Chapter Two: Jesse

As the weeks slowly passed us by we had one of the coldest winters. Several things happened between myself and my man, things I’m not open to discuss. One saw us go our separate ways for a few weeks. And thanks to a very good friend who saw the love still there (and I’d driven her crazy asking after Jess daily LOL) that even we hadn’t seen ourselves, we tentatively began our chatting again. In fact, carried on exactly where we left off, funnily enough. Jess opened up completely to me. This man put his whole life out there before my eyes… stood naked. I felt touched. It couldn’t have been easy, but he felt confident enough in us to go that extra step. I loved him even more that night. Well, I’ve never stopped loving him. I just can’t, no more than I can stop my next beat of my heart. Each night I lay on my futon, my back breaking. (You ever lay any time on one of those things? Jeez! Swear it’s a medieval torture device, rack) Little Briar curled in my legs, messages of love flying back and forth.

Because of the time differences I was awake all night, every night. Also in this time I went on a serious diet, working out twelve o’clock each night for an hour… only time myself and Jess didn’t talk. My then husband going up to bed at 11… must backtrack there… see, when he got back from his trip, having Jess to lean on gave me courage to refuse to go sleep up in the bed of nightmares… away from my abuser. Even then I would wake some nights to find him lurking in the living room door, just there staring at me which freaked the hell out of me. I took to putting a large heavy chair in front of the door. Jess worried over me. Must have been awful watching someone you care for go through this, unable to do anything.

Weeks went on and Jess had often said about me visiting him. I’d have given anything to but I had no passport. And imagine ME! I mean me flying on a plane!!!… agoraphobic, barely able to get down my road, never mind tackling airports, planes peopling oh myyyyy. But it was an amazing dream (was it possible? Could I, dare I, even dream this for me, us). The more we talked about it the more excited we both got. I managed one day to get to the post office to pick up a passport application form. That even made my heart race LOL. We were both chatting like kids full of what could be. Okay we’re all adults here, right? To say the sexual tension grew was to put it boringly mild. We were sexting like teens. I mean we are very mature sexters, LOL, but, hey, who said it was just for kids? We loved each other. It’s normal, right? My excuse.

Now around this time Jess started working away… all weekend I wouldn’t hear from him. These weekends drove me crazy. They seemed to last forever. Sundays especially. One Sunday I had some crushing news: my beautiful bubble of Jess and Treez came crushing down. I had no way to contact Jess till Monday, which I did, leaving him frantic messages. It was Tuesday before I heard from him. I can’t go into what happened; it’s Jess’s story, not mine… but on that Tuesday we texted back and forth through our Facebook Messenger… text flying between us. We rarely phoned, but this was one of those occasions. I sobbed. A quiet voice said ‘but I love you‘. I’d never heard these words spoken, only in text. A big lump caught my throat and I croakally replied ‘I love you too‘ despite my world crumbling around me. I also walked home from my icy walk, the only way we could talk by the way (I had to leave the house as my resident stalker wouldn’t leave me for a second except to walk Briar).

With those beautiful words in my ears I walked home to my living hell.

To be continued …….

Jesse’s Perspective

Winter. Cold… foreboding. Night after night was spent talking with one another on the phone. Toward the end of November we stopped communicating due to a petty, jealous lady in our group who carried out an agenda against Tess out of spite. Her conniving bitchiness caused turmoil within our group and the band of friends I thought I had bought into her scheming and stabbed me in the back. Outraged… angry… I left the group and cutoff all communication with everyone in it, Tess included. 

The time away from her was painful… heartbreaking. I had grown to look forward to our conversations… grew to love just being with her on the phone. I had not yet solidified my feelings for her and did not quite comprehend the depth of hers for me, but I knew that I felt infinitely better with her in my world than without her. Eventually a mutual friend informed me that Tess really wanted to get in contact with me. I sent her a text and that started our communicating as if we had never stopped. There was sun in my sky again. The birds sang. Everything was daisies and roses. I found I trusted this woman, cynic that I am, and it felt natural to tell her all about my life, warts and all. I divulged things to her that I had not told another living soul, not even Tracy. It just felt comfortable… right.

Every night we talked. She would lie curled up on a futon in her living room with her dogs while we chatted. She would wedge a chair into the door so that her quasi-husband could not get in. I worried about her constantly. She opened up more and more to me about her life and I filled in details about my own. We were growing closer with each passing day. Everything felt so right.  

We began talking about actually meeting. It seemed like such a pipe dream to me. Here was a woman suffering from agoraphobia, hardly able to leave her home. I lived a million miles away. Further, she was adamant that she would never be in a relationship again. The miserable existence she had led had made her cynical about marriage, which is something that I very much wanted in my own future. How would we ever meet one another given all that? And to what end?

