Page 97 of Last Fall

Until Tony made me the center of hisuniverse.

Our first time was nice. Very nice. Considering my past boyfriends had been very lackluster in the first-time department I once again pointed to Tony’s age and experience as making him a superiorlover.

A superior person,really.

He stacked up the dominoes and I followed along, trotting behind like an oblivious lamb on the way toslaughter.

He continued to charm my parents. My friends dropped off one by one, replaced, I thought, by Tony’s love and our new friends we’d met together. His business partners and theirwives.

Key words beinghis, his,andhis.

Not mine. Everything that was mine was gone except formyjob.

And then...Let’s move in together.I was so busy playing house I didn’t notice being sealed up in the pretty box called Tony Moravek’s penthouse. He was good. Very good. He even waited four months after I moved in, enough to get comfortable and compliant again, before he suggested I quit my job and gofreelance.

So I could be more flexible and less stressed. So I could bewithhim.

I was sooblivious.

I scratched a few hateful words on the legal pad in front of me because it was cathartic to let it out, but I couldn’t look at what I’d written so I tore off the page and crumpleditup.

Dressed up like his little doll Tony would parade me out for dinner and “meetings” but I had almost no life outside of him. I didn’t even notice—probably because up until then Ilikedall the attention—until I ran into an old co-worker and we decided to grab lunchtogether.

It was in the middle of the laughing about our old boss that she suggested I come back. They missed me. No one was as good as I was and they werefloundering.

That’s when I said the words that wokemeup.

“Oh Tony wouldn’t like that. He’d besomad.”

She stared at me like I was an alien who’d just been plunked down across from her while I sat with my mouth hanging open as I realized whatI’dsaid.

WhatI’ddone.

I laughed it off as a joke and then said that I was so busy with my freelance clients that I couldn’t imagine ever going back to working forsomeoneelse.

It was such a lie. I only had one client left. Tony kept me so busy traveling with him that I’d dropped the others for convenience. After all, I was living a dream life, being whisked away from city to city, wining and dining with the rich and famous. Would I rather spend my days enjoying the city and the comforts of our five-star hotels, or cooped up working on someone else’smoney?

Dumb.Dumb.Dumb.

But I could fix it. Fixus.Surely it wasn’t intentional. We were just so in love we’d slipped down a slippery slope. He’dunderstand.

I took back a client and added a new one. He noticed I was busieragain.

“Why didn’t you take the food tour today?” We were in NewYorkCity.

“I had to finish these projections and I wanted to get a jump on Hu’s second quarter,”I said as if it were perfectlynormal.

It should have been perfectlynormal.

But Tony was upset. Very upset. I’d never seen him soangry.

It was just the tip of theiceberg.

We fought about my work for weeks. He kept insisting he wasjust so stressedwith his own workload. He apologized for each outburst. I forgave him. He kept suggesting I was working too hard, that he was worried about me. I ignored him. That’s when he brought home the tickets to Paris. He made it nearly impossible to do anything but be with him onthattrip.

But we seemed to find a balance after that. He didn’t give me a hard time about my clients and I kept my work as far away from him as possible. I didn’t even realize I’d gone right back to the same bad behavior. I thought having more clients, more money, fixedthings.

Itdidn’t.