Li Ling Montefeltro

Ren and I do not cohabitate. She leads her own life, separate from mine and in the stretch between I love you, and the first gusting winds of destruction, we see very little of eachother.

It is a small agony, but on occasion she manages to slip into my apartment, and I make efforts to stay at hers-- anything to clutch those little blissful domestic moments where a good night's rest wrapped up in one another can balm the ache of being apart so very often. She doesn't say it, neither of us want to talk about it. It's one of our rules.

She doesn't talk about her escorting. I know she has a new client, I know he monopolizes her time. I know this because for the past several months I've been getting nonsense texts and attractively framed video clips of my girlfriend fucking this guy.

[there's a pooling of ink here, a clear thought point, and judging by the content, an unpleasant one.]

I can and do logic this aside every time. It is framed and altered in a way that makes it look worse than the reality probably is. If I was trying to alter perception and make an average situation better, that's precisely what I would do. Logic understands it's bait, but my heart hates it. Feels sick with it. Logic interjects, laced with concern: We have to weather this, it too shall pass. If we bring it to Ren, it may set off alarms and jeopardize what we have.

So I ignore them. I only get them every few weeks. It's easy to just push them out of sight and out of mind.

Good things are happening throughout. I met another ogre, Jameson. He'd been teaching me about what I am, and I've learned so much, so many questions answered, and so many uncertainties washed away. He's a good guy, it's nice to have someone like me to be able to come to with questions.

By the time summer has rolled around, I am desperate and ready to have vacation alone with Ren. I ensure we have the best accommodations, and I don't want to miss a moment with her, so rather than riding first class, I go for the most extra flight package and book us a suite-- yes. Like a little hotel room for the agonizingly long 16+ hour flight to Hong Kong. It's extravagant, unnecessary, a clear flouting of money and normally I would never go that distance, but fuck everyone else, this is about me and Ren. It's a little weird at first, but we adjust and the flight is surprisingly comfortable, it's almost like being at home, cuddled up in bed being completely irresponsible with our time and one another.

I'm not looking forward to our trip home so much, China has never felt like a part of me. I've always had a complicated relationship with that part of my identity, my nonni were hateful people, racist. They never could stand the fact that their endlessly talented daughter ended up with a middle class silk farmer from 'the orient'. My mother was - according to them - a beautiful dancer and superb operatic vocalist. She had nothing but open doors in front of her, but my mother was also a hopeless romantic, and I'll wager you can guess where that led. She died giving me life, and my father was taken by the typhoon not long after sending me and my wet nurse back to Italy while he wrapped up his business in China. China has effectively stolen two integral pieces of my life from me. China took the one person who could have guided me through one of the hardest rites of passage I've ever experienced, it took understanding, and family from me.

China hasn't given me much. It gave me a distinctive look, it made me white passing, but not white passing enough to avoid the discrimination and fear of post war America. It gave me internal conflict, empty family estates and billions of people I know I should feel a connection to but don't because I wasn't raised with emphasis on anything but my Italian heritage. My relationship with my Chinese heritage is complicated. I have ageless heirlooms that need appraising, and an old estate I've let fall into neglect for what I feel I can confidently say is spite. I hate that part of myself, because I feel cheated. It's childish, I know. But, for as old as I get, a small part of me remains that little girl who didn't understand why she didn't have a mother or father, or why she was so different from the other children. Even now, I get het up just trying to wrap my brain around it.

Ren is organized, and smart and more than capable of handling appraisal so I can get each piece insured, and she looks so god damned cute in her little glasses and white gloves. Like so many things, Ren makes this trip bearable, enjoyable, even.

At least, until the e-mail. All those videos and hard to parse text messages I've been getting? It's all come to a head. Apparently someone found out about she and I and is leveraging their knowledge of Ren's other, more embarrassing clients as blackmail. What do they want? Everything. I don't negotiate with people like this, and the situation is a damned if you do, damned if you don't sort. I can't give up my livelihood, but not doing so gives the impression that Ren isn't important enough to me. Do I tell her?

I can't tell her without also telling her how I've been harassed at length over the course of 4 months with videos that have hit like sucker punches to the gut. I'm afraid to, I'm still scared that no matter how I phrase it, it'll read as insecurity, that I can't handle what she does, and I can. I have been, even with the evidence routinely rubbed in my face. In hindsight, this was the wrong answer to the problem. I ignored it, knowing full well that in 24 hours, all that evidence was going straight to the client's wife and I would have effectively removed another client from Ren's clientlist. I knew there was a great, fiery explosion waiting for me back home in the states.

This was the second trip she and I took plagued by bad endings, and just another nail in China's coffin for me. Nothing good ever happens for me there.

When we were back stateside, she dropped me off, told me how much she loved me and honestly, I felt like I just wanted to die. I didn't know how bad it was about to get, and Jameson was about to make it worse. Upon entering the lobby, and entire villain monologue scene played out, and damnit if I wasn't just mentally exhausted from the outset. He laid out his entire dastardly plan, how he'd stalked me, how I was a terrible ogre halfblood unsuited to the birthright I'd claimed-- There was so much, but allow me to sum this up in a digestible fashion.

Jameson is a 3rd or 4th cousin, and because my father was the last of his line and had no male heirs, all his assets defaulted to me. I was never given access to the traditions of my Chinese heritage. I had no real grasp of veneration of ancestors, or the importance of that tradition. In effect, I am not Chinese enough to be sole owner of Wuxing-- the original name of the business I grew into EB Textiles. As is so often the case with men in my life, he felt entitled to all the things I had-- that I worked for, and apparently, that included my girlfriend. Now, because I knew it was a matter of hours before Ren confronted me, I told him to make himself scarce because frankly, he wasn't worth the energy. I needed that for someone who really mattered: Ren.

So, the way this was setup was clever, I'll give him that. He did a fine job of covering his bases and set it up so that in the end, only I knew his connection to all this, and all the blame, all evidence-- everything, pointed to me as the conductor. The irony of this was not lost on me. So worried about being seen as insecure, now I could be seen as insecure and capable of sabotage in the eyes of the one person who meant anything to me. I was feeling strong. I knew it'd be hard, but I leaned heavily on my conviction, that I could clear my name, show her the evidence and have a return to normal, but... I wasn't prepared enough.

When she arrived, it was absolutely earthshaking. Every trinket, every note, every sentiment I'd ever written to and given her was thrown in my face, and to be accused of such ugly things by the woman you love? It tore me apart, broke my heart-- it broke my heart to see her heart breaking. I did that. I tried to defend myself, insist I was innocent, but she was understandably not ready to see it. I had to find the evidence, exact my revenge and clear my name.

It wasn't just about Ren. I was betrayed by someone who was a snake in the grass. Two-faced, he befriended me, gave me a taste of what it was like to have kinship and used it to hurt me.

So, when Ren left, I tore my office apart like a well adjusted, endlessly frustrated adult and then left to exist in apathy for several days before I managed to put myself together enough to start following leads.

What followed was two months of Hell, if we're being honest. More on that next time.