Chapter 4: An Ivory Coast

It wasn’t that she didn’t still care about him.  Even now, part of her loved him still, or at least the memory of the good times that they shared.  She was little then, early teens with absolutely no experience whatsoever when in came to the male sex.  He was like a man who stepped out of the magazines she sometimes paged through in the grocery check-out line.  He looked like a teen movie boy-next-door with thick and long black hair, big brown eyes and a perfect mouth.  That he even descended to look upon her that day in the Toys R Us parking lot was a matter she held in great reverence for many years. Perhaps he saw in her something he wanted, a toy he knew he could have. She had been wearing her Toys R Us uniform of kaki pants and a red collared shirt, and her chubby, blond co-worker, who they called Bilbo, had jokingly placed price stickers all over her sleeve that read .69 for 99 cents.  It was oppressive and hot, and her hair clung messily to her face, though the bulk of its length was contained within a thick yellow hair-tie, looped into a sweaty bun.  He often told her later it was her long curls, cascading over her shoulders and down her back, that he first noticed about her, running around in her front yard after her dog in the earliest days of summer when the sea air was still cool and sweet.  But not on that day.  On that day, the 90 degrees and the 8 hour shift made her moist and exhausted.  Jiggling her keys in the door of her ’87 Dodge Lancer, she cursed as she opened the door and felt the wave of heat belching from the red fabric interior.  Fanning her face she stood by the door, and she noticed him looking at her, his sunglasses not quite obscuring the shift of his eyes.
“You live next door, don’t you?” he said, standing a little closer- and her heart skipped a beat hearing his voice, its smooth and even timbre.  It slid over her shoulders and swam down her chest, tugging a little lower than a voice had ever touched her body before.
That summer was carved in her heart like a most beautiful dream that came before the most bone-crushing nightmare.  Every moment of their togetherness that summer was innocent, pure, and full of longing.  They had discovered one another like travelers to a new world, caught up in the swell of the sea, the mystery of new skin, and the search for private treasures that no one else could share.  That’s how she liked to remember it.

She didn’t think about how his hand pressed a little too firmly against her shoulders when he pulled her to his chest.  She couldn’t remember when the line blurred between the fairer, sweeter sex of children and the darker passions of his mind.  Perhaps they had always been there, just under the surface, waiting to spring out, maybe without his even knowing.  Six years her senior, she trusted not only his hand but his instincts, and he taught her, with seemed patience, the arts of love.  She was an ample, able, excited student whose eyes would light up when she saw his hand stray towards his belt.   For four years he led her down a path which grew deeper and darker and so unlike the man she had once known, that it was almost like loving another person.  She never breathed a word of the darkness to another soul, choosing instead to exalt him as passionate and creative- an artist whose strength and character attracted everyone to him.  He never for a moment let his eyes stray to another woman.  Even as he grew more darkly beautiful he clung to her like cool black seaweed, obscuring her vision and her senses.   When she first found out about what happened to him as a child, she used it as an excuse to blame away any strange, violent, or bad behaviors.  Being taken advantage of by an older woman, as a twelve year old boy, must have been deeply traumatic.  Being made to believe that he was happy about the liaison; being manly and grown-up;  must have flayed his perception. She would tell this to herself in the darkest parts of the night, his body curled around her like a snake, hand pressed between her legs as if to assure himself that she belonged only to him.

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