Sex 10, Words 3

Brown had a habit of criticizing almost everything about me. Most of it stung. But when he rubbed salt into the never-healing wound of my career disappointment, I always went over the edge.

I was nearly six years out of college, cum laude from Yale University. But while my classmates were presumably on their way to being doctors, lawyers, captains of industry and heads of state, I was answering phones and schlepping coffee as a $16/hour secretary.

After quitting the Lunacy Network without notice, I'd gone temp-to-perm in the home video division of the Looney Tunes movie studio.

My boss was cool. Like me, he was from Detroit – although the Detroit he grew up in was considerably different than the one I grew up in. His Detroit still had lots of white people in it, before all the white people like him fled. He'd started out as a copywriter in Detroit ad agencies, worked his way up to owning his own agency, and now he was a vice president at Looney Tunes.

Cool VP made it clear that he didn't want me settling for life as a secretary, not even his. "You're the best damned secretary I've ever had, and you're absolutely wasting your life." He offered to mentor me as a copywriter, and told me he would help me get started at an agency.

I shared my happy news with Brown, only to have him cut it to shreds.

"I'm not trying to piss on your parade, but I've seen what happens at advertising agencies. You have to be able to produce on demand, and if you can't, you're out the door. And I know you. You can't handle stress at all."

He dug this knife into my psyche while we were in the middle of watching a movie. I held in my tears until the credits rolled and Brown stepped in to the shower. When he stepped out, he found me standing in the dark hallway, with my coat on and my keys in hand, crying uncontrollably.

I told Brown that I was upset, and I was going home. Brown did what I knew he would do. He told me that I was not going anywhere at 1 a.m. He proceeded to undress me and tuck me into bed as he rubbed my back and told me to relax, and I continued to sob.

A thousand words were screaming in my head. How could I be in love with a man who had no belief in me? Why couldn't he take the knife out of his mouth long enough to encourage me ... or to even just say nothing?

In the night, I woke up and found myself holding on to him as if he were my life preserver.

In the morning, we made love, and the words I couldn't say were still there choking me, and I wanted to tell him, but I didn't know how to make the words come out, so I just had my orgasms and choked back the words until it was time for me to go to work. He never once asked me what was wrong the previous night, and I was more or less relieved, because I didn't know what to say or how to say it.

We didn't see each other again for 2-1/2 weeks. I was once again giving him the silent treatment and refusing to come to his house. Brown got so frustrated, he banged on my door at 7 a.m. on a Sunday. I was so happy to see him, all I could do was hug him and kiss his neck and lay quivering beside him after another round of passionate lovemaking.

I still had to talk to him, somehow. And I still didn't have the right words to say.

(Brown Diaries Part 10 of 18: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 | Lessons Learned 1-3: 1 2 3)

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