I watched in horror as the pictures popped up, one by one. Taylor. Number 3. Emme. The girl he currently worked with - Amy. I was confused at first. Maybe they were old pictures. I mean, they had to be old pictures, right? I scrolled and I scrolled and I scrolled. Taylor mostly. At the bar. Over the summer. Some place sipping champagne with him the day after his birthday after we returned from visiting his mom. Pictures of Emme from her social media. None of me. Not one of me.
I opened the email again. I searched quickly for anything from Emme. Nothing. I searched for anything from Number 3. Nothing. I searched for anything from Taylor. Lease contracts. From the previous spring, after he was living with me. Lease documents they had both signed to rent a house together, complete with their dog information. I ran to the bathroom and threw up.
But that wasn’t all of it. Apparently, they had some kind of falling out because he obviously didn’t move out, but then there were the numerous emails from her begging him to unblock her and then just as many emails from him desperately pleading with her to forgive him. To this day, I don’t know what happened, but I do know that neither one could let go. From there, I loaded his Facebook and managed to get into his Messenger where there were so many inappropriate messages between him and another co-worker, Kristin, who he said he hated. I couldn’t even stomach reading them all, especially not the ones where they were talking about “hitting this and hitting that.” She was married. We were living together. But my favorite was from a friend of his asking him who Taylor was because she added him on social media and noticed they had Joe as a mutual friend.
“Yeah, go ahead and accept it. She’s been my mistress on and off for years. I’m a lucky man. Just look at her, young and pretty. I have been banned from any social media contact with her by my girlfriend (it’s complicated), so I figure I can check hers out through yours.”
I giggled at his friend’s response, which was something along the lines of not being impressed and wouldn’t help him cheat. I’m sure his enormous ego wasn’t completely deflated though. He was so full of himself, he didn’t really need help building himself up.
More pictures loaded. More emails. So many current ones from property managers just days before where he is looking for places to rent, while talking marriage with me. I was devastated. What was I doing wrong? I was just trying to love him and pay bills. We had a cruise planned for the spring. The tickets were bought. And he was looking to move? In secret? Like an escape? That’s what he had to do to leave? That’s who I had become? A woman he had to escape? Maybe I was the monster.
And as I was scrolling, I heard him come in. I disconnected and put the iPad back and jumped up to greet him.
“How was work?”
“Pretty good.” He kissed me. I quietly plotted his death. “How was your day?”
“Oh, fine. Uneventful, really.” I plopped down on the bed.
“Yeah?” He looked at me sideways. Maybe it was the sound of my voice that tipped him off. “Should I sleep with one eye open?”
“Why would you say that? That’s a weird thing to say.” I was genuinely curious. There was no way he could know that I just discovered all of his secrets, yet his guilty conscience is that strong?
“I’m kidding.” He took off his shirt. I imagined where I would stab him when the time came. I saw the scar. The one that was supposed to kill him. You have no idea how many nights I wished it had. Like the night we argued about some infidelity of his and he opted to sleep on the garage floor with a dining room table leg as a pillow instead of face the truth.
He put on another shirt and looked at himself in the mirror. He drug his hand across his chin and down his neck and I imagined what it might feel like to slice his jugular. To really kill the monster. The real monster. The one standing in front of me. To feel his blood wash over my arms. I wondered if it was cold. Because this man was not alive. No human could ever be this cruel while being that convincing.
We had dinner with a murderer once. Well, he committed his murder well after we dined with him. And when I heard what he did, I thought he was evil. We sat and broke bread with pure evil. And I never understood how we didn’t know. How we never caught on that he had that inside of him.
But, I was sleeping with evil for two years and never caught on.
That’s how good they are. The really evil ones. The ones who are actually real monsters. They feign being alive. And we believe them. And then we’re the crazy ones. The women that love them. We’re the ones with issues. We’re the ones who lose our shit. We’re the ones. The fingers are pointed at us because now we’re screaming out our pain and frustration. It’s the psychopath love cycle. Idealize, devalue, discard. And when they discard you with such severity, you break. You can’t help it.
Loving a psychopath is like being hit by a wave. At first, it comes right over you and takes you down. Then you float to the top, rather easily while the water pools. You swim for a bit. Enjoy yourself. And then the water recedes to the ocean with such force that it practically rips you apart limb by limb and the sand under your feet starts to crumble. You either go with it, or you fall and wait for the next wave to hit because the part where you’re swimming in warm, crystal blue water looking up at palm trees is euphoric. And you’re just trying to get back there. And trust me on this, as much as you can love somebody who is “normal,” this kind of euphoria only comes from somebody like Joe. Because it isn’t real. It’s an alternate universe. And they bring you close enough to touch it, but you never really have it because it-is-not-real. It’s a made up place that only he can take you to, and that’s why you keep going back over and over again.
He started telling me about his day, like he always did. But this time, everything was muffled. I could barely make out his words. He was cheating his company, or so he said. And every night he liked to come home and tell me how he was doing it, which was probably horribly exaggerated. But, he was so proud of himself. He was so proud that he was pulling one over on them. I wondered who he was telling about how he was cheating me. How he had managed to live rent free while he was saving money to buy himself a new tooth. That I ended up paying for after he had to use his savings on some “emergency” somewhere, which I am guessing was a whore and a champagne flute the day after his birthday.
Oh, yes, the tooth. He was missing one. In the front. On the top. Some childhood accident except it was time to get a new one or fix the crown or something because it was loose. And I originally felt bad that it came out when he took a bite of his burger one night at dinner, but not anymore. I was happy he was toothless. I was happy he looked like a backwoods hillbilly when he took it out. Because the space was huge. And that night, he took his temporary tooth out and put it in the container on the counter in the bathroom and proceeded to the kitchen for a beer. An IPA. And then another, and another and another and another, until he was good and drunk. He was such a functioning alcoholic that you never knew if he was drunk or not, but on this night, he was sloppy. Slurring. And his words whistled through the hole in his mouth. He was a mess.
Yet, a year before that he had the audacity to call me a mess. That night when he texted me and said he wasn’t alone and then later said he was – yes, that night. He thought I was a mess and I believed him. And he played on that for a long time. He was going to rescue me. And all I had to do was put up with the bullshit for my savior to come.