I awoke to the sound of Michelle crying softly next to me, her sobs shaking the bed just enough to stir me. It had been a marathon fuck before bedtime and I had been sleeping the sleep of the mostly dead. Reflexively I checked the clock (1:42 AM) and reached over to make sure my .45 was still in place on the nightstand. It was. And the pre-Wilson, Nashville-era Scattergun Technologies "Border Patrol" model shotgun in the corner, and- ah, never mind. This was about her pathologies, not mine.
"Michelle? What's wrong?"
"Oh, shit, I'm sorry I woke you up. I was just having a bad dream, and I woke up, and I've been laying here thinking."
I hugged her. "Come on, what's wrong?"
"Go back to sleep, Master. I'm okay. You're the one with an early class tomorrow."
"Michelle, this is important. Come on. No titles or that bullshit. I want to know what's bothering you." Early was relative. I didn't have to be to "Special Topics in History", a pre-grad school seminar, until ten.
"Well, the dream was about living in a shitty apartment in LA and fucking guys on camera for heroin. Not a good dream. I mean fucked up sex dreams can be fun, but that was not what I wanted at all. And I've never even tried heroin."
"The dreams haven't happened much lately anyway."
Weird dreams and nightmares are often a symptom of cocaine withdrawal, and for a while I'd actually been writing down descriptions of Michelle's dreams with some idea of using them to try helping wean her off. They'd basically fallen to nothing, at least that she could remember or would admit to. Besides, normally if she got freaked out on account of a dream she'd do something sexual to take her mind off it. She had woke me up to fuck a few times. Laying there crying was not her usual style.
"I was dreaming about how bad I wanted the needle the guy had, even more than I wanted to cum, and then I woke up and started crying."
"Aw, hell, I'm sorry." We hugged. You know, like normal people.
"Anyway, I've been thinking. You, me, us, how good things have been. It's been serious moment of clarity stuff. And with the way the last almost-month has gone, I've figured my problem out. I am two girls in one body. Not in a bipolar psycho way like Joan. She just goes zero to bitch in two seconds. I just have two completely different sets of goals and needs.
"Goal one. I am an intelligent, educated woman who plans to work hard, make a lot of fucking money, retire young, and enjoy myself. I already have a marketing job lined up back home in Dallas with an ad agency one of Dad's friends owns. In five years I'll have my own department."
"All right, admirable goal so long as you don't go pushing yourself to eighty or ninety hours a week and go back to the Bolivian marching powder the way the Wall Street types do."
She smiled weakly. "That ties into goal two. I'm a complete fucking slut who doesn't even want to put her clothes on to leave the house. If I'm not getting fucked or slapped, I better at least cock have a cock in my mouth. With what I have learned about myself over the last month, and looking back at my life of the last three years, unless I get the right sort of entertainment, I will go looking for it, and I have shitty self control. That means I'll end up a stripper or a hooker. Maybe, if I was lucky, I'd be a porn actress if I relocated to Southern California. Either way, my education is out the window, I know I'd be doing drugs again, and I probably catch something and am dead in five years."
I was somewhat taken aback at all this. "Damn. How long have you been laying awake thinking about this? We only went to bed a little over three hours ago."
"I haven't just been thinking about this tonight, dummy. This goes way back, even before our little romantic interlude in the hot tub a couple nights ago."
"Yeah, the rape roleplay. Real romantic. Even I know better than that."
"Not the roleplay, which you will remember was my idea, the second fuck after that. You should have seen the look on your face when I dropped the hint about 'our' next place."
"I was meaning to ask you about that-"
"Wait, let me finish this part first. These two goals are completely incompatible, and dying a junkie is what I moved in with you to avoid. So I need someone in my life with enough responsibility to make me put my clothes on and go to work, but enough of a vicious asshole to treat me the way I like when it's playtime. I've only ever gotten that treatment one place, here with you. So the solution is to keep you around in my life, and if that means I have to make this more of a lifetime deal, that's it then."
