1. This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Learn More.

How I Came Out

Discussion in 'Coming Out Advice' started by AngelaIvyBloom, May 29, 2015.

  1. AngelaIvyBloom

    Regular Member

    Joined:
    May 29, 2015
    Messages:
    7
    Likes Received:
    0
    Location:
    Minnesota
    Gender:
    Genderqueer
    Sexual Orientation:
    Bisexual
    Out Status:
    Family only
    So I could explain this in a "forward" but I think my short story tells it all pretty clearly. I just couldn't take it anymore. So I wrote this story about what it felt like to grow up as me and I published it on Amazon through Createspace. Of course I've unpublished it since then. But I sent copies of it to my immediate family to let them know how screwed up hiding my had become hiding my sexuality. If I get enough positive response I'll put it back up on Amazon. I published a number of stories under my pen name, Angela Ivy Bloom(same as my username). I'm publishing the full text of my short story here. I hope someone here connects with it.

    CHAPTER 1


    When I was growing up I liked to write stories. My favorites were the dirty ones. I could act out sexual fantasies on paper that I was prohibited to by my religion. God didn’t approved of this behavior, I knew, and I was certain my parents would have been shocked and disappointed if they had caught me. But biology trumped my good intentions. As I had no friends interested in being with me sexually, I had to find other outlets for my feelings. When I began puberty we had no internet, I had no friends whose parents left porn lying around, and my artistic skills, as adequate as they were, were pretty useless without models.
    I had sex the first time when I was sixteen. I met a girl in high school named Raquel who had some previous experience. And despite what my parents hoped for from girls educated in a religious institution, Raquel was more than willing to take part in my sex education. My parents had bought me a car. Dad wanted me to get used to working. If I was going to have to have a car, I was going to help pay its expenses. I barely made enough money at my job to afford gas, but I didn’t care about the pay. I just wanted to be with Raquel. I’m not going to describe in detail the things we did as the law won’t permit me to in a story like this. I can say that we dated until we were nineteen, and as young adults we did everything a couple could do in a car, at least within the bounds of our limited imaginations.
    When I started college Raquel and I broke up. We’d had a rough relationship. We argued a lot. Premarital sex was a temptation in my religion. And as much as I liked it, I wanted to be good, I wanted to be good like my father was good. I wanted to obey the scriptures. When the end came I wanted to enter heaven. But more often than not my desire for Raquel overrode my desire for eternal life. Of course this was during our sexual encounters. After sex, even before my orgasm was finished, the severity of what I’d done would set in. I was trading a few seconds of ecstasy for an eternity of damnation. I was angry with myself, and that anger spilled out onto Raquel. We were both fighting this urge to have sex, and I blamed her for giving in just as much as I blamed myself.
    When I left her I wanted to believe that she was just a bitch and that I just couldn’t stand her anymore, but that wasn’t the case. The truth was my sexuality wasn’t as simple as I wanted to believe it was. The stories I had written were a testament to my issues. A part of me wanted to be a regular guy. I wanted to be like my father who I imagined kept himself in the missionary position when I heard him ramming my mother upstairs in their bed at night. But I couldn’t keep my imagination in line with the morals my parents tried to impose on me.
    It was after years of sexual exploration that I realized I didn’t hate Raquel. I was jealous of her. I was jealous of her because I wanted to be like her. It wasn’t that I hated my penis. I didn’t despise my manliness. As I got older I got more creative in my fantasy world. I wanted it all. I wanted to feel what sex was like as a woman. I wondered what it would be like to have breasts, to have them fondled, to feel oral sex, and to perform it myself. When I discovered internet porn during college my fantasy playground exploded into a vast universe of possibilities. I began shaving off my body hair like the actors in the porn movies. When my sexual feelings were strong I would wear lingerie under my clothes, wear it when I pleasured myself in my dorm room. I would stay on campus over the weekends when the college emptied out so I could play dress up for days at a time without having to worry about interruptions.
    I felt guilty. I wanted to please my parents. I guess it’s just a biological side effect some of us inherit from childhood. I was so hung up on making them proud. It’s why I went to such great lengths to keep this part of my life hidden. I was afraid they would think I was gay, and the God in our church hated gays. There were times I felt so much self-loathing that I would throw away all of my sexual paraphernalia and commit myself back to God. I would attend church, read religious literature daily, and beg God on my knees to help me change. But eventually a lingerie catalogue would arrive in my mailbox, or I would get an email from a sex toy distributor. Sometimes all it took was a nice set of boobs walking by me on the way to class. I would drive to a big box store and load up on panties and dresses, wear out a pack of disposable razors shaving off all of my body hair, and call my parents with some excuse why I had to stay on campus that weekend.
    I didn’t think I was gay. I didn’t want to be gay with all of my heart. Of course what I wanted to be defied reason. What I wished the world was like was an impossible fantasy. For me sexuality wasn’t as simple as being born LGBT. For me it was a spiritual torture caused by how I learned about sexuality. Mine was a product of guilt, of right and wrong, good and bad, a labelling of certain sexual behaviors as sinful that created a person like me. It created a boy who wanted to have a woman’s experience in bed yet wanting to avoid the intimacy with a man that this experience would require. I don’t think I can exaggerate just how odd this made me feel. I couldn’t imagine kissing a man. I couldn’t imagine him hugging me, groping me, penetrating me. I couldn’t imagine dating a boy. Even with her anatomy, I didn’t have the vocabulary of a girl. If I had spontaneously changed sexes, even if I did so today, I believe I would be a lesbian at best and a slightly odd one. I doubt I could even stomach the idea of sex with a butch female. Denying even the slightest possibility that I was gay left me alone in a fantasy world where all women were stereotypical, model beauties. All people were perfectly sculpted women in these scenarios, the only difference among us being that some women had penises. And of course every one of them wanted to put theirs in me.
    My self-loathing continued to grow. I was naive. I couldn’t bring myself to date other women. What girl wants a boy who fantasizes about being a girl during sex? What female wants to have sex with a boy who dresses himself in lingerie because he likes the way the fabric feels on his freshly shaven skin? No young woman in the church would tolerate that. Still, I couldn’t stop playing out these fantasies in my head and acting them out alone in my dorm room on the weekends. The result was an overwhelming guilt. My fantasy world became a place of masochistic sex with penis wielding women. It was a place where I was a bad girl who needed to be punished. I found a new kind of enjoyment in all of this. I imagine it’s just as difficult to explain the allure of masochism as it is to explain sexual preference. The best way I know to explain it is that the more I thought of myself in these punishment scenarios the more I wanted it. I got to enjoy the pleasures of sex while suffering the punishment for my behavior at the same time.








