my bedroom wanting sex. When I refused, he would storm back to the living room and turn up the volume on the tv or his stereo. And since I worked early mornings, I often went to work without any sleep. A few times I gave in just to get some sleep. My life was spinning out of control.
It was during this time that my cousin and his wife broke up. I had introduced them and since she was my friend prior to their marriage, we began hanging out with one another after their separation. My cousin felt betrayed and would go weeks without speaking to me. But I had Val and that was important to me. And then something unexpected happened. She and I had gone out to a bar one night. As we sat there having drinks, we spotted an attractive man at the same time.
She looked at me and whispered, “We should take him home with us.”
Val knew that I was bisexual, but she hadn’t shown any tendencies up to that time, but that night, we did take him home with us, back to her apartment. The man was only too happy to oblige us. This wasn’t my first threesome, but it was Val’s, so she let me do all of the directing. It was an amazing night that stretched on into midday the next day. (I won’t go into the details here, since this isn’t an x-rated blog)
After that night, I realized that I was more interested in being with her than I was with a guy, even though we were both seeing men at the time. Threesomes became our thing. We went to bars and picked up men, brought them to either her place or mine and had wild sex. We even had one with the guy I was seeing, which resulted in us breaking up. He wanted to keep both of us as solely his, but Val wasn’t about to give up the man she was seeing and since I was more into Val, I broke up with him. Then Val decided that she wanted us to have a threesome with John. I think this was the final straw between he and I. He wanted Val, but not me. I wanted Val, but not him. And Val wanted us both. We went through with it, but that was the end to our threesomes.
Soon after that, Val had a change of attitude. We sat in my foyer one day and she cried for a long while. I had no idea what was wrong and just held her. Finally, she pulled herself away from me.
“We can’t go on seeing one another,” she whispered as she wiped the tears from her hazel eyes.
“Why not?” I was stunned and began to cry.
“I love Mark and I want my children back.” She didn’t even look at me as she said the words. Instead, she picked up her purse and left.
Val knew that if her first ex-husband found out that she was in a same-sex relationship, she would never get custody of her children. I understood her reasoning. I would gladly have ended the sexual part of our relationship and just gone back to being friends, but that wasn’t the way it happened. She cut off all contact with me. No emails. No phone calls. She changed her number and even moved out of her apartment and in with Mark.
I was beyond devastated. I was in love with her and my whole world was crumbling. And there, still living in my house, was John. I was on the verge of another mental breakdown and he made sure I fell off the cliff.
A Delicious Torment @2016 Lori Carlson. All Rights Reserved.
A Delicious Torment is a memoir of my descent into madness and subsequent recovery. I will post new sections of this each Monday.
To read the other parts of the memoir: C1P1
As the Fates Would Have It 