Unchained Heart: The Education of Bryan

By B L Blake

UNCHAINED HEART is about a woman who commits a terrible crime -- she falls in love with a 18-year old boy. She gives up everything up love and for a chance to feel alive.

THE EDUCATION OF BRYAN Bryan is a 30 year of man who is a drunk, a sex addict and a man lost in a world where he cannot find himself. He longs to love but something keeps him on his own path to destruction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jan 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491827178

B L Blake

Barbara Lynn Blake has lived all over the world including Venice & Assisi, Italy; Monte Carlo, Monaco; Pyeongtaek, South Korea; Bournemouth, England; Eden Prairie, Minnesota; Linz, Austria; Santa Barbara, San Jose, Solvang, Pasadena and Santa Monica, California. She currently lives on the island of Maui in Hawaii. She is a writer, artist and fitness teacher. Other books by Barbara Lynn Blake Venice Backstreets Innocence Lost Senseless Dead Girl Living The Scandal Unchained Heart The Feeding Grounds Scarlett's Other Life My First Wife Love Poems to God and Others

Book preview

UNCHAINED

HEART

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THE

EDUCATION

OF BRYAN

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B L BLAKE

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AuthorHouse™ LLC

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2014 by B L BLAKE. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/13/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-2821-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-2717-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013918598

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

UNCHAINED

HEART

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

THE

EDUCATION

OF BRYAN

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

UNCHAINED

HEART

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B L BLAKE

. . . the bitter lapse into everyday life, the hideous dropping off of the veil.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher

CHAPTER ONE

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W hy did you do it? she was asked.

She was looking at the white walls of the room. The naked metal of the chairs and the table. And she could not answer. She wanted to answer. To explain herself. But she couldn’t even understand herself why she had done what she had done. It was as though she had no choice in the matter.

But no words came out of her mouth and the interviewer tried to make her talk.

Were you in love? she was asked.

She smiled faintly at this question. Of course she was in love. How else could she leave her husband and her children and run off with a eighteen-year-old boy.

But the woman who asked her the question did not even seem capable of understanding the word love. What it meant to her and what it meant to the interviewer were two different things.

The interviewer let out of breath of expiration in her frustration to get Jane to talk.

"Listen, if you want people to know your side of the story, you have to tell me something. I can’t make it all up."

Okay, Jane said meekly.

The interviewer looked at Jane through hard and calculating eyes. Jane was pretty enough, but more in the way of a child than of a woman. It was hard for the interviewer to imagine Jane exciting any sexual passion much less allowing herself to be sweep away by her sexual desires. Jane’s blond hair was cut short just above her neck as it had been most of her life. Even though Jane was in her late thirties and a mother of five children, she projected the image of a child herself. As if she had never progressed to develop the shell of hardness necessary in the adult world.

CHAPTER TWO

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F inally Jane found her voice and she began to speak. This is what she said.

I was happily married. At least I thought I was. Even now, after everything, I can say my husband was a good man. I mean he loved me, he loved our children. He provided me with a good home. I had a nice house then and a new car. I suppose people would say I had it all."

Did you love him?

Yes, I thought I did. I mean he was handsome, he was a runner and he had a strong body. He was a good lover, if somewhat mechanical sometimes. But I guess that’s what happens after fourteen years of marriage.

You were married for fourteen years?

Yes. We had three children. Our son, Joe, was born the first year we were married. Then four years later we had our daughter, Julie. And finally there was John, who was three years old the year I met him.

Him? You mean Raul Torres?

Yes. He moved to a street near our house. He was a year older than my son and they became friends, sort of. He came one day to mow the lawn when my husband was away for two weeks.

Your husband was away? Where?

He went somewhere for some conference or some meetings. I forget. He traveled a lot. You see he had a good job in a computer company. He was a Director of Marketing and he was required to travel quite a bit. He was gone all the time or so it seemed to me.

So you were lonely?

No. I didn’t think so. I mean I really didn’t think about it. That’s was the way our life was. My husband traveled maybe two weeks out of the month. He always traveled even when we were first married.

Did you ever resent his traveling?

No. I mean, he traveled since I met him. And when he came home he was always nice to me. We had a good marriage.