    CHAPTER 2


    I didn’t start dating again until after I graduated college. In a fit of spiritual revival I decided to attend a religious school and train to work in the ministry. My desire to make myself as sexually vanilla as my father was so strong at this point in my life that I hadn’t masturbated for over six months. I believed that my constant church attendance had given me this newfound self-control. It filled me with such self confidence that I wanted to be at church all of the time. I believed this closeness to God was what had cured me. It had made me worthy of dating, worthy of marriage to a woman. And as a result of my salvation in church, no one would ever have to know about the fantasy world I had lived in before. Sex would be strictly natural in my future. I would be a man, a manly man. I would wait until marriage and use sex to make my wife happy, to give her children that we would raise in accordance to the American dream as God intended.
    Then my father and mother divorced. A twenty five year marriage was over. Two months later my father was remarried, and I had a stepmother and a stepsister. I was crushed. Divorce was against our belief system. It was the first time that I saw my parents as hypocrites. They had spent years pounding me over the head with scripture, and now they were both sleeping with other people. My faith in God faltered. Again I attribute some of my feelings to that biological connection between children and their parents that some of us inherit from childhood. If mommy and daddy could break the rules then I could too. And I did.
    Needless to say my religious studies suffered. I even changed my major to a secular one. Granted I still played the church game. School required it. I even performed the school’s worship services twice a week. I didn’t abandoned my faith right away. No, I was torn, conflicted, confused for years. I tried to reconcile my parent’s choices with our faith, but I was on a slippery slope now and no amount of explanation from anyone could save me.
    When I was in my dorm room in the evenings I would tell my neighbors I was going to bed early. None of them knew that I was still awake, shaving, dressing in women’s clothes, surfing internet porn. I returned to my old fantasy world to escape the confusion. After the divorce, ideas that had been too taboo to consider before became fair play. The women in my fantasies began bringing me men, and what had been gross before now became a part of my punishment. With a twisted kind of logic that only a masochist could understand, I had been very naughty and needed to suffer the unthinkable to make amends to God.
    As I sank deeper into taboo, I found myself falling in love with my stepsister. She was a few years younger than me. She was smart, sexy, and she thought I was funny. I began to believe that we could be together some day. My parents had committed the sin of divorce after all. They had gone even further and remarried new partners. Not only had they divorced, now they were committing adultery too. So what if I wanted to be with my stepsister. It wasn’t incest, not real incest. I integrated her into my fantasy world. We became lovers, and I served her willingly doing whatever she asked of me. It made me happy. I loved her.
    Then I made the mistake of letting her know how I felt about her. At least it felt like a mistake at first. I approached her as purely as I could, simply declaring my love for her. When she rejected me I was so embarrassed, and so was she. She never spoke to me again. I don’t suppose I blame her, looking back. I think my fantasy world got the best of me. Something like love between stepsiblings is considered taboo by society after all, even by most atheists. How could I expect her to return that kind of love? How could I expect her to remain my friend after revealing something as strange as that? But it was not all a loss for the masochist in me. My stepsister’s role in my fantasy world changed. She became obsessed with punishing me. I became her bitch, and she was as brutal and as cruel in my dreams as she wanted to be. I loved it.







