She had never felt so lost before, not even that time when she turned down the wrong street in Memphis and ended up in the worst part of town for her to ever be alone in. She knew that all she had to do was turn around go back the way she came, but this time she knew there was no way she could turn around. Time just doesn't work that way. There was no Mapquest or GPS that could tell her where to go now. She could only live, day by day, trying to make the best decisions she possibly could, and dealing with the consequences as they came. Right now she was dealing with the consequence of being young, stupid, and in love. Also she was dealing with not listening to her mother, and choosing to be with the worst possible person for her.

She knew Tim was all wrong for her from the very day she met him, and she dated him anyway. She loved him and hated him at the same time. She loved him because she'd fallen in love with a person he'd made up inside his mind to woo her, and she hated him because once she'd fallen under his spell he'd changed into a completely different person, and manipulated her. He used her mind just as much as he used her body, and he most certainly did use her. Years later Kimberlyn would describe him as the evil husband in the Ingrid Bergman movie, Gaslight. He was so manipulative and cunning; he'd nearly convinced her that she was actually worthless and maybe even a little insane, that she was a burden to society, and a burden to him as well. One of the worst things you can do to a person is make them hate themselves, and that's exactly what he'd managed to do to her.

It was 4:25 am and she was lying awake in bed. Tim had fallen asleep around 10:00 pm, on the couch. She couldn't cry herself to sleep that night. She'd cried and cried, but sleep wouldn't come. Tim stopped sleeping in the same bed with her on nights when she'd somehow displeased him. He would never tell her what she did, or why he was upset, he would just go upstairs and collect his pillow and go back downstairs to the couch, refusing to look at her. When he first started doing this she would cry and beg him to speak to her, but she stopped doing that when she grabbed his arm to try and make him look at her, and he pushed her down the stairs. She blamed herself for his actions of course; she told herself that she shouldn't have gotten in his way. She remembered him stepping over her and sitting on the couch just before she fell unconscious. Luckily the stairs were carpeted, and she didn't suffer any major injuries, physically that is. Now she left him alone, and cried herself to sleep while he stewed in his anger. Usually he watched Letterman for a little while, and then fell asleep without a blanket and with the television on. Kimberlyn would always, without fail, cover him up with a blanket and turn off the tv, and the lights, and go back upstairs. What was she supposed to do? How could she make him happy if he wouldn't even tell her what was wrong? She knew in the back of her mind that he didn't love her, but she never listened to that part of her mind; because she'd much rather believe him when he said, "I love you" on his way out the door every morning. Even though she knew most of the time he was leaving to go see some other girl.

Finally Kimberlyn managed to fall asleep. She dreamed that something was chasing her. She had that dream a lot. She woke up when her alarm went off at 7:00 am. She liked to wake up a half-hour earlier than Tim, that way she could get up and dress, and make breakfast and then get Tim's lunch together before he left to go to work. That morning she flung herself reluctantly from the brand new bed she and Tim had bought, and went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. Then she left the bathroom, walked through the bedroom and hallway, and into a separate room that was just for her. All Kimberlyn's clothes and furniture wouldn't fit in the bedroom, so she had a kind of dressing room. None of her clothes got mixed in with Tim's; she had her own closet and drawers, a vanity table, chairs, pictures on the walls. It was just like her old bedroom but without a bed. Kimberlyn felt like being comfortable that day, so she decided just a pair of jeans and a tee shirt would be fine. She picked up a yellow tee that had a sunflower on it she'd gotten at church camp when she was 10, and put it on. Then she brushed her hair and pulled it into a ponytail and went downstairs to the kitchen.

Tim was still sleeping on the couch, snoring away. Kimberlyn sighed as she opened the fridge as quietly as humanly possible. Tim hated to be woken up by anything other than his alarm clock. She grabbed a tube of cinnamon rolls, and closed the fridge. She prepared the cinnamon rolls and stuck them in the oven, and while she waited she set the table for breakfast and put together Tim's lunch. Tim always ate nearly the exact same thing for lunch every day, which was odd because it made him mad when Kimberlyn made him chicken for dinner more than twice a week. Every day she packed him a Ziploc bag of Chex-Mix, a Trix or Cocoa-Puffs milk and cereal bar, one string cheese, one small bottle of fruit juice (either pineapple mango or fruit punch), one bottle of water, a microwaveable burrito, and sometimes a few cookies. He ate like a twelve-year-old boy. Somehow he managed to eat like he ought to weigh three hundred pounds, but instead he barely weighed a lean one hundred and sixty-two pounds, soaking wet and with a brick in his pocket. Kimberlyn sat down his lunch bag on the counter, and then went to sit down at the dining room table, to wait on the cinnamon rolls. She sat in silence, staring blankly at the yellow top. "I hope he's in a good mood this morning…" she thought. Shortly afterward his cell phone alarm went off, and she heard Tim turn it off and groan, then start to get up. Kimberlyn just sat there, looking down at the table. "Here we go." Tim walked into the kitchen; he was wearing a pair of red pajama bottoms with flaming dice on them.

