My Obsessive Love
by Lucinda Watson
The first time I saw him I wanted to keep him. It might have been that cowboy hat slouched down over his very blue right eye or the long, lean look of those jeans or maybe to be honest it was the way those hips moved and shifted as he wended his way across the springtime meadow of Virginia on that warm May day. Whatever it was I forgot I was with another guy, wearing his ring even, and let the air between us fill like smoke in a well-worn chimney swirling and twirling around itself making its way up the flue. I wanted to steal him, just take his hand and tell him to follow me and not make a sound, but I didn’t have the car keys. My husband did.
It’s interesting in life when you have to choose ethical behavior versus lust: you just know you have to do it but you’ll find any excuse in the book not to. I reviewed right and wrong about a billion times on that afternoon but still came up empty. There was no way I was going to be allowed to do what I wanted to do with every cell in my body and more. I had to return to the picnic and pretend I didn’t feel that burning lust, pretend I was another happily married young matron out with her husband for a Saturday afternoon.
I would have turned and run into the opposite direction forever away from him had I know what was to come: what he would do to me. The things he would steal so easily without my even knowing they were gone. I’m not talking about the tangible things he stole though there were a lot of them. I’m talking about the pieces of my heart that had been so carefully stitched together, the brief moments of joy emblazoned on my brain, the freedom from desperate loneliness if only for a year, I’ve never meant a thief who cared so little about those around him. His life a trail of detritus wider than the Mississippi and deeper than the foundations dug for buildings in Shanghai. “Shanghaied”. That’s what I had been and it would have gone on for a lot longer if I hadn’t come to my senses. Or rather, had my senses come to me?
What was it about him that I was drawn to? That easy sexuality, that casual smile, that sense that anything you asked for in and out of bed would be given, no questions asked. That was so appealing to me as I had never known it. I had never seen that kind of open hunger before in a man’s eyes: hunger for me, every part of me. I liked the power of it. It was like driving a Maserati: I knew that any minute I could floor it and be shooting anywhere I wanted to go. It was addictive. I liked it and I couldn’t let it go.
I’ve never felt that hypnotized by a man before and I’m sure I never will again. Few do. It was only years later and countless episodes of sex that I realized the sex was all about him: I never once in all those times felt as free as he did nor as involved in fantasies created so readily just for him. I was the actor, producer, and director and I liked it that way. Every breath he took was controlled by me and every thought he had was known by me. Why did I do this, I asked myself even now? Because it was safe that way. As long as I was in charge, I thought I had him under my control. Fulfilling his fantasy life was my way of ensuring he was forever mine. Little did I know that it could be done by anyone. Like going to the gas station. That’s my naive side. My sister says I shouldn’t blame myself as after all no one around us growing up told the truth, so how were we to know?