    CHAPTER 3


    My sexual practices began to broaden. I explored the darker realms. My lingerie went from pieces decorated in flowers and teddy bears to vinyl skirts and fishnets. I bought sex toys that mixed pain with pleasure. My willingness to violate myself overrode my desire to make God happy to the point that I was willing to put myself through the pain of autofellatio.
    I wanted to let religious life go. I thought I could just move on and accept myself the way I was. But I found quitting self-righteousness just as difficult as stopping my dirty daydreams. I would pleasure myself in the darkest ways I could imagine at night, and the next day lead my peers in worship of a God I no longer understood. Part of me wanted to be punished while the other wanted me to be righteous. Neither wanted to give up. I couldn’t just throw God away, I couldn’t just throw away the propaganda fed to me by my parents. I couldn’t throw that away any more than I could throw away my sexual desires. My religion was too ingrained. My sexuality was a part of who I was. I was being torn in half by my desires.
    Then I met Danna, the woman who would one day become my wife. Her beauty wasn’t in keeping with my ideals. My stepsister was far prettier in comparison. Danna was overweight. Her hair was way too long, like a flower girl from the sixties. She had large breasts, but I could tell they were the kind that sagged even before I saw them outside her bra. Still, I loved her, and she did many things that made me feel that way. She laughed at my jokes. She was willing to help me with whatever project I was doing at school. She listened to me and tried things I suggested. Eventually, she seemed to worship me. She left her boyfriend back home and gave herself to me.
    We consummated our love many times during our first summer break together. Somehow I managed to ignore my idealistic views of female anatomy. My first girlfriend from high school, Raquel, had a nearly perfect body. Everything about her made it impossible for me to refuse her desires. How I managed to get off with a girl fifty pounds overweight, a girl who had stretch marks on her body from rapid weight gain before ever bearing a child, was my ability to hide inside my fantasy world during sex. What I really wanted was an underwear model, but my imagination made it possible to settle.
    I thought I was using her back then. I probably was. We started out as friends. I knew she wanted more than that, but my ego told me she was a step down for me. Then I got to know her. When one of my friends told me he was going to ask her out I panicked and declared my love for her. I thought I was being cruel. I thought I was playing with her emotions, but really this was all a denial of the truth. My wish before I ever met Danna, when I was dressing myself in lingerie as an undergrad, was to find what I called an alternative girl. I dreamed of finding a woman who wouldn’t flinch when she heard about my sexual fantasies. She was a girl willing to have sex before marriage. She was willing to do everything Raquel and I had done in my car back in high school. She went to church but wasn’t married to religion. She just wanted to have me, please me. Danna had all of these things. And the more acceptance she showed me, the more I fell in love with her. I thought I had finally found a woman who would accept me no matter how strange my sexual behaviors were. Danna seemed interested in this at first, but as time passed she began to reveal who she really was.







