Part 11…….The Vampire Returnith……AGAIN

“Be careful what you do to a good woman, because you will have to deal with the bitch you create” – Unknown

Remember when Lestat said if I took him back he was going to change?  Yeah, that never happened, but then again looking back now I should have known it wouldn’t because he got what he wanted, he got me back and got to stay married.  So why should he live up to what he had said?  The thing is I never made him, he also constantly told me that he never promised me anything, and he sure as hell lived up to that, the not promising me anything I mean.  What did happen was that I kept evolving into a more headstrong independent woman, who was beginning to need him or should I say want him less and less.  But I wasn’t ready to leave him just yet, no I had to put myself through more heartache and vampirically emotional bloodletting by Lestat the married vampire.  He kept draining my emotions and his strength grew with every puncture of my self-esteem and self-confidence, it’s what a vampire does, they drain you little by little trying to turn you, or kill you.  I mean if you let them kill you that is.

There is no justifying behavior like Lestat’s because he had gotten his way for as long as I can remember, and before I met him that’s for sure.  When we think of being in love we think it’s like in the movies.  We find “the” one and then we begin a relationship, we “fall” in love and then one of two things happens, they fall in love as well or we fall in love alone.  When you fall in love alone it’s the most devastating type of love.  Because the one’s we love don’t and will not love us back no matter how hard we try or what we do to try and convince them of how much we love them.  We continue to think love is what Hollywood wants us to think is it, or how a song can express just how much “love” is good and eventually we all experience this.  But love isn’t like the movies or what we hear on the radio.  Everyone and I do mean EVERYONE wants to be that movie or song to the person there in love with.  Just like I wanted to be Meg Ryan in “You’ve Got Mail” to Lestat’s Tom Hanks or to be “the” song to him.  Like a beautiful song by the group Shenandoah called “I Want to Be Loved Like That.”  In my mind it is (maybe was) the epitome of what I wanted Lestat to feel about me, because I sure as hell felt this about him.  The first two verses of that song go….

Natalie Wood gave her heart to James Dean

High school rebel and a beauty queen

Standing together in an angry world

One boy fighting for one girl

I want to be loved like that

I want to be loved like that

A promise, you can’t take back

If you’re gonna love me

I want to be loved like that

Of course I’ve never been loved like that, and even though as I mentioned before I did love Lestat like that, he always told me he didn’t know how to express himself to me the way I did to him.  But of course I know that’s a lie because he can, he just won’t and maybe it’s because he has never loved me “like that.”   Which would make me question why he’d always, and I do mean ALWAYS come looking for me after every single breakup.  I always walked away and he always came back.  The longest relationship rehab went on for almost a year, can you believe that?  I was away from him for ten entire months, I ignored him passing by on my way to work.  I had blocked him from my phone but because he had cell phones for his construction company he’d use those at times to send me texts.  I walked away all the time and he always came back.  I have yet to figure this out if he said he loved me but yet tortured me to no end, and I’d leave and he would almost always beg to let him back into my life.  I think that everyone deserves to be loved that way.  A love so strong that it can push both of you through anything because love is what kept you from going insane and gave you the strength to hold on, not just for yourself but for each other.  The closest I’ve come to that kind of feeling (besides Lestat) was when a new bakery opened up near my house. It’s called Nothing Bundt Cakes and I fell in love with their white chocolate raspberry Bundt, true story.

As a result of the day to day routine in my dysfunctional relationship with Lestat I grew to get use to certain things about him.  For instance when he had to be home by a certain time, or he couldn’t see me on certain days, and for a while I tolerated this routine.  Okay I wasn’t okay with it, it was frustrating and annoying as hell but again, I believed that Lestat the Vampire would turn into Prince Charming, that guy I had been waiting for all my life.  I didn’t voice my discontent, I mean I didn’t voice it very often.  Alright that’s a lie I told him toward the tail end of our relationship that it was pissing me off that he wasn’t making up his mind.  I know that you’re wondering how the hell he was still married, after I had mentioned that when I met him he was separated and getting a divorce, right?

So let me elaborate, when I met him he was separated and in the process of getting a divorce and if you remember his wife was pregnant with their second child, a child they planned on having so their son wouldn’t grow up alone.  This bothers me, I mean I know that it was a conscience decision to have another child, and that it was done so that their son would have a sibling.  But think about it, when this girl grows up and she may or may not know that she was planned which is okay, I suppose.  But I know it would bother me to know that I was planned for the sole reason of making sure that my brother had a sibling and wouldn’t grow up an only child.  It’s disturbing to know that your existence was planned as a companion for your brother.  It’s like she’ll be a FrankenSister or something like that (not to mention she looks like Gossamer from the Looney Tunes Cartoons).   Okay it’s probably just me but I suppose it made sense to them at the time.