"Cinnamon rolls?" he asked, smelling the air.

"Yep." Kimberlyn answered, looking at him and nodding, trying to smile a little.

Tim sighed and rolled his eyes. "Whatever Kimby…" he said, and started to walk away.

"He can't be serious…" Kimberlyn rubbed her eyes. "You told me last night that you wanted cinnamon rolls this morning. Right before you went in the office." Kimberlyn started to get up too. The oven timer had just gone off.

"I did not. I said I wanted cereal." Tim stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.

"Tim… we're out of cereal. You said you wanted cinnamon rolls last night. I know you did." Kimberlyn was almost in front of him now, and was reaching into a drawer to find an oven mitt.

His face started to turn red. Tim, enraged suddenly, advanced on Kimberlyn who had oven mitts on both hands now. He pushed her up against the sink and stood over her breathing heavily. He said, in a slow and deliberate voice, "Are you calling me a liar Kimberlyn Renee? Because I know what I said, it came out of my fucking mouth. I ought to know what I said because I said it. If you weren't so insane you'd know that." He was pointing his finger right in Kimberlyn's eye; then she closed her eyes and whimpered. "OPEN YOUR STUPID EYES AND LOOK AT ME WHEN I'M TALKING TO YOU!!" He yelled, and Kimberlyn obeyed, whimpering and squirming back as much as she could, but he was pressed up against her now, and she was bent backwards as far as her spine would let her. Her ponytail was in the sink getting wet from a bowl that had water in it. "What the hell is your problem? You look scared, like you think I'm gonna hurt you or something." He stepped away from her and Kimberlyn stood up straight, her wet ponytail flopping onto her back. She looked scared, and watched Tim walk away from her. "You're so fucking stupid. I'd never lay a hand on you." He paused and stared at her for a few seconds. "Whatever Kimby, I'm getting ready for work. Have that look off your face before I come back." He stomped up the stairs to the bedroom and slammed the door, and found his work uniform folded neatly on the bench in front of the bed, with socks and boxers laid out on top. When Kimberlyn heard him slam the door, she collapsed into a trembling heap on the floor. She shivered and wept, scared, and she felt violently sick. How could he say he'd never lay a hand on her when he'd pushed her down the stairs, and when he pushed her against the sink? How could he be astonished at the fact that she was scared of him, when he got so angry over the stupidest things? When his temper flared like it did?

Kimberlyn realized why she had oven mitts on, and got up and took out the cinnamon rolls. They were fine, luckily, and she glazed them and put them on both their plates, making a mental note to go to the store before work to buy cereal and some more milk. She attended to her dripping ponytail. Squeezing the water out into the sink, and putting her hair in a bun. She heard Tim coming down the stairs as she was pouring the last of the milk into glasses to drink with breakfast. She sat down at the table with her Cosmo and read it while she ate. Tim sat across from her, huffing and puffing the whole time while chewing and gulping milk as loudly as he could. Kimberlyn looked up at him, and he was staring at her with disdain.

"Is something the matter?" she asked, knowing that there was. There always was.

"No. I'm just sick and tired of you today." He looked away and finished his roll, the scooted the chair away from the table.

Kimberlyn's eyes opened wide in surprise at the comment. How could he be so mean? "I'm sorry…" Kimberlyn said, hurt. She felt so tired… so incredibly tired.

"You should be." Tim said, as he turned to put on his painty work boots.

"… Oh… Okay." Kimberlyn wasn't about to ask what she might have done. She knew it would either be something totally dumb or he wouldn't tell her at all. She watched Tim put on his work boots, and stomp around the dining room, getting paint flakes everywhere, as he walked to the table next to the back door and collected his wallet, and keys from the little tray they sat on. Then he stomped all the way back into the living room, getting paint flakes in there too, to get his cell phone off the couch and stomped back into the kitchen, got his lunch, and stomped into the dining room where Kimberlyn was gritting her teeth and trying to not scream at him for getting paint flakes everywhere.

"I want ravioli for dinner." He said, and reached for the door.

"Alright." Kimberlyn said through barred teeth. "Anything else?"

"No." He said, and opened the door and slammed it.