    CHAPTER 4


    After dating for years, Danna and I finally married. After college we moved to Virginia. Our wedding was very unconventional. It was an eclectic combination of marriage traditions from all over the world. It symbolized our desire to have a union unbound by the expectations of our former religion. Not that we were out to break the law. We both appreciated society’s ideas of common decency, those based on scientific understanding. We just refused to dedicate ourselves to any particular religious voodoo.
    Before we married I thought it was best to have full disclosure with my fiancé, and I told Danna everything I could about my sexual past. I didn’t want her finding out something after we were married that would make her regret her decision. But the idea of saying these things to her face was just too difficult, so I wrote it all down in letters and gave them to her. I worried the truth would repulse her. I didn’t want her to feel pressured to accept my history. A part of me even wanted her to leave. I couldn’t believe that a woman would stay with a man after reading what I wrote. But she did.
    I didn’t verbalize it at the time, but I was submitting to her. I was giving her written record of my secret fantasies since childhood. I told her of my desires for my stepsister. I told her about my collection of sex toys. I wrote about my obsession with autofellatio and even demonstrated it for her. I was giving her ammunition. I was giving her a written account of my darkest secrets, things I never wanted anyone else to know. I believed I was offering intimacy through full disclosure. I was letting her know that I loved her and would never leave her.
    Danna didn’t appear phased by any of the things I wrote. In fact, she strapped on a few of my sex toys and used them on me to show it didn’t bother her. To me this felt like acceptance. She was willing to take part in my fantasies. What I didn’t realize at the time was that she was collecting. She saw my intellect, my desire to work, my employer’s satisfaction with my skills, and the likelihood of a decent inheritance from my rich father. She saw the money I would make if I applied myself, and she wanted that money for herself.
    My wife was a gold digger. I wanted to help her. I wanted her to blossom just as much as I wanted to blossom. My belief was that paying into our relationship would bring us both into successful careers, careers where we both contribute. We both had degrees. We both went to work for the same employer. We both started at the same level. But it was our willingness to contribute time and energy to our financial wellbeing where the truth about our relationship started to reveal itself.
    I didn’t realize I was being fooled. I thought I had found a woman who loved me because of, if not in spite of, my sexual interests. Yes, I realized I was damaged. My anger towards religion would burst out from time to time. But I don’t believe a man’s anger issues about being lied to his entire childhood by his own parents is license for a woman to steal from him. I think she smelled my guilt from the start. She wasn’t stupid. She saw my talent when she met me, and this is why she set her sights on my future. I was an investment to her. Eventually I would make something of myself. The higher my income went, the more excuses she found to avoid work. It went from a relationship of cooperation to one where she fed on my labors. She saw my tendency to submit, and it made her salivate. Once she had me in her grasp she would own everything I had, and I would be her workhorse.
    When she became pregnant with our child she quit her job. Before we married she worked hard on her figure and dropped down to a normal, healthy weight. But when she became pregnant she gained not only her baby weight but another fifty pounds. She was just over five feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds. I went to all of her to OB/GYN appointments during the pregnancy. Her doctor plead with her to consider what she was doing to her body. I tried to encourage her to watch her eating habits. But she didn’t care. Life was about consuming for her. She wanted to stuff herself even though it covered her body in more unsightly stretch marks. Life for Danna was about taking everything that came into contact with her. And she didn’t care about the consequences, because I was the one who would pay her consequences for her.
    We bought a house. It was an old house, a hundred years old. I spent months of my own labor improving it. I even went to work for my father, working outside in construction year around, trying to make our lives better. I would work sixty hours a week and then come home and work on our foundations in the cellar till dark. I would come out covered in sweat and dust and cobwebs, and Danna would be on the couch still in her pajamas from that morning on her phone chatting with her friends. I would restrain myself from saying anything cruel, but it got harder as time went on.
    When our son was born I took off work to care for him the first two months of his life. I still worked. When he wasn’t in my arms I was on my computer practicing my writing. I wanted to be a professional writer. My job in construction took me out of town for months at a time, and I wanted a job where I could be home with my son every day. If I wasn’t writing I was holding him as we slept.
    Danna spent these first months of our son’s life recovering from a planned C-section. Our boy was going to be a big one, and her doctor thought it was best. She recovered from this surgery without incident. However, the consequences of her lifestyle during the pregnancy started showing up. One day when she got up from the couch to get another bowl of popcorn she injured her knee. When she went to her doctor for treatment he told her she was out of shape. She had spent so much time lying around on the couch that her muscles had atrophied. The treatment he recommended was exercise. But this was too much for her. Instead she spent our money, the money I was earning working outside exposed to the elements, to have a chiropractor adjust her once a week. I argued with her. I wanted her to take care of herself. But in the end I always submitted. I had to. I remembered the letters I gave her before we married, the letters describing my sexual secrets. She had photographs of me in lingerie. I had to submit to her, and she knew it.
    The final blow came when my father sold his company. I lost my job, a good paying one. My income went from nearly a hundred thousand dollars a year to four hundred dollars a week on unemployment. Danna became angry. Her sugar daddy was drying up. I wanted to provide for her and my son, I looked for other jobs in construction, but it was after the war and times had become difficult for everyone. I had seen the end coming many months ahead of time. When I saw that the economy wasn’t creating jobs in my field I began to write more than ever. I knew it was long shot, but I doubled my efforts anyway. This was my dream. I had always wanted to be some kind of an artist. I wanted to make superhero comics as a kid. Later that turned into a desire to make fine art. But these dreams are rarely realized by those who dream them. I knew that. I was diving into oblivion, hoping for salvation.