Their intention (or at least that’s what he) was for them to agree to have another child for the sake of their son and divorce because they were unhappy together.  Again this is intel I got from him, you know Lestat the Vampire.  But then it’s not like he’s the best source of reliable information, I learned that the hard way.  So when he explained his situation I accepted it because he did tell me (many times) that he wasn’t happy and that they had mutually agreed to do what they had planned.  So what happened along the way you ask?  Life took a huge steaming dump on my plans that’s what happened.  After almost a year and a half of dating Lestat (that’s how long we were together prior to his backtracking) he asked me out to lunch.  During our lunch date he was unusually quiet which is not like him at all, then he took my hand and said to me “I need to tell you something, and I don’t know how I’m going to do it” I thought to myself oh my God he has a terminal illness.  Yes that’s what I thought because he was so serious and straight-faced I had no idea of the emotional bomb he was about to drop on me.

I put my hand on his and looked at him asking if he was alright, and tightened my grip on his and then he looked up at me and said “I’m moving back home, I’m going back to live with Fiona because I want to be a part of my kids’ lives and that’s the only way it’s going to happen.”  I couldn’t move, I was frozen in place with my hand on his, I could see that his face was beginning to flinch and my grip was getting tighter and tighter and I realized I was digging my nails into the top of his hand, he finally pulled away and I had drawn a small amount of blood from one of my nails that punctured the top of his wrist.  Funny, I drew blood from the vampire and vampires don’t like that, they hate it when you turn the tables on them.  He looked at me and asked “are you alright?” I stared out of the window where we were sitting, I suddenly realized that the noise around me had stopped.  I had gone deaf, I heard nothing but the ringing in my ears and the pounding of heart, or should I say the breaking of my heart.  I heard myself swallow hard and turned to look at him.

He asked again if I was alright and I turned to him and yelled “does it fucking look like I’m alright?  You asshole, how could you do this to me, you said you were getting a divorce and I never once question why it was taking so fucking long.  And now you tell me you’re going back to your wife, and you do it in public no less you asshole chicken-shit!!!!!”  He asked me to keep my voice down and I said would not, I told him that if he wanted to keep me from making a scene he should have told me in private.  But I think it was his best defense because I am, after all Latina and my first reaction was to take a hard right to his face and then go out into the parking lot and take a baseball bat to the windshield of his truck and an ice pick to each of his tires.  That’s what I should have done (I might have as I did have a baseball bat in the trunk of my car…..and an ice pick, don’t judge) but what I did was get up and walk out of the restaurant.  I walked towards the middle of the parking lot realizing that I didn’t have my car with me because Lestat had picked me up at work.  I felt what seemed to be rivers of tears falling from my eyes and then I couldn’t hold back anymore.

I screamed as loud as I could, it was the only release that I had at that moment, my screams and crying were uncontrollable.  I felt a hand on my shoulder and I turned around and it was Lestat.  He told me to get into his truck and I screamed at him that I’d rather walk the five miles back to my office rather than get into a vehicle with a fucking liar.  I began to walk down the street, not really knowing where I was going with tears streaming down my face as I dug through my purse for my cell phone.  I was thinking of who I could call for a ride, I called my friend April the bartender.  She didn’t hesitate the minute she heard me crying she only asked what part of town I was at and she gave me a destination near to where I was to wait for her.  I waited for what seemed hours but in reality it was only fifteen minutes before she got to where I was at.

As I got into her car she asked me to tell her what happened, and I proceeded to tell her what had transpired during lunch.  “That asshole! That fucking asshole!” she screamed and drove straight to Robert’s office running every red light she came across.  By the time we got there his truck was already in the parking lot.  She looked at me and then popped the trunk on her 1996 Honda Civic.  She put it in park and got out, I heard her screaming his name as she was riffling through her trunk.  I had no idea what she was doing back there and then low and behold I saw her with the baseball bat in her hands and instead of stopping her, I let her go on her rampage of bestfriendedness (spell check says that’s not a word, I think it should be so therefore it is, BESTFRIENDEDNESS!!) and sat back in her car and let her go after his truck.  She began with his side mirror and then his doors, then the windshield and by this time his brother came running out and then yelled at her. All I heard was mumble, mumble “your crazy bitch!” did I mention April is a white chick?