One day Tess excitedly told me that she had gotten a passport application. A passport!!! This is a woman who fears walking out her door and she is getting a passport!!!! To visit me would require getting on a plane. Flying. A very long flight, at that. Airports… connecting flights… all of which are a bit farther than her doorway. How was this going to work? But I became excited by the prospect. I really wanted to meet this woman but there was still that nagging doubt in my mind: to what end? She didn’t want another man in her life for fear she would end up with another like the one she escaped from. She had never left England before. Would she want to live in the US? Would she want us to live in the UK? As to the former, would she willingly leave her three grown children behind? She seemed to waffle as to what she saw her future entailing.

But we WERE  becoming so close. We both had been celibate for several years; she from the disgust at being with her slob of a housemate, me from the plethora of medical difficulties that Tracy had suffered from. As we talked about everything under the sun, our conversations eventually turned to the topic of intimacy. For me, that sort of opened a floodgate. I had successfully shut all such thoughts out of my mind, but now I found myself in constant touch with someone who was awakening feelings of want and desire in me. Apparently, she felt the same stirrings. Delving into the subject we learned that we both very much loved and craved intimacy. I missed it immensely as, I suspect, any healthy male would. I never held it against Tracy that it was missing in our relationship, I just accepted it and adopted the mindset of a monk. Tess also missed it greatly, shutting herself down being with someone who showed no passion at all and was only interested when he could force himself upon her. To be blunt, we excited one another. We turned each other on. It became clear that we both had similar levels of desire that were unfulfilled and becoming attracted to one another just launched an endless parade of fantasies. I found it difficult to continue with the monk mindset any longer. 

Things went well throughout December, into January. We still had not heard from Tess’s passport application. We talked incessantly, enjoying each other’s company. I was really beginning to have strong feelings for this woman. Unfortunately, I was completely ignorant of the depth of her feelings for me. Many have said the words ‘I love you‘ to me but I have come to learn that when Tess says it, it takes on a whole new dimension… a whole new meaning. What she means when she says those words is that she is willing to devote her whole life to you, willing to give 100% of herself to you, willing to do anything and everything to please you… and all she asks in return is love and honesty. Being married to a psychopath who had multiple affairs, lied about them, took her for granted, abused her, kept her prisoner, treated her like a slave… he was too stupid to realize that all she ever wanted was to be loved. I wish I had understood that earlier.

I began to, once more, let my cynicism run wild. As wonderful as we got on together, what future would we have if, as she continually said, she would not marry again? How could we have a future when we lived in separate countries? How could I expect her to leave her homeland where her children lived? Was this all just a nice little fantasy that succored us both or could our union really be a reality? Given all these doubts ricocheting in my mind, I did what was probably the stupidest thing I have ever done in my life. I succumbed to my loneliness and began a relationship with someone physically near and accessible.

Out of respect for this lady I will not go into detail, but the passion that I felt for Tess and have come to feel now was never there. The feeling of comfort like I felt with Tess was never there. There was no intimacy even though we were ostensibly together. I have felt more intimate with Tess on the phone than I felt with this woman while in the same room with her. The whole time I was in this nascent relationship I could not stop thinking of Tess. When I was with this woman I thought of Tess. I am not the smartest individual in the world… sometimes it takes a two-by-four onto my head to pound in some sense. Everything pointed to the fact that Tess was the woman for me, regardless of the difficulties in our being together.

Thankfully, in April, that relationship came to an end. With tail between my legs I turned to Tess and she miraculously accepted me back with open arms. We had never stopped communicating, but now I approached it with a fervor unlike before. I realized that whatever it took, whatever was demanded, I wanted to be with this woman more than I have ever wanted anything in this world. She makes me a better man simply by being in my life. She loves me and accepts me without judgement. I tell her continually that I have been an asshole most of my life and she admonishes me, saying it doesn’t matter. ‘You are not that man anymore‘ she tells me. ‘I love you unconditionally.’ I find it hard to believe I deserve such love but, dear reader, I would not trade this relationship for all the riches in the world. 

Anyway…we renewed our relationship, much to my relief. I vowed to myself that I was committed to Tess and no other for the rest of my days on earth. I heard her utter the words ‘I love you‘ on the phone. Reading it as a text and hearing the sexiest voice I can imagine saying it are two entirely different things. It took my breath away. I told her I loved her and she tells me she had a similar reaction. Now we were serious. Unbeknownst to me, she always had been. I was the one who was late to the party.

She began going out, walking her dog so we could talk. She no longer felt comfortable talking with her housemate about. Tess and I acknowledged our love for one another and she continued to endure the physical and mental bashing which caused me growing concern. I knew now, however, that this was a temporary thing. I was convinced for the first time that some how, some way, we were going to end up together and be able to enjoy After Eights for the rest of our natural lives.

To be continued…