    CHAPTER 5


    I failed as a writer at first. My first story sucked, I admit it. I had no real experience. I had all of the stories I had written growing up, but most of those were too taboo for most publications. I wanted to be a science fiction writer. I wanted a good reputation for the sake of my family. But there was too much ground to cover for me to make a living at it from the start. It would take time, more time than I had on unemployment. But Danna wasn’t patient enough. She wanted insurance for her chiropractic visits and her trips to the message therapist. She liked to eat out regularly. She liked to drive all over the place visiting her friends and acquaintances. She wanted to buy this or that thing for the house, prettying it up to impress her friends. But when she had to go out and get a job to maintain her insurance, to help compensate for her spending, she became angry with me. My unemployment check was more than what she made in her new job. And I wasn’t being lazy. I was working around the clock trying to start a writing career. But because I wasn’t out there sacrificing my life in the heat and cold to provide her with the cushy lifestyle she expected, I was the dirt bag. We had substantial savings set aside. All I asked was that she be accountable with her spending. But looking at our bank statements is appeared that all she cared about was fast food, messages, and gas money.
    Then she began to push me away. She began eating large amounts of garlic before bed at night. I understand garlic is good. I love it too. But it seemed she was eating it by the case, because her breath became like death at night. The smell would jolt me awake. It seemed to me that the garlic she ate during the day had fermented in her stomach to the point that at night her breath smelled like a rotting landfill. I complained to her, but she didn’t change. I asked her to consider a different diet, but she insisted that garlic and other strong spices were not a part of her problem. She insisted the problem was me. Somehow my senses were distorted.
    Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I was writing all day. I was taking care of our son while she worked. I was cleaning the house, doing the chores. I eventually started a part time job that wasn’t in my field of expertise, working third shift for a package company. The pay wasn’t great, but it did offer some benefits. It was hard work, and I needed to sleep at night. Woken night after night by the stench of garlic, I became angry with her. I accused her of trying to sabotage me. She accused me of the same. So to keep the peace I decided to sleep in a different room. I promised to visit her in the mornings. I invited her to sleep with me at night whenever she wanted. But she behaved like my move to another room of the house was some kind of abandonment. I loved her deeply. I didn’t want to move. I just knew that not getting any sleep at night was bad for my attitude, especially considering the loss of my job.
    But Danna was offended. Now she was traveling out of state to visit friends. She was performing improvements on our house that we didn’t need. She was eating out regularly. It seemed to me she was intentionally spending up our savings to spur me forward, like a farmer whipping an ox tied to the plow. I threatened to leave her if she didn’t stop, so she divorced me.
    When we got our divorce, I warned her it could become ugly, and it did. I tried to give her the house. The interest payment on it was only two hundred dollars per month. I would take the lesser assets from our marriage in exchange. But she wanted me to sell our house. She wanted to tear our dreams to pieces. I asked her to consider our son. I asked her to think of his future, but she wanted to hurt me more than she loved him. She wanted to burn me. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, the saying goes. That’s what it felt like in her wake. It felt like I was caught in her tantrum. I wanted my son to be safe, to be happy, to be loved. But I think all she wanted was for me to suffer, to die. I believe she dreamed of my suicide. If I died the half million dollar life insurance policy we took out on me years before would be hers. Then she could pay a man to rub on her every day for the rest of her life. But upon our divorce I immediately canceled the life insurance policy and took out a new one with my bank.
    I moved in with my brother and began to write. I had my son every other weekend. It was hell for me seeing him so briefly. I had gotten used to seeing him every day when he was four years old. I fed him, bathed him, changed his diapers since he was born. I loved him more than anything, more than I loved life itself. In the end I loved him more than I loved Danna. After the divorce I only saw him every other weekend despite his protests. I loved him more than anything, and she knew it. She hated me because I wouldn’t sacrifice myself for her pleasure. She hated me so much for my failings that she chose to torture me by torturing our son. She didn’t love me. It seemed to me she never loved me. She only saw me as an opportunity. I was a big fish and she was a leech. She saw me as a slave. She believed that because she knew the details of my sexual past that she owned me. She assumed that with time I would go back to working in the field of construction where I had made so much money. That’s all that was important to Danna now. She assumed that my income would return to what it was before and then she could sue me for child support. Once my money was flowing into her accounts she could return to the life of leisure she had enjoyed before.
    But I had other ideas. There was something inside me that refused to be drawn into this life of subservience. There was someone telling me to kick off Danna’s manipulations. Maybe it was God, the real God that rules this universe, and maybe it wasn’t. Maybe this someone was a secret part of me.
    If I’m a pervert, I can accept it. I’m sorry if you think I’m sick. I imagine some people who read this will imagine me burning in hell forever. But I was more than happy to do what did. I would gladly burn in hell to get my son back. Of course, I couldn’t kill Danna. That would make me a murderer. Most likely it would put me in an institution if not on death row. Besides, if I took her life, the life of my son’s mother, I believe it would have changed something inside me irreparably. I feared it might take away my ability to love. Besides, she was his mother, and I wouldn’t want him living his life knowing that his father killed her. I wanted him to know her. I wanted him to grow up and see her for what she was. I didn’t want her to be a mystery to him. I would rather he learn to hate her than never know her.
    I would never impose the sexual confusion I’ve experience in my life on anyone else. It’s hurt me so much. I’ve lost so much. I would never impose this on my son. I would never let him know where I’ve been in my life if I could. I would want to save him from this. But this type of blackmail Danna was using to control me was too difficult to escape legally. If you want to judge me, I don’t care. I loved him so much. And that someone inside me loved him too, and they were furious. This person showed me the way.