I couldn’t really hear what they were saying to each other but then Lestat came out of his office and since he knew who she was he knew what she was doing and why.  Oddly enough he didn’t act angry or called the cops, which I found weird because, did he anticipate this might happen?  She said something to him (I could see her mouth every obscenity his way as she held onto that wooden baseball bat in her Hello Kitty pajama bottoms and Nike running shoes, her hair tied into a messy bun on top of her head).  He seemed to ignore her as he walked over to me and opened the passenger side door to her car and knelt down and said “I’m sorry, I love you really I do” and I turned around to him and didn’t say anything. I just sat there as if every part of my being was being pummeled by every single emotion at the news he had given me over lunch.  Everything from the past hour was a blur, nothing made sense and my head was swimming in a cloud of confusion and heartbreak.  That night I didn’t sleep, probably because he kept calling me and I didn’t answer.  I had resolved that night to not see him ever again because he had decided to go back to his wife that he hadn’t yet divorced.  But during this year and a half of waiting for him to “finalize” his divorce I didn’t push or ask too much about it because I didn’t want to seem, well pushy or needy or a bitch.

Yes I know that you think it was stupid of me and it was but there was an end game here, a return on investment if you will, well when I believed he was actually going to get a divorce.  After his imaginary divorce was complete he and I would begin to build our lives together and that is was I was looking forward to, I had pictured the end of the rainbow with him, for him to be my Prince Charming.   But that night all of that went up in smoke, the ashes from what I thought was left of my relationship with him were smoldering underneath me, slowly burning there, silent but painfully.  After what seemed like hours of darkness both physical and emotional I had to get up and go to work, with my face swollen from crying and no sleep I looked like hammered shit.  But I soldiered on and got ready and headed out to work resolving to pick up the pieces of the shattered life I had known for over almost two years.  That day I kept getting call after call from him on my cell and at work, and I not once answered (I was very proud at my resolve).

I stayed strong for about three weeks after, even though the sting of rejection was still fresh like an open gaping wound that wouldn’t heal, but I had decided to dull the pain with work, coffee and nicotine.  This was 2002, I worked for a fire alarm company and I was alone most of the day when the all the installation technicians would leave for their scheduled calls.  Which was a much needed reprieve from putting on a smile and going through the motions of my day for the sake of my job.  But the minute they left I fell apart, I didn’t cry out loud by I sure as hell had a hard time keeping the tears in, as I sat there staring out of my office plate glass window wiping the tears away with tattered tissues that seemed to pile into my trash can like the snow caps of Mt. Everest.  Three weeks eventually passed and each day the hurt got worse but my resolve was getting stronger.  And then it happened, the motherfucker decided to show up at my office, and I was NOT prepared to deal with him or his emotional ambush. He knew that for most of the day I was alone, and just like Lucy Westenra in Bram Stokers Dracula, I was a goner.

He knew what the fuck he was doing since I hadn’t answered his phone calls for three weeks (this was before blocking a number was available on your cell phone) he had no other option but to physically and emotionally ambush me at work.  I saw his truck drive up and thought to myself this motherfucker has some balls.  But my heart was telling me, oh my God he’s here and he wants to talk to you because he loves you!  I wish I could’ve shut my heart up because the rest of me always winds up listing to it, well, all except my brain because that’s the one that is logical and says to me “don’t listen to this lying asshole, no matter how charming he seems or what he tells you he’s just trying to get his way.”  And she was right, my brain I mean, that motherfucker came over only to tell me he missed me and that he still loved me in spite of the fact that he had moved back in with Fiona.

I should have stayed strong but the truth is my heart convinced the rest of me, including my logical brain whom I’ll call Sharleen (why not? She’s my brain after all) to give into him….again.  It was hard to resist his allure and bullshit covered in charm and Halston cologne.  The day he showed up at my office I was at probably what I would consider one of the weakest days of my life, and it showed.  Because my office had an extremely large plate glass window and the parking for our company was literally right in front, anyone parked in front could see inward, it was like shooting fish in a barrel.  He saw me in this state, which was, let’s face it obvious.  In true vampiric fashion he sat in white Ford F-150 flossing and sharpened his fangs, sprayed on his Halston Z-14, popped the collar on his black cape and walked towards the entrance to my office in that slow motion walk that always happens in the movies.  The wind slowly blowing through his cape revealing the red satin underside, gently whisking that dark muddy river hair of his, strutting his 6’1 frame towards the door, his erotic dimpled smile showing his fangs shinning in the sunlight as he was about to take another bite out of my heart, emotions and life.

