Dennis: Part 7

There came a point in time when Dennis proposed to me. He didn’t have enough money for a ring. He only worked one or two nights a week, washing dishes in the dining hall of a nursing home. He bought me the best ring he could with the $50 he made a week. The stone was green, because green is my favorite color.

He proposed to me in the park that we always hung out in. He didn’t get down on his knee and all that and I was really happy he didn’t, because I always thought that tradition was weird. I said yes right away and threw my arms around him. He kissed me for a long time, really softly, and touched my hair and told me I was everything to him.

And you know what we did when we got back to his place?

Duh. That man was pent up by that point.

I think he only got 5 whole thrusts in before he was done. But it was all good with me, because I was climaxing by thrust number 3. He’d never let himself just go wild with me like that before. Months and months with him and he’d always been so restrained. Not that time though. I was wearing these baggy shorts and he didn’t even get them off me. He pushed them to the side, along with my underwear and we were barely on the bed before he was off and going.

The month or so after that, we barely left his room.

Some women pretend they like to give blow jobs. I’m gonna call it like I see it. Nobody likes that shit. It’s putting your mouth on someone else’s genitals. Where pee comes out. Where sweat congregates all day. It’s disgusting. It tastes bad. It makes your jaw hurt and sometimes you gag, which feels awful. Precum has a texture like a loogie. Nobody, nobody likes that shit.

Except, for when you really really like a guy.

I really liked Dennis and I gave him a lot of blowjobs.

What I liked most about having sex with him was that, after that first time, the energy sort of shifted in this really awesome way. I usually initiated. I usually took the lead. And he always let me.

I didn’t really know what I was doing or why I was being so different with him than I’d ever been with any other guy. I just knew that I liked it a lot.

Whatever it was I’d started, he went with it. I touched him, played with him, explored him, and he just reacted to it. I loved watching his reactions.

I’d tell him he had to ask me really nicely if he wanted me to suck his cock and he would smirk and play along. “Please, would you? Could you find it in your heart?”

He always did it in a kind of joking around way.

But there were times when I pushed the envelope a little too far with him.

Like the time I climbed on top of him, pinned his wrists down and started kissing his neck, biting his earlobe. He tensed up, so I stopped.

He gave me a really weird look. “What are you doing?”

“Um…I don’t know. Trying to tease you?”

“I don’t like this.”

“Oh.”

Later he asked me if I was trying to like a dominatrix thing.

“Not really,” I said. I didn’t know what I was trying to do.

There were a few other things I tried that had him slamming the brakes on, but mostly he let me drive things in the bedroom, if I didn’t stray too far from normal, and he was the first man who ever did that and I loved him for it.

It was just something else that made me feel really safe with him. I had never felt safe with a man like I did with him.

But if he was so great and so sweet and such a huge part of my life then what happened? Why are the two of us married and not to each other?

There’s a little bit that went into that.

To start with, Dennis and I were idiots and a lot of the times that we had sex, we did so without condoms. I was not on birth control.

It’s been a really long time since I’ve told anybody about this. Sometimes when I’m about to talk about something and I feel like people will go “I’m so sorry” then I don’t really want to talk about it. So this is sort of one of those things. Plus, there usually isn’t much of a reason to talk about it.

My period was irregular at this time. My period didn’t even out and become regular until I was in my mid-20s. Back then, it seemed to show up whenever the hell it felt like. Some months I didn’t get it at all. Sometimes they were two weeks apart.

I started feeling sort of weird. I don’t know how to describe it, except to say that I knew something was different. I had some weird cramping one day, but then my period never showed up. Different smells were bugging me. I kept craving mushrooms in mayonnaise. I know I said I eat trash, but canned mushrooms drowning in Hellmans isn’t something I normally eat. Nicki noticed this one day.

“Jen…what are you doing?”

“I know, it’s disgusting. I’ve been craving this a lot lately.”

She gave me a weird look.

A few days later, I asked if she could maybe just wash some of her perfume off. “Like I know I sound like a bitch, but smells have been bugging me lately.”

She stared at me.

“What?”

“When’s the last time you had a period?” she asked.

“I don’t…” I had to think about it. “I don’t know. I don’t get them every month. It skips around.”

“But have you had one this month?”

“Um, no.”

“Last month?”

“Oh…fuck.”

She nodded. “Let’s go get a pregnancy test.”

We got a couple of pregnancy tests. “Sometimes they aren’t accurate. Take more than one to know for sure.”

We went to some girl’s house. I don’t remember her name or much about her. She was a casual acquaintance of Nicki’s.

I took both tests. Both came back negative.

“That is a relief,” Nicki laughed. “Man, what is up with you if you aren’t pregnant, though?”

We’d bought two boxes of hair dye. Nicki and I both dyed out hair in this girl’s sink. Nicki dyed her blond hair blood red. I dyed mine blood red with black streaks.

Dennis didn’t like it, but considering the whole thing with the pregnancy tests, he didn’t say too much about it. I think he was worried about me.

I kept feeling kind of weird and then I was in class one day and I felt this flood of warm liquid between my legs. I went to the bathroom and there was blood there. More than you’d usually see with a period. At least more than you’d see all at once on the first day of a period. You don’t go from not a drip to soaking through your jeans.

I didn’t tell anybody for a couple of days. Then I told my grandparents. They brought me to the ER.

I explained what had happened to the doctor. I didn’t tell them about all the other weird symptoms. I only told them about the blood.

“When was your last menstrual cycle?”

“A couple of months ago. It’s irregular though.”

“Is it usually that irregular?”

“No. I took two pregnancy tests though. They were negative.”

They examined me and then told me the most likely explanation was that I’d been pregnant and miscarried.

“Come back if it happens again and make a follow up appointment with your gynecologist. But this seems like a very early pregnancy to me. It’s a lot more common than people think. A lot of pregnancies the body self-aborts early on. Especially first pregnancies. It’s one of those things. Are you trying to get pregnant?”

“No, I’m in college. I live at home.”

“You should start being careful. This might have been the universe looking out for you.”

The doctor was much nicer than all the times I had to go to the ER for psych issues. It was the first time an ER doctor talked to me like a human being.

I went to Dennis’ house that night. I hadn’t been upset about it until I saw him. Every time I’d started to get sad, I told myself I was being stupid. I was 20. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I didn’t even want a baby. I kept telling myself that.

But then, there was Dennis, looking at me so worried. He brought me downstairs to his room and pulled me into his arms and I started sobbing. He pulled me into the bed, covered me with a blanket. I still had all my clothes and my shoes on. I cried into his chest for a really long time and he didn’t say a lot. He just rubbed my back and held me and whispered over and over that it would be okay.

And I feel asleep like that with him.

We woke up the next morning, both of us still in our clothes and I kissed him goodbye and went to school. I tried not to think of it again.