Jessi's abrupt departure had prompted a rush of tumultuous thoughts concerning the young blonde, our relationship, and what I should do about it all. Woven through all these thoughts were musings about Jessika and how my sexual friendship with the lovely brunette fit in with whatever was happening with her former classmate.
After spending nearly half an hour just sitting on my couch, my thoughts endlessly and futilely chasing each other around, I decided I needed to do something. I got up off the couch, went to my home office, and spent the next hour and a half running on my treadmill. After that I took a long shower, so it was nearly 1:00am before I fell into bed, hoping I was exhausted enough to sleep. Unfortunately, even though I had worn out my body, my mind was still running nonstop. Even when I finally did fall asleep, I would wake ten or twenty minutes later with dreams of Jessi and/or Jessika haunting me, though I could not remember the details of any of them.
Sometime around 5:00am, I finally slipped into a sleep deep enough to last for a while. It was nearly 1:00pm when I truly woke again, although I seemed to recall various times when I had been partially awake. My disarrayed sheets and comforter told a story of restlessness that my body reflected as well - I felt groggy, as if I had been drugged.
Making myself get out of bed, I stumbled to the bathroom and took another shower. As I stood under the hot water, I tried to recall a night as tough as the one through which I had just suffered. Objectively, I was quite sure I had lived through worse at the end of my marriage, but in the moment, they seemed to pale in comparison. Still, thinking about that time brought me some sense of perspective, and when I emerged from the shower, I did so with the conviction that worrying about my relationship with Jessi would accomplish nothing. I would just have to wait to see what would happen and do my best to show her that I cared about her.
After I dressed and ate, I went to my office and booted up my computer. As I waited for it, I checked messages on my phone, something that I had been reluctant to do up to that point. However, I had not received any texts since one had come in from Jessika the evening before, replying to my "Merry Christmas" text to her and letting me know she was having a great Christmas with her family. I also saw that a call had come in, although I did not recognize the number - it was an out of state area code, and that I had a new voice mail as well.
When I accessed the voicemail message, Jessika's voice came through my phone's speaker:
"Merry day after Christmas! I hope you had a good day yesterday. I received an interesting text message today. It was from Kasey from our class. She told me that last night you and Jessi had come in to the restaurant she works at, but then immediately left when you saw her. I hope everything is okay there. Call me when you get a chance. You can call my cell or the number I called you from - it is my parents' number."
I listened to Jessika's voicemail twice more, trying to determine what her mood might have been when she left the message. Her greeting seemed happy enough, and during the part of the message about Kasey seeing Jessi and me, I detected no anger in her tone - rather I heard concern and maybe a hint of amusement. Finally, she had given me her parents' phone number, so I doubted she was upset with me.
"That is the one with whom you should be thinking about having a future," my conscience suggested, "not the one who is much too young for you, and who also has some very troubling issues."
"That would be much easier," I thought, "but neither of us feel that way about the other. For better or worse, it is Jessi for whom I am falling."
Shaking my head, I tried to put these thoughts out of my head. I decided to wait until evening to call Jessika. I wanted to find something to take my mind far away from thoughts about either of my paramours, and I thought that maybe working on revising and editing some more of my old attempts at writing fiction might do the trick for me. However, I made the mistake of checking my email first.
I found a long email message from Jessi in my inbox. As I began to read through it, I immediately recognized the young woman's precise but rigid writing style, which made me smile. I fondly recalled reading her essays and trying, unsuccessfully, to glean anything personal about her from them. However, unlike her essays, the email was full of the kind of personal details I had wanted to find back then.
The first two thirds of her email fleshed out her relationship with her parents and two siblings, about whom I had heard nothing but vague references. Jessi was the middle child, having an older brother and a younger sister, and while some of the family issues she related seemed to be those typical of middle children, there were many others that seemed to be quite different.
According to her email, Jessi had only had close relationships with her father and his parents, although both of her paternal grandparents were now deceased. Additionally, she explained that she and her father now had a strained relationship, although they still had contact. The young blonde had almost no contact with her mother and her older brother, and she had a great deal of resentment toward her younger sister, although from what she wrote, the reasons for the resentment did not seem like her sister's fault.
In her email, Jessi told me that her father, who was thirteen years older than her mother, was a high school math teacher. Her mother was also a teacher, but she taught elementary school, which made some of the details Jessi gave me about their relationship seem all the more disturbing.
Jessi's mother had apparently never understood why her daughter had not liked dolls and dresses; had not been able to easily develop social bonds with other children; and had preferred, even from an early age, working math problems with her father to any other activity. For the first six years of her life, Jessi had been subject to her mother's attempts to make her daughter more like herself. Then, when Jessi was seven, her sister had been born. At the time, Jessi had hoped that would mean a reprieve for her. Instead, however, her mother had taken every opportunity over the next several years to point out how preferable her younger sister's behavior was to Jessi's behavior.
I stopped reading for briefly after finishing Jessi's description of her early relationship with her mother. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to take the young woman in my arms and hold her. I thought about calling her, but I had no idea if she might be free or at work, so I decided to keep reading.
When I continued, I learned that Jessi's older brother, who was almost three when she was born, had always resented her for taking attention away from him, especially that of their father. Jessi's description of her torment at her brother's hands was all the sadder because he, like their mother, had embraced Jessi's sister when she had been born. For Jessi, it had become the three of them against her, at least until recently. She explained how she had always believed her sister was spoiled and did things just to hurt and annoy her, but that in the last couple of months she had begun to think that her sister, who was now thirteen, was mainly innocent, and maybe even embarrassed about how their mother and brother fawned over her and either ignored or criticized Jessi.
Following her paragraph about her brother and sister, Jessi wrote several describing her relationship with her father and his parents. Jessi had adored her father when she was young, and to this day, she explained, they still sent each other math problems to work. According to Jessi, one of them would work part of a problem and send it to the other to finish. Often, she explained, they would intentionally make mistakes for the other to find and correct. It was a game they had played since she was three, although it had become much more complex over time.
Jessi then told how losing her grandfather when she was eleven and her grandmother when she was thirteen had caused her to withdraw from people even more than before. She explained that she had been afraid to care about anyone, for fear they would go away. However, she had also craved contact with other people, and the tension between what she feared and what she needed caused her to act out and push her boundaries.
When she was fifteen, her mother had walked in on her and a boy making out. Despite the fact that nothing else had happened with the boy, Jessi's mother never trusted her daughter again. She would check Jessi and Jessi's clothing nearly daily, sometimes even more frequently, for signs that she was doing something wrong. It was during this time that Jessi's panic attacks, which she began having when she was eleven (the same year her grandfather had died, I noted), intensified. This led to her mother putting her in counseling, and then subsequently firing three separate therapists who had each suggested that Jessi's mother's treatment of the teenage Jessi was at least causing her attacks to be worse than they might otherwise have been.
As bad as everything in the email had been to that point, where I really began to feel the young woman's pain more keenly was when she told me how her father had started to separate himself from her after the incident with the boy. They had continued working math problems together, but otherwise Jessi believed he had become more distant. This strain between Jessi and her father caused her to act out even more often.