Okay it sounds stupid and yes I watch a lot of movies but this is how I saw it happen, the entire vampire, slow motion walking, cape flapping, smiling shiny fang thing! (Just a quick note, emotional vampires can and are able to be out in the sunlight, it’s in the darkness that they have issues with).  In reality he was wearing Wrangler jeans, his cowboy boots and a dark maroon colored button down long sleeve shirt.  He looked like John Travolta in Urban Cowboy, when he first shaved his beard and we catch the first glimpse of that handsome face of his in his black Stetson.

I sat there wearing my jeans, boots and company polo shirt, hair tied on top of my head in a messy pony tail with little to no make-up.  My defenses were down and I couldn’t go into battle knowing I was about to be taken down by Lestat the Emotional Vampire hunting for sport, because I had no strength to fight him off whatsoever. And true to form, he walked into my office and with every step he took towards me I took another back.  His facial expression changed as if he noticed that I didn’t trust him anymore, which of course was right.  He asked me if there was any one else in the office and I stood there in silence and he said to me “It’s me, its okay, are you alone?”  As he was talking my eyes slowly glanced over through the big plate glass window to see the damage that my friend April had done to his new truck.  I looked at the dents on the doors and he had replaced the windshield but the side mirror on the passenger side was being held together with black electrical tape.  I could hear him talking to me but it sounded muffled because it felt as if I had gone deaf once again.

Then all at once I snapped out of it and managed to say “what the fuck do you want?”  He stepped back and the lingering scent of his cologne wafted through my office and my heart.  He said he was there because I gave him no choice since I hadn’t answered any of his phone calls.  I mentioned that was for a reason, I mean what the fuck did he think I was doing?  Really, ugh!

Then I told him that I didn’t want to talk that I wanted him to leave (this was Sharleen talking and she was awesome!) That is until he said those three magic words…….I…..love…. you and then everything went to shit.  My heart took over and managed to muffle Sharleen and I felt as if I couldn’t breathe so I sat down in my chair.  He walked over to me and took both my hands to bring me up towards him and then he hugged me and whispered in my ear “I’m so sorry, I love you so much and I don’t want to lose you.  I can’t live without you, please don’t send me away.”

As he held me in his arms, my eyes closed tight listening to these words coming out of his vampiric mouth, smelling his cologne and feeling the tightening squeeze of his arms wrapped around me (like a motherfucking anaconda right before it eats its prey).  I pushed him away and asked him how the fuck could he ask me NOT to send him away if he was still married AND had moved back in with his ugly wife Fiona?  He said he did it for his kids, and that he is living there with her and the kids but he loved me.  Of course in retrospect this was complete and utter bullshit because that’s what vampires do, they charm you, they hypnotize you and then BAM they suck your will to live or make rational decisions.

Needless to say I took him back even though he had moved back in with his ugly, fat horse faced wife and I told myself that I could deal with this.  I told myself that I could be a mistress to the man I believed I loved in order to be with him and that’s when he made that statement “when they are grown and out of high school we can be together.” Inside I was like, what the fuck? High school? Their daughter is all of a year old (at the time) and I have to wait until she graduates from high school, this assholes crazy! Of course this was an empty promise because after all he had spent the rest of our relationship telling me he hadn’t promised me anything OR that he wouldn’t fight for me.

Now, once again I need to stress that those who will feel the need to judge me based on the decisions I made to stay with him and be his mistress, this did NOT start out this way.  I sort of fell into it, like a ginormous puddle of quicksand I didn’t see while running through a vine ridden jungle of emotions.  And that Charming dude and his white horse whom we’ll call Carlos (I had to throw in one Hispanic name right?) could have shown up to save me but they didn’t.  But the pious and self-righteous will always judge, so to those I say, judge away I’m sure someone’s out there judging you even if you don’t think it’s happening to you, it is, you’re just blind to it or actually believe you haven’t done ANYTHING wrong in your entire life.  Go ahead, keep thinking that but me, Sharleen and Carlos the white horse know better.  In any case this was why and how I found myself dating a married man for twenty years of my life.  Needless to say as I got older and wiser I realized that the window of opportunity was getting smaller for me to find a “real” boyfriend to date and have a potentially healthy relationship.  Stay tuned for part 12…..