A good marriage? How can you say that? You had an affair with an eighteen year old boy?

It wasn’t like that. I mean it wasn’t an affair.

If it wasn’t an affair, what was it then?

It was love. I loved him. I can’t even explain to you how I loved him. I loved my husband, that was the normal kind of love. But with Raul, I had a passion. I knew it was wrong. I knew I was giving up everything for him, but there was no way I could stop myself from loving him. I would have done anything, do you understand anything, to be with him. I fell in love with him in one day, and that love has never waived. Even to this day, when I know what I really was to him. When I know I will never see him again. That I will never be allowed to see him again. It didn’t matter then, it doesn’t matter. I love him. You can never make your heart love someone you don’t love. And you can never stop loving someone when you do love them. When it’s the real thing. I sometimes think I will die because of my love for him. Sometimes I wish I would die.

Why do you say that?

Because I have nothing now. I am nothing to no one now. I am no longer a mother, or a wife, or even a lover. My children are strangers to me and will be the rest of my life. I am to never see them again. And my husband, I know what I did to him… that I hurt him and he didn’t deserve that. He didn’t deserve to be hurt. He didn’t deserve what I did to him. He didn’t deserve to be cast away and disgraced the way I disgraced him. I almost wish that I had hated him… that I wanted to hurt him. But I didn’t. I never wanted to hurt him. I only wanted to be with Raul more than anything else in the world.

These are the things I have to live with. And worse of all I know Raul is now lost to me. He doesn’t love me anymore, I know that now. Sometimes I think he never did love me, I was just someone who was convenient. I suppose I was willing, more willing than any girl his own age. I suppose he loved me in some adolescence way. That he had some image of me as a perfect woman. I suppose he loved my blond hair, my fresh American looks. But now my blond hair is turning gray.

Are you bitter against Raul now, then?

Bitter. Yes, sometimes, I think I hate him. If he didn’t love me, why did he let me do all the things I did to be with him? But, then, I know in the beginning he did love me. Or at least he made me believe he loved me. And I believed. Oh, how I believed that he loved me. And that he would love me forever. I had to believe that. If I didn’t I could have never left my husband. Or my babies. My little John was only four years old the last time I saw him. What will he think of his mother? How will he grow up to think of me? Oh God, forgive me. If he could only forgive me for everything.

CHAPTER THREE

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L et’s go back to before you were married. How did you meet your husband?

I knew his sister and one day I went with his sister to an art festival. I met him there and we got along. He was a nice boy. And he was good-looking with blond, neatly cut hair. He had a nice face. He had a good job and he was handsome and he seemed interested in me. So he asked me out the next day. Things just went along and he seemed like he would be a good husband. He was a good husband…

But…

But I think he loved me, but it’s like he didn’t even know me. I mean he loved what I was—a photography teacher, an attractive blond woman, I suppose. I think he was looking for some type of a woman to marry. And I seemed to be that type of a woman. So he married me. But I don’t think he ever really knew me. I mean I would show him some of my photographs and it was like nothing to him. He would say to me ‘I don’t understand it, but I’m sure if you did it, it’s great.’

He was trying to be nice, but I didn’t feel so very close to him a lot of the time. Maybe I expected too much from him. Maybe I thought love would be different. That we would bond in some unbelievable and cosmic way. But on the outside everything in our life was going well. He was always getting promoted and I got a job as a photography teacher at the Cultural Center. Then I got pregnant. And we decided to get married. To tell you the truth, I got pregnant before we got married, but we told everyone that I got pregnant on our honeymoon. But on our honeymoon I was already two and half months pregnant. We didn’t even talk about an abortion or anything like that. I just told him one day that I was pregnant and he said, ‘Great, let’s get married.’

‘Why not?’ I said.

And he agreed, ‘Why not?’

We had our son before our first wedding anniversary. And we were busy then and happy, I suppose with building our house, then decorating it and fixing the garden, with working and with our son. I didn’t have time to think back then. And what would I think about, that maybe I made a mistake. That maybe my husband didn’t love me and I didn’t love him. No, I just went along. For all those years, I just pretended to be happy.

You just pretended?

I tried to be happy. But my husband was a