    CHAPTER 6


    I begged Danna to forgive me. I promised her I would be good. I begged her to overlook the angry things I said. I offered her everything I owned. I had nothing else. But she didn’t answer. She didn’t speak to me anymore. Her response came in the form of a call to my lawyer. She was taking away my visitation rights. I submitted to this, though my lawyer insisted that I fight her. But he didn’t know about the blackmail. He didn’t know about the letters and photographs that she would use to embarrass me if I didn’t submit.
    It took me some time to understand what was happening. It was months later, and many nasty one-way emails, before I realized this was a game of control. This wasn’t about communication anymore. This was nuclear war. Danna wanted to destroy me in our son’s eyes. Not being allowed to be with him, he would see me as weak, as a failure. Her parents had divorced when she was a child, and she wanted to throw me into the same bonfire her mother threw her father. Danna wanted me labeled the same as her mother labeled him: the asshole. If she couldn’t get a life insurance payment out of my suicide, she would whip me into working a more lucrative job. If I wanted to spend time with my son, perhaps I could, but only if I performed for her.
    What these bitches didn’t understand was that I was not the typical man. There was someone living inside of me, a woman, I came to understand. This woman loved me, and wanted what was best for me and my child. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. This cunt, Danna, felt she could rest easy in her manipulation of me. She knew all I wanted was to hold my son again. I just wanted to love him. I just wanted him to know I loved him. Fuck her. Fuck her to hell, was my conclusion, and fuck anyone who supported her. Fuck my mother and my father and my sisters who thought Danna was a good mother. I would destroy her self-righteousness. All Danna wanted was money and control. And if I didn’t give it to her she would fill my son’s head with her lies. Well, fuck her and her lies, even if it meant fucking me.







