44 Chapters About 4 Men - BB Easton Page 0,1

bus and leave everything I worked so hard to achieve in a gutter at the side of the road. Because my nerves were fucking shot by the time I met Ken, my heart was riding in on fumes, and the stability and security and sanity he offered was a soothing balm to my spent scorched soul.

Those inked-up men-children from my past might have been ferocious lovers, but they couldn’t keep their dicks in their pants, their asses out of jail, or a positive balance in their bank accounts to save their lives. Ken, on the other hand, was just so…safe, responsible, easy. He wore Nikes and GAP T-shirts. He owned his own home. He jogged. His criminal record was as ink-free as his freckled skin. And, to top it all off, he had a degree in…wait for it…accounting.

Needless to say, I might have overcorrected a bit.

Don’t get me wrong. Ken is my best friend, and we are actually ridiculously happy together—or, at least, I’m happy. I am. Really. You can be bored to tears and happy at the same time, right? They call those happy tears. Happy, bored, oh-so bored, sometimes-fantasize-about-hitting-your-spouse-out-of-frustration happy tears. Ken is pretty anhedonic and deadpan, so it’s hard to tell how he’s feeling. I choose to think of him as happy, too. But let’s be honest. Ken doesn’t really have feelings.

What he does have is a Captain America–style square jaw with a subtle cleft and a permanent five o’clock shadow. He also has enviously high cheekbones. His aqua-blue eyes are hooded by long espresso-colored lashes, and his sandy-brown hair is just long enough on top to allow for a good grip. His physique is lean yet muscular. His sense of humor is dry. He is brilliant and self-deprecating, and he has the ability to skip rocks across any body of water (a secret turn-on of mine).

The man is at least ninety percent perfect for me, but lately, all I can think about is the less-than-or-equal-to ten percent that’s missing—passion and body art. Two things I need to mourn and move on from in order to protect this lovely yet depressingly monotonous thing I have going with Ken.

But I can’t.

Tattooed bad boys are like a drug I can’t quit. I devour antihero romance novels like they’re an essential food group. My phone and iPod runneth over with the songs of a thousand breathy, angsty, tattooed alt-rockers, ready to fill my head at the press of a button whenever I need to escape. My DVR is brimming with mysterious vampires, renegade bikers, hedonistic rock stars, and zombie apocalypse survivors—alpha males into whose swollen, ink-covered arms I can run whenever things around here get a little too…domestic.

And do you know what I realized in my escapades to these imaginary dystopian societies and fictional underground fight rings? I realized that I know these men. I dated these men—the super intense skinhead turned US Marine turned motorcycle club outlaw, the ex-convict/underground hot-rod racer with the devil-may-care attitude, the sensitive guy liner–sporting heavy metal bassist…

I had them all, Journal. How did I not see the parallels between my fantasy men and my ex-boyfriends before? And I call myself a psychologist!

Take Knight for example…

There Once Was a Man from Nantucket

August 23

When I was fifteen, a pale skinhead

Handcuffed me to my ex-boyfriend’s bed.

He doused me with honey—

The noises were funny—

And then ripped my poor hymen to shreds.

Sorry, Journal. I just felt like the only way to soften the blow of that information was to deliver it within the inherent whimsy of a limerick. That poem pretty much exemplifies the confusion, oppression, and ultimate pain (both physical and emotional) that was my first serious relationship.

Looking back on it, the time I spent being Knight’s girlfriend was not unlike being a kidnapping victim with Stockholm syndrome. At the time, my innocent fifteen-year-old brain didn’t know what the hell was going on, only that I had somehow become his, and resistance was futile.

Knight was a skinhead. Correction: Knight was the skinhead—the only one in our sprawling suburban Atlanta tri-county area, to be exact. It was comical. He was so incredibly angry that none of the other angry-white-male subculture groups at Peach State High School would do. The jocks were a little too gregarious. The punks, although sufficiently violent and vandalous, had a bit too much fun. The goth kids were just pussies. No, Knight’s rage was so consuming that he had to choose the one subgroup whose image screamed, I will fucking curb-stomp you and then rip