I Was an Emotional Prostitute Part 8

Trigger Warning: Nasty Car Accident

The second thing, which opened my eyes to the truth of our relationship, was a car accident I was involved in. One evening while working for Domino’s pizza, I was hit head on by a man making a left turn in a pickup truck. The accident was so bad, that paramedics thought I’d be a body, although I didn’t know it then. It must have been a shock to find me not only alive, but conscious.

All I remember about it is that one minute I’m heading back to the store, the next I think I see a reflection of light in front of me. I wasn’t sure, but no one was behind me, so I hit the brakes. The next thing I knew there was rain coming in where the driver’s side window had been, an ambulance was about 100 yards away coming my direction, and the steering column was in my lap. My first reaction was, “Oh, my god! I’ve destroyed a rental!”

            Then, for some reason, I decided I needed to take the keys with me. Don’t ask me why, because I honestly don’t know. When the ambulance arrived, one of the paramedics opened the passenger door then got into the car with me. He told me they were going to get me out of there, but I needed to trust him. Other personnel tried to open the driver’s side door, but it wouldn’t open. The car started rocking, so the guy inside hollered that they needed to stop what they were doing.

            I told him I could just crawl over and started to do so. He looked at me, held up his hand, and said, “Stop.”

            I said, “Why?”

“We don’t know if your neck is broken.”

Then he told me they were going to have to cut the door off. That I needed to trust him as it was going to be noisy. I said, “Okay.”
            I heard them start the saw up, then the next thing I knew the saw was being shut off and they were removing the door. I remember thinking in surprise, “That wasn’t noisy at all.”

            Several years later I realized that I must have fainted.

            As they were putting me on the backboard, I heard someone say, “She came out of nowhere, man!”
            I thought, “What? I had my headlights on!”

            When I was loaded into the ambulance, someone asked me whose fault the accident was. I said, “I can’t say.”
            I’m surprised I had the presence of mind to say that. I wanted to say it was the other guy’s fault, but wisdom prevailed.

            Thankfully, the injuries were fairly minor. I had whiplash, bruises across my chest and belly from the seatbelt, and had to have six stitches put in my right knee at the bend, which required a splint so I didn’t accidently bend it and rip out the stitches. The stitches bothered me the most. I’d never had to have stitches for any reason before the accident.

The resulting shock had me sleeping most of the time for a week. On one of the few occasions when I was awake, I asked Andrew to come out to the living room to sit and talk with me for a few minutes, just the two of us. Andrew refused on the grounds that I needed rest. I couldn’t believe it. He would rather sit in the dining room with everyone else, than spend time with me. That hurt. The only time I saw Andrew during that week was when I dragged myself to the dining room to have dinner with everyone else. This made me feel like some kind of lovesick puppy following her master around wanting some of his attention.

Shortly after this, Kathy and her husband split up for good. Kathy moved to Oregon and stayed with her family while she looked for a job and a place to live. Andrew drove down to see her one weekend, but didn’t come home till several hours after he’d said he would be. I was working when mother called to tell me that Andrew had called to say he wouldn’t be home on time. I immediately got suspicious, especially as mother couldn’t give me a reason.

As it turns out he had stayed late in Oregon because he was looking for a gift for me. I was so angry with him I didn’t care about the gift. In my eyes it was an excuse for him to spend more time with Kathy. No one seemed to understand that Andrew keeping his word to me was more important than any gift he could have bought me.

To make matters worse, the gift he brought home to me showed me how little he understood me. It was a ceramic cat, curled up as if sleeping. It had some sort of blue pattern on it. Had it been a solid color or looked like a calico or tabby cat, I probably would have loved it. The blue design was just weird to me.

A few months later I moved out of mother’s house again. That’s when I finally felt free to break up with Andrew. The nice thing was that Andrew said the very thing I needed to give the deathblow to our relationship.

One night Andrew came to the apartment I shared with my friend, Clara. He’d bought a truck recently that didn’t have seat belts in it that we knew of. He wanted me to go with him to a nearby store to find new sheets for his bed, as he’d recently moved into another apartment close to ours. I refused due to the lack of seatbelts in his truck.

He tried to convince me to go by reminding me the store was less than a mile or so away. Given what I’d just been through a few months prior, there was no way I was going anywhere in his truck till the seatbelt situation was remedied. He finally left.

I went to a movie instead with a co-worker, Pat and my roommate, Clara, instead. We got back kind of late and I knew that Pat had a long drive ahead of him. So, I suggested he stay the night in our apartment on a cot I could set up for him. As we were getting it set up, Andrew called. While we talked, he asked what was going on so, I told him. Andrew said he wasn’t comfortable with that idea. I told him that it wasn’t his decision and that I would never leave him for another man. He laughed, then said, “I hope you wouldn’t leave me for another woman either.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. I felt like he’d just put a knife in my heart with the fact that he could even think such a thing. I told him I needed to go. He sensed something was wrong and questioned me. I told him to let me go. He did, but reluctantly. He hated for me to be angry with him and not talk about it. He would push at me to talk until I got so angry I not only told him what was wrong, but said some things I wished I hadn’t; despite warning him to back off. But this time I had my way. He let me off the phone without forcing me to tell him what was upsetting me.

Pat left because he didn’t want to be the cause of any trouble between us. What I didn’t tell him was that the trouble was already there; his presence only brought it to the surface. Andrew called the next day and told me he’d meant that last part as a joke. Joke or not, it still felt like I’d been stabbed. I told him I needed a few days to think. He called me a couple of days later to say he wouldn’t wait forever. I said that I hadn’t asked him to wait forever; I just needed some time to sort things out. Well, that last phone call from him sped up my decision. The next day I went to his apartment, picked up anything that belonged to me and left him the key.

Andrew pulled into the parking lot just as I was leaving and wanted to talk things over. I was so angry I didn’t care. All I wanted was to leave him behind. I’d had it with him and everyone else who had thought he was so perfect for me. They could not or would not see how the things he did hurt me.