How You (I) Feel When You Discover You've (I've) Dated a Sex Offender

I just found out someone I dated a couple years ago is a pedophile. Maybe in this case statutory rapist is the appropriate term? Yet, sex with a minor has a sweeter tone. I’ll stick with that. Minor sex. Sex with a minor. So I Googled this guy last night. You know, a quick scan. A what-is-he-up-to-now kind of thing. We only dated for two months – actually less, like 52 days – but I suddenly became intrigued to know where he had ended up. I expected nothing to pop up on Google. Nothing did when I first met him two years ago. But this time, when I pressed the button, hundreds of hits appeared. Key words: Teacher Arrested, Felony, Sex Abuse, Minor and oddly enough Avocados. It all went down in a Midwestern state, which makes the avocados even odder.

 I went on interior mode, having flashbacks: he used to love taking me out to ice cream and had insisted that I call his penis “Sir Cocks-a-lot,” like some sort of Penis Charming that was going to save my cunt from her evil step-sisters, which are often called hands, and whisk her away to a fairyland called coitus-ville. Oh, and come to think of it, the first time I met him, he asked me if I was old enough to vote. He did look a little disappointed when I said yes, but I blamed the slight funk he fell into on the bean burrito he’d just had from a taco shop. I know what it’s like to have bad gas. Were these all signs that I just didn’t read right?

The last time I saw him was in a coffee shop. The village. We’d already broken up. It had to be done. I just couldn’t handle the way he always tried to feed me banana mush and cooed at me while I was trying to go to sleep. Ok, that didn’t actually happen, but he did ask me to shave. Yes, of course, “down there." Complete bald eagle style (or maybe, in this case, it should be called newborn sleek). I think he was lying about the chafing. I knew it didn’t chafe. My mons pubis grows proteins that are as soft to lay on as a bearskin rug. After lights out, was he actually trying to conjure up images of pre-pubescent tween?

On our final visit, we sat across from each other, coffee in hand. Wait, he didn’t have coffee. He didn’t like it. Too bitter, he’d said. He had hot chocolate (with marshmallows). He wanted to say goodbye. He was leaving town. He said the school system in the city was too fucked up for him to properly operate. When he took students to lunch off-campus, he’d get in trouble. He couldn’t even talk to them – his 15-year-old female students - on the phone. I arched my eyebrows. I swear I did. They were arched! I had a face expressing quite a bit of skepticism. Promise. But he explained that he was a highly invested teacher with out-of-the-box tendencies. He wanted to teach his students more than the boring lessons, verbatim, from math texts. I guess, in a way, he was telling the truth.

I’m grossed out and feel embarrassed. It feels icky (ICKY!) to have trusted someone with such bad judgment. I’m learning stuff anyway: don’t Google men who you’ve dated! And meanwhile, as it all soaks in, I’m trying to take the whole episode as a compliment. I mean, maybe I have aged much less than my years.

Avo-fucking-cado!

*some facts have been changed to hide identity