The Homicide Detective (Part Two)

After about a year things got to a really bad place. He had been the only man who’d been able to really break me down and make me lose myself. I grew up watching my father be emotionally abusive to my mom and I swore I’d never end up in a relationship like that, and here I was living it. I would tell Matt this during every long emotional argument and he’d always apologize and say he didn’t want to do that to me. Another of his many lies because he always would do it again, and again. I became afraid of him, and not just because he slept over with his gun right next to the bed, which looking back was also pretty frightening. I was out to dinner with a friend one night and left her in the restaurant while I stepped outside for what I expected to be a quick conversation with Matt. It was snowing and freezing that night, but because I thought I was just stepping out for a minute I didn’t bring my coat. He picked a fight and was so manipulative and threatening that he managed to keep me on the phone for a half hour, even though I told him I was cold and my friend was waiting. He told me if I hung up with him then we were over. I should have taken that enticing offer, but instead I stayed out in the cold and came back to an angry friend who was confused by my new found inconsideration. After that I started avoiding going out with my friends. It was easier to just stay home then to even go out to dinner with friends, since I knew it would just end up in a fight.

The reality of the situation really began to really sink in while I was out visiting Gavin and Raven in California. We were at Disneyland, and I should have been having a great time, but instead I was on the phone with Matt most of the time, and snapping at my friends for making jokes in the background. They sat me down and had an intervention of sorts. Raven even cried and said she couldn’t stand to see me this way. Gavin told me I was one of the most optimistic and happy people he’d ever known, but that in the past year he didn’t see that person anymore. I was shocked that I was viewed this way. I hadn’t realized my friends could sense how flawed and defective the relationship was even as I’d tried to hide it from them all. I felt trapped and broken, and somehow dependent upon this screwed up relationship. Inside I was screaming to be freed from this torturous relationship but on the outside, I was hanging on to it, and him, with fervor. I was completely lost. It was almost as if I’d been brainwashed and, in a way, that’s exactly what he’d done with his manipulation. He took advantage of how trusting I was and how naive. He knew exactly how to use my weaknesses to his advantage.

I started becoming more certain that he was being completely dishonest with me as more time went by. The information he kept giving me didn’t add up. On one of our vacations after he’d taken a private shower and finished blow drying his fake hair behind closed doors, I went in to shower but realized I’d forgotten my face wash, so I left the water running and went out to get it. When I came out he was on the phone and acted kind of nervous and surprised as if he’d been caught. I went back and finished my shower and when I came out I asked who he'd been talking to. He said it was one of his construction guys, that there had been a problem, and he proceeded to tell me a story I was pretty certain he’d made up on the spot. He said he had to call him back to make sure everything was resolved. He then supposedly called his "worker” and while he was supposedly talking to him I knew in my gut that he hadn’t been speaking to one of his guys when I’d walked out of the bathroom earlier, and I also knew that he wasn’t really talking to anyone right now. I believed he was making a pretend phone call to solidify his story and I wasn’t going to make it easy for him. I went over to him, smiled and sat on his lap, and tried to kiss his neck to get as close to the phone as possible so I could hear if there was a voice on the other end. He seemed uncomfortable and even moved the phone to the other ear furthest from me. I looked at the clock and made a mental note of the time.

Later, when we were on the beach, I said I needed to go back to the room and get more sun block. While in the room I grabbed his cell phone and looked at his outgoing calls. I’d made a note of the time he’d made the phone call I'd believed to be fake and, sure enough, no call was made at that time. Liar. I looked at the call he’d made right before that, the call I’d walked in on when I'd come out from the shower, and I wrote down the number. I used *67 to make my number private and I called it from my phone. It wasn’t one of his work men, it was a woman with a New York accent almost as thick as Matt’s. I hung up. His wife. Has to be. Bastard. I saw another number he’d called earlier that day. A different number, but when I called it, the same woman’s voice answered. I could have confronted him but I didn’t. I can’t really explain why. Part of me was afraid of him and part of me just still didn’t want to admit to myself what a fool I’d been. Another part of me still felt like I loved him and wanted to believe that even if he was lying, it didn’t mean he was still with her, that maybe he was calling about the kids, or so I hoped. Unfortunately that wasn’t the end of Matt…yet.

The beginning of the end came while we were on vacation in Aruba for my birthday. We were downstairs at the hotel casino playing blackjack. He was losing so badly that I was shaking my head and laughing. I couldn’t believe how bad our luck was going and I was trying to lighten the mood. We finally left the tables and were walking back to the room to freshen up before we headed to dinner. Matt was acting cold. I asked what was wrong and he started getting upset and telling me that it wasn’t funny we'd lost. I said I wasn’t laughing because it was funny, I just couldn’t believe our bad luck. I told him it wasn’t worth getting upset over, you can’t take gambling too seriously. He told me that was easy for me to say since it wasn’t my money being lost. By the time we got back to the room a full blown argument had ensued. I didn’t understand what he was so upset about, and I couldn’t believe he was yelling at me on my birthday. Then he looked at me in the midst of his shouting, with anger in his eyes, and reached out and grabbed my throat hard with his hand. I lost it then. I ran from him to the other end of the room and screamed at him to stay the hell away from me when he tried to come closer. He tried to calm me down and I wanted nothing to do with it. I ended up bawling, in a puddle on the floor, on my birthday, in the middle of Aruba. I slept there that night, on the floor. On the flight home we didn’t speak. I looked over at him at one point and I saw tears sliding down his face. I shouldn’t have, but I grabbed his hand and held it while he cried. I would love to say that was the end of Matt, but unfortunately I stayed with him a little longer........To Be Continued........