What am
i to you

Am I still too scared to ask the questions that will drive him away… again? I had thought of this moment so many times over. I had memorized some of the lines I would deliver. I can easily make that move now and free myself from the heavy burden. But instead, I rest my head on his car’s passenger side window and feel the cool air from the air conditioner freeze a fleeting moment.

I look around his car, trying to keep myself from starting a topic I don’t think I am ready for. I see the strings of dried Sampaguita that hang on his rearview mirror. I notice he has replaced the empty air freshener from last week. A quick look into the rearview mirror showed that the blanket from Tagaytay was gone. I notice his right hand on the gear shift and the small plastic bag filled with two boxes of condoms beside it.

“So, how was your day?” Matthew asks.

“I got my first copywriting assignment today,” I tell him.

“For the lifestyle magazine?”

“No,” I run my hands through my hair and they make sexy waves in the process. “It’s for a new Japanese client. A breast enhancing cream of some sort. They want a woman’s touch on the copy so they gave me free samples.”

As a young professional, I should have learned something about thinking first before I open my mouth. I snicker. He laughs. And we both agree that my girls don’t need enhancements. 
We are almost to the end of Ayala Avenue when I feel his hand touch my knee. By the time we reach EDSA, I can feel his fingers massaging the slightly wet spot on my lace underwear. I hear myself groan, whimper, and soon I feel the walls collapse just as his fingers badge in and then out and in again.

As a young professional, I’d like to believe I have learned something by now. I did, and in the midst of my whimpers, I check the windows and am satisfied that they are heavily tinted. We are enveloped in the darkness. But still, there are things that I haven’t learned yet and one of which is that sometimes, I still do not think before I open his pants.

And along EDSA, I bend and open my mouth. He soon fills it with so much wanting and throbbing that I can feel it grow more and more violent. I keep my mouth full with so much of him from Makati all the way to White Plains in Quezon City. We end up looking for a place where we can release a week’s worth of built-up tension that has nothing to do with work.

As a member of Makati’s young professional workforce, I expected to have learned something by now. And in a way, I did learn something: I learned that I am still affected by the stigma that is Matthew Rondillo and for the nth time, I allow him to sting me.