His Rules (2 page)

              As more of my insecurities faded away, I found my right hand running my fingers through his hair, grabbing it at times, and pushing and pulling him as he continued to drive me to pleasure.  His right hand was on my thigh.  My left hand caressed his forearm before intertwining his fingers into mine.

              On the verge of orgasm from just his mouth, I pull him up towards me.  I kiss him as if I could never get enough of that mouth.  The warmth of his kisses linger in the area no man has ever made feel so alive.  I feel more warmth from him that I can’t wait to feel him deep inside of me.

              He didn’t disappoint me, whether I was on top, bottom, or behind.  I didn’t want his body to be separated from mine.

              I came three times before he finds his release.  I grab his ass as he does and pull him in closer to me.  He falls on me exhausted.  As our sweaty bodies rub against each other as if they are one, I pull his head close to my mouth and say, “Stay inside of me.”

              I don’t know how long he stays inside of me as we kiss each other, he plays with my hair, and I run my hands gently down his back.  I only know I felt him going soft and then getting hard again.  It was like I was emptying him out.  He was giving me all he had, and I felt like no matter who either of us had ever been with, we now belonged to each other.

              That is the sex I could have had that night.  Instead, I was dating Rick, so I had sex with a good looking drunk man, passed out after the act he wasn’t emotionally there for.  I was the physical receptacle for his physical need at the moment.  He’s still a bit of a frat-boy, even though he had graduated college a few years ago.  He’s arrogant, self-entitled, and feels like women should appreciate him for the gift he is to them.  He’s rich and comes from one of the best families in New York.  He can act badly and get away with it because of who he is. 

When I first started dating him, my friend warned me he was the type of guy you have sex with, but he’s not the kind of guy you try to have a relationship with.  Maybe I should have listened to them.  Rick was fun, but that was all he was.  You can’t have a relationship with a man who is just fun.  I found that out after I became pregnant with his child.

I wouldn’t trade my son for anything, but I know being with Rick was a mistake.  He left me three months into the pregnancy.  He doesn’t see his son that much, which in some ways is a blessing. 

I made it through the pregnancy with Jack’s help as a friend, and he is more a father to my son than his real father is, even if he just calls him Jack.  I could have the family life I have always wanted, but I was dating Rick when Jack the chance to choose between me and Kristen.  And now he has rules about not dating an ex-girlfriend’s best friend or one of his best female friends. 

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.  He is a man of morals and won’t break his own rules of propriety. 

Chapter Two

              Jack 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 Kristen 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 that was special.  As much as he wanted to make it on his own, her being a little bit older and wiser and his truly being in love with her made him do things he wouldn’t normally do, like accepting help.

              When they first started dating, she 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.  Kristin’s past seemed to indicate a pattern of younger men looking for more in life than what they had been born with.  She was in her early thirties and knew her youth and beauty, her two most powerful commodities, were fading.  Older men could date younger women to regain something that was lost.  Why should society judge a woman for doing the same thing, or the man who allowed himself to be treated the same as a younger woman by an older man?

              Jack, being the type of man that he is, saw through the fakeness of it all, even if he allowed other women Kristin’s age and older to believe they could ever be with him if it didn’t work out between him and her.  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.  I was born with St. Charles Place and trying to get Park Place.”

              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 Kristin.

              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 the 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 which keeps telling yourself you are doing things you promised yourself long ago 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 he did that cut me the hardest and the deepest.  Before I could recover from the wound, he continued, “The saddest part is you know there is still something 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 Kristin’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.  I actually started to see what Kristin saw in him, and I think he knew he had finally won me over as somebody who understood him.  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 couple of weeks later he had a piece published in
The New Yorker
.  It was a satirical essay about New York’s elite and their treatment of the poor.  The older rich date the younger poor, but it’s not considered prostitution because of terms like “dating” and “relationship”.  Sex is being exchanged for fancy dinners, jewelry, and gifts of money.  And if this isn’t enough sex for the elite, and they look for it on the streets where sex is exchanged for actual money, then the women trying to pay for their basic needs by selling the only thing they have left, their bodies, are thrown in jail while the rich get off.

              Jack was praised and condemned for his work.  He was then praised for his condemnation.  I thought it was funny and extremely well written.  The rest of proper society didn’t know how to take him at parties.  On the one hand, they wanted to be seen talking to him because of the success of the article.  On the other hand, he was an outsider, who they had been kind enough to allow in their society, and he returned the favor by mocking them.

              I don’t know what Kristin thought of it.  I don’t think she took it personally as an insult to their relationship.  In some ways, his growing fame made her stock go up in society, but he was quickly growing out of her shadow and was becoming her equal in the power couple.  She enjoyed the fact he was still younger than her and he was becoming important.  It meant she snagged a big, younger fish.

              While he was being ostracized by the society that was proclaiming him a genius, he began to spend more time with just me and Kristin.  He would go on double dates with me and Rick.  He would do jokes about Rick, which would go over his head.  Kristin and I would try not to laugh.  Rick being Rick never got it.

              I probably shouldn’t have laughed at the jokes and insults, but a part of me felt Rick had them coming to him, even if I thought I loved him.

              It was around this time that Jack’s relationship with Kristin started to fall apart.  I don’t know when or how the trouble started.  The first sign I saw of it was one time when we were hanging out without Rick.  I was complaining about my sex life.  Kristin offered to loan Jack’s services out to me.  She may have tried to pass it off as a joke, but you could tell from the look on Jack’s face he didn’t take it as a joke.  He was already dealing with people thinking his relationship with her was that of a male escort and a rich woman.  He didn’t need her putting him down.

              I tried my best to make him feel better about what she said by refusing the offer, but that doesn’t really help anything.  She continued with the argument of how good he is, as if that would make him feel better.  He just said, “Well, I don’t think I would be much good.  I’m not a prized horse you put out to stud.  My services are only good for those I care about.”

A few weeks after that incident, 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 who 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 really famous.

              I did it because I cared for him.  I thought it would be my way of saving him from the gigolo image he had gotten.  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 Kristin’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 probably based on himself.  Then older women 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 Kristin.  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, “My growing fame is hurting a person I honestly care about.  It started with the article in
The New Yorker
.  The perception of me was changing in society, so she tried to change to fit how people saw me.  Now my novel has hurt her even more.  She’s changing to be with somebody who hasn’t changed.  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 Kristin 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 and what it was like to be in the upper class.

              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.