I shiver as I draw my sweater closer around my shoulders. It’s a warm night, but is it really? All these months I thought I knew him. I thought I knew myself. It turns out to be an illusion of what I wanted. I find myself walking faster down the sidewalk. The nighttime sprinklers kick on and part of the access water finds its way into the cracks of the concrete. Kind of like how Tommy filled in the loneliness of my sophomore year in college. He didn’t ask me out because he was attracted to me, but because I was the easiest target; the lowest among our peers. He rushed toward me because I was on a downward slope. He flooded me with all of these ideas and I never even thought to question him. He was the love of my life. My soulmate. My master. My manipulator.

How could I have been such a fool?

“Kitten! Wait!”

I can hear his sneakers pounding behind me.

“That is not my name,” I say in a voice that quivers with weakness.

“Aww Kitten, don’t be this way…”

He’s right behind me now. I can smell the ax body spray.

“That is not my name.” This time there’s a little grit in my answer.

“You never liked your name, remember? You chose to be called Kitten. I’m only trying to help you find your true self. You’re letting yourself get worked up over nothing. I never thought you were dramatic…”

“Stop! Just stop with the mind games!” Now my tone verges of the brink of begging. I want him to just leave me alone. Let me sort though this with a clear mind…a mind that is no longer clouded by passion and longing. An awake mind, aware of the gaslighting and manipulation techniques that have held me captive for so long.

“You’re making a mistake.” His friendliness is gone, replaced by the cold and calculating devil that has been hiding under the surface all along. “You are throwing away your life and breaking apart our union. Oaths are not to be broken so easily.”

I shiver again, “You are not allowed to be intimate with an unbeliever…consider me one now…good bye, Tommy.”