    CHAPTER 7


    Science fiction writing wasn’t panning out for me. After five months I wasn’t even covering my costs. My savings were running out. I was going broke. My credit card debt was mounting. I felt powerless. My son was drifting further and further away from me. I needed to make a living to be with him. I asked my family for help, but they told me I should get a real job. I could have gone back to loading boxes in delivery trucks, but I was willing to aim much higher than that. I was willing to get down on my knees and do whatever it took. Fortunately, getting on my knees wasn’t necessary.
    Reviewing my dismal book sales one day that familiar advice writers receive came to me. Write what you know. I’d heard it many times while working on my writing. Now it occurred to me that maybe all of these perverse fantasies I’d imagined over the years was “what I knew.” I knew a bit about science, but I knew a lot about sexual fantasies, mine at least. I’d had a lot of practice creating these stories in my head. Mine seemed a little more unique than what you typically find on porn sites. They were dark. They were taboo.
    The idea of publishing them had occurred to me before, but the risk of my family seeing them, finding out about my dirty daydreams, was too great a risk. But I didn’t care anymore. What if they were valuable? What if there were others out there less creative than me, but in my same shoes, who would enjoy reading these things I invented?
    But then my idea went further than just making money for child support. I missed my son, and I wanted to be with him. I missed my son more than I missed my self-respect, and I found myself willing to give up all of my pride and risk everything to make it happen. Simply revealing my sexuality to my friends and family wouldn’t be enough. In fact, most of them would probably side with Danna if I told them the truth. No, I had to combat the blackmail. I had to let the whole world see all of the details of Danna’s control over me. At least I had to threaten her with it.
    My plan started with writing erotica short stories. I took a pen name to protect my identity, but I used different names for the characters. But I based my short stories on my life with her, stories with plots that detailed our sexual encounters, how she used my feelings of uniqueness to control and manipulate me.
    Erotica is a lot more popular than reviews and ratings on Amazon.com will lead you to believe. Most people who buy it don’t leave reviews for their friends, family and coworkers to find. The darker themes, the taboo, are even less represented in the area of reader feedback. This type of erotica, the type I wrote, is the type people explore only in secrecy. Not that it made me rich at first. My sales weren’t spectacular for the first few months. But the more I wrote, the more exposed I became as a writer, the more books I sold. These sales were laying the groundwork for the final step.
    The last story in the series, this story, was the final step in my plan. It wouldn’t be in the erotica section of the bookstore. It would be in a more socially acceptable place where people wouldn’t be afraid to give ratings and write reviews. It would detail the truth, expose the blackmail, and be popular enough create the sales I needed to bring me and my son back together.