Wow. That was a lot to digest on short notice. And maybe I didn't pick my next words with quite the delicacy the situation required. I'm into equal rights. I'll talk to women the same way I'll talk to anyone else. That means I can be remarkably insensitive to what women think they need to hear, and I'm a little too brutally honest when emotional tact is needed. There was a reason I spent a lot of time single.
"Michelle, my dear, please don't take this the wrong way, but are you fucking insane? We've been together less than a month, and you're talking marriage already? Ignoring the fact that I am really shitty husband material, you're-"
Yeah. She took it the wrong way. Guys, I don't give a shit if you call yourself a dom, a sub, a switch, or are as vanilla as that partial half-gallon of Breyers I've got in the freezer. Shit, you gay guys too. Don't think you're off the hook either just because you don't like pussy. Every fucking one of us has said something our "significant others" took the wrong way and it either involved tears or yelling.
At this point she was crying again, and visibly trying to decide if she was going to hug me tighter or roll over to her side of the bed to cry in peace. "You mean you're unhappy? I thought I was being good! I thought I was making you happy!" she managed to choke out in between sobs.
Now this was exactly the third-worst scenario that I thought up that first day in the campus video arcade. Absolute worst case was Joe using her as bait to kill me. I solved that problem by putting him in the fucking dirt instead. Second worst was her stealing a bunch of my shit and trading it for coke. Hadn't happened yet. Third worst was she falls in love. I figured our chance of this becoming long term happiness was less than zero. It was still just above zero, but there she was rolling the dice on it.
"No, goddamn it, I am way TOO happy. It's probably illegal for me to be this happy. I'm going to graduate college after six years, and I have you around. Someone beautiful, intelligent, pleasant company even with her clothes on, who fucks like a goddess, and to be honest is completely and totally out of my league. Even after you called me that day, I figured I had exactly zero chance with you no matter how hot I always thought you were. I had no idea who you really were under the pothead act. It's not that I don't appreciate the arrangement, I don't think you're looking at the downsides for you."
And yeah, my emotional reserve popped like an overripe pimple, spraying stuff I didn't want to see. It was moment of clarity stuff for me too. Here we were, just under a month in, and I was finding I loved her back even if I hadn't said it yet. Goddamn it, I did not want to be in this situation when we started out with this. Big risk, but the rewards were turning out to be more than I could handle. Fuck it, no guts, no glory. Let's see where this goes.
"I don't give a shit about the downsides. As far as I'm concerned there are zero valid downsides. Getting married after graduation is standard fucking procedure, and I was going to be stuck doing that anyway if I hadn't left Brian."
You know, maybe I was rubbing off on Michelle, but she didn't used to cuss that much. On the other hand, we were dealing with a lot of raw emotions here so her usual decorum went out the window.
"So you're not some asshole fraternity boy that will make my friends jealous. Doesn't matter. In case you haven't noticed, my friends aren't really my friends any more, assuming they ever were. Fuck them. You and I are both smart people who will make more than enough money to live well on, and that's the important thing. I grew up in that whole bullshit upper-class putting on appearances fucked up upper class life. Mom and Dad drove the right cars, we lived on the right street, I danced, I cheered, I hung out with all the right people, and all it got me was two or three addictions we're still dealing with, a pregnancy scare or two, oh, yeah, and I don't think I ever told you, I lost my virginity when my Oh So Special high school football player boyfriend raped me the week before Prom-"
"No, you didn't mention that. I definitely would have remembered." My first instinct was to ask her where I could find this young man so he could end up in a nice deep hole somewhere as well, but I bit off the question before I could ask it. "Is that something you'd like to talk about?" I admit, it made a couple other things about Michelle fall into place.
"Fuck no. Disappointment aside, it was not a big deal. I would have fucked him if he'd just asked right. I mean if he'd actually known what he was doing and tried getting me excited a little first, I might have even played along with it. He was what I now know was distinctly undersized, and he barely got it in before he shot his load. As rapes go, it was the worst three seconds of sex in human history. Damn, he was worthless in bed. He couldn't even pull my hair the way I like it-"
"Oh, like this?" I got my left hand deep into Michelle's thick mane of black hair, flexing my fingers just a little for an extra tug to her scalp. She liked it that way.