The bulletin board on the wall next to the door crashed into the table with the tray, then and clattered to the floor. Bills and mail went everywhere. Normally Kimberlyn would have immediately gotten up and picked everything up, but instead she threw her Cosmo at the door, and cried and ate another cinnamon roll, and sniffled while she drank her milk. Kimberlyn couldn't take it anymore, the mess was driving her crazy, so she got up and started to get everything back together. She sorted through the mail, and she got to Tim's latest credit card statement. She never really looked at the mail, not even the bills, because he handled all that stuff. He didn't trust her to do it, well, sometimes he asked her to write the addresses on the envelopes or lick the stamps. A feeling of curiosity ran through her. The statement was already open… he'd never know she read it… she looked around, no one was there of course, so she took the paper from the open envelope. She read all the credit card purchases he'd made that month. All the purchases seemed normal; in fact she'd been with him for most of them, all except for one. She saw at the end of the page something very odd, a payment to for over $120.87. Angry tears welled up in Kimberlyn's eyes. "That bastard…" she whispered to herself. "That fucking… unbelievable… rat bastard…"

She threw the paper down and went upstairs to Tim's office. She had only logged on to his computer a few times before, but only to answer her email and write Livejournal entries when she first moved in and the Internet wasn't working with her laptop yet. She'd never snooped in his computer before, but she certainly knew her way around a hard drive, and she knew how to find out exactly what her boyfriend had been up to. It was all becoming clear to her now, as she waited on his PC to start up - which took forever. He'd spent hours on the computer after work, with the office door closed. Kimberlyn had never really thought much about it, she spent a fair amount online herself, talking to her friends and writing, or answering photographer's emails and updating her modeling portfolio. She logged on to the Internet, and began searching through his History, and his Bookmarks. He'd been to Jana's Myspace page tons of times in the past week, and he visited nearly every night. It was a website that seemed to specialize in violent porn, like pretend rape scenes and men beating women while they had sex with them. Kimberlyn couldn't stand to look at it for more than a few moments. It terrified her to see that her boyfriend enjoyed looking at porn that was so violent. Maybe if it were just a man and woman having consenting sex wouldn't have been so bad. Lots of guys like to look at porn, but this? Girls with bloody noses being raped by men laughing maniacally wasn't normal. In one video that she'd seen Tim had watched 30 times, a girl was begging not to be raped by a man. "Please don't rape me Mister," she'd said. "I'm just a virgin." And she cried while the man forced himself on her. It was too much for Kimberlyn to take. Sure, maybe it was acting, but it reminded her too much of her past. Her pain, her fright… now she was watching it happen and her boyfriend actually enjoyed it. She couldn't believe it. There were other free porn sites that she saw Tim frequented, among a couple more paid sites.

She also saw that he'd bookmarked a lot of Myspace profiles of girls around Nashville, some of them she knew from school. She logged on to his Myspace profile, which she didn't need the password for because it automatically logged him in, like all the other websites. He'd been sending messages to tons of girls, and apparently he'd been going and meeting them. Some of the messages were more sexual than others, ranging from some girl named Kristen saying, "Bring the condoms in the blue pack. I liked those much better than the green ones" and another from a girl named Anna (who was 17) saying, "I really had fun last night. Anytime you're up for it again be sure to call me." There were messages from at least 15 different girls (including some from Jana), and even more that Kimberlyn couldn't bear to read.

She went to his email, expecting the worst, but she didn't expect to see what she saw. He had dozens of emails from various girls with attachments. She held her breath and scanned the subjects. "Hey baby here's the pics you wanted", "Hey hottie tell me how these make you feel", "Let me know what you think", and "Here ya' go. Enjoy!" Kimberlyn felt like she was going to puke. She clicked on the first email. It was, as she suspected, an email of nothing but naked pictures. She looked at some more. The women emailing him looked as if they could be anywhere from 16 to 35. He apparently liked all ages, as long as they were naked. In his sent mail box there were also tons of naked pictures he'd taken, sent as replies to many women sending him nude photos. A wave of nausea took over, and she ran to the bathroom and threw up for a long time. She cried as she vomited, and screamed at the top of her lungs. How could he do this to her? He watched violent porn that he paid for, and denied Kimberlyn things she needed so he could feed his habit. He was cheating on her with his ex wife, and not only that, he was also cheating on her with tons of other girls including some who were underage. A twenty-four-year-old man had no business with girls who were sixteen and seventeen. What could she do? Why was he doing this? Why wasn't she good enough for him? He'd called her a nymphomaniac when he found her vibrator, and here he was sleeping with at least a dozen girls besides her!!