    CHAPTER 8


    I met Danna in the park where we used to meet to exchange our son on the weekends. I chose the location because I knew she would feel safe there. We would be surrounded by parents and their playing children.
    “So you were able to cash the check my lawyer sent you?” I asked.
    “Yes. I take it you got a better job,” she replied. “My lawyer wants to sit down and discuss changes in your child support payments.”
    “I’m sure she does,” I said. “And I would like to discuss a change in our custody situation.”
    “I’m afraid that option isn’t on the table,” she replied. “Are we done here?”
    She got up to leave, but stopped when I laid a book on the table. “Have you read this?” I asked.
    Danna read erotic fiction from time to time. “I’ve heard about it,” she said. “It’s sold really well. She’s a lucky lady.”
    “Did you know that you know her?” I asked. “And yes, it has sold really well.”
    “No, I don’t know her.”
    “It’s a pen name,” I said. “I’ve read it a number of times too. I’ve read all of her work. They’re all pretty much your basic smut. But there’s something I think you’ll find familiar if you read them.”
    “I don’t have time to read them right now.”
    “Well, you don’t have to put yourself through that, right now. Let me just give you the highlights.”
    “I really don’t have time for this,” she said and got up to leave.
    “The main character in every one of her stories is named Danna. And her love life reads an awful lot like yours. So many familiar details. And the stories make her out to be a pretty cruel individual. I think if you reviewed them you would agree.”
    “Well, if this person does know me, and I find out who they are, I will make sure to sue them.”
    “Oh I wouldn’t expect anything less from you. But if you did sue her, wouldn’t that incriminate you? I mean, as long as she hasn’t used your last name, as long as she’s using a pseudonym, no one will know. But if the truth did come out, your good name would be smeared everywhere. The news would get to your son someday. This is the age of the internet after all, and with eBooks porn like hers is pirated all over the world. Trust me, I’ve looked. You wouldn’t want your mother reading these things.”
    I could see it in her eyes. She was drifting away in her imagination, realizing what I’d done. “I’m calling my lawyer.”
    “I wouldn’t do that until you hear everything I have to say. You won’t have this opportunity again.”
    “Are you blackmailing me?” she asked.
    “I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching ever since you did this to me, and I’ve figured out that there’s more than one personality living inside my body. I’m a boy obviously, and the boy inside of me wants to be a man. He wants to be like his father. He wants to make his mother proud. But then there’s this woman too, and she’s feminine. She wants things that women want.”
    “I have all of this on record,” she said. “You told me all of this years ago in your letters, the ones I guess you wish you had never written now.” She didn’t go any further than that. This blackmail, her type of blackmail, depended on denying its presence.
    I smiled. “You can’t come right out and say it, can you? If you admitted what you were doing the game would be over.”
    “You can’t come out and say it either,” she replied. “I guess that’s what you’re doing here, right?”
    “Oh, I’ll come right out and say it. In fact I already have.” I pointed to the book on the table. “It says it all pretty clearly right there. This one isn’t smut like the others she wrote. It’s biographical except that it’s sold as fiction. But it pretty much outlines exactly how I’m going to get out from under you and get my son back. It spells out every detail of how you’ve been blackmailing me. Some of the details are missing. I had to simplify things for the sake of brevity. And it might make me out to be a better person than I really am. But Danna is the main character of interest in it for you. And a discerning reader, if they knew I was the author, could easily verify that the information inside refers to me and you.”
    “So that’s it? You’re going down, and you’re going to take me with you? What about our son.” It was typical of Danna to redirect our conversations away from issues of her responsibility.
    “I have a better idea,” I said. “It’s in the book actually. I imagined our conversation would go this way. What I suggest in the book is that you could quit your job. You don’t need to discuss this conversation with your lawyer or with anyone for that matter. The fewer who know, the less likely it is to slip out. I suggest that you take these checks I’m sending you every month and consider it child support. Your income will be more than what I made working for my father. I created an offshore fund in our son’s name that will pay out to you every month until he turns eighteen. At which point he will gradually get paid more over the years and you less until you each receive half. You will continue receiving these payments for the rest of your life.
    “You will give me back custody of our son. You can remain primary custodian, and he can still live with you if you both want. You can put him in whatever school you wish, give him whatever care you think is best. You can have him on the holidays, take him to Disney World, take him to visit your family and friends. But if you fuck with the custody of my son once, try keeping him away from me once, my lawyer will take my real name public. The offshore fund will stop making payments, these child support payments that are much larger than what the law would require of me. You might have to go out and get a job. But everyone will know it’s you in my books. Your reputation will be destroyed (and so will mine.) And you may sue me for every penny I have, if the law can get to the hidden accounts I’ve used overseas. And I may spend the rest of my life in jail as a result, but so will you. Your life will become a living hell. Your reputation will proceed you. You won’t be able to hide. No one will trust you, not even your son.”
    “You would do this to your child?” she asked.
    I pointed to my pen name on the book. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” I said. “What would you do in her shoes? Would you behave any differently?
    “Or you could look at it another way,” I continued. “We could become a happily divorced couple. We could tell our son we love each other, and that we both love him. I’ll say good things about you, compliment you when you’re not around, and you’ll do the same for me. We can tell him that we tried to work things out, but we just had issues. We’ll hug, we’ll even kiss when we exchange him. We’ll sit together at his school plays. We’ll exchange cards at Christmas. I’ll congratulate you when you introduce your new lovers to me.”
    “And what if somebody finds out? What if the truth gets out some other way?”
    “As long as you follow the rules I’ll tell them that the idea for the book came from you. Which in a way is true, isn’t it? You were just trying to help me make it as a writer. I was going through a nervous breakdown. I exaggerated the details of our life to sell a story. I write fiction. And if you and I corroborate on our story no one will know for certain. We’ll laugh about it if our friends and family find out. It might still hurt a little, but if I recall, you like seeing me in pain.”

    THE END