Violet & Jack: Chapter 29 – Goodbye, Jack Stallings

November 29, 2025 – December 12, 2025

Jerry’s disclosures had not freed Violet from the control.

They had only changed the shape of it. Jerry had told her more than she knew before, but only because he chose to. He decided what to say, what to leave out, what to name, what to blur, what to make sound casual, what to make sound honest, and what to keep for himself.

So even as Violet knew more, she did not feel grounded.

She felt more exposed, more aware of the danger, but not yet clear on its edges.

That was its own kind of terror: realizing she had been inside something she did not understand, while the person who understood more than she did was still the one controlling the information.

She was reeling. Her mind kept trying to make a map.

Because she was still trying to get out.

Because she needed to understand what had happened to her.

She was beginning to feel the stark reality of how much danger Jerry had been able to put her in mentally, physically, sexually, and emotionally without her full knowledge. Without her informed consent. Without her even knowing the actual shape of the situation she had been living inside.

That was what terrified her.

Not only what he had done. What he had made unknowable.

She had consented to many things with him. She had chosen many things. She had wanted many things.

But there were also many things she did not consent to.

She had not consented to unknown partners, incomplete sexual transparency, missing information, or unsafe kink. She had not consented to withheld facts that changed the meaning of what she thought she was choosing.

And still, the thread between them had not gone completely dead.

The questions were there. The distrust was there. The danger was beginning to come into view. But the old rhythm was still there too. Jokes, innuendo, tenderness, sunsets, familiar language. The small private signals they had built over more than a year.

A few days before that last visit, Violet sent him a screenshot of an old exchange, one where he had avoided answering her directly and suggested maybe they could talk about it on the pillows.

“You owe me some answers,” she wrote. “Next time the privacy of my bed and my penis pillows 😉”

Then she added, “I know you’re scared of the toys I might use on you, but you’d love the sunset lights in my room.”

It was a joke. It was also not only a joke.

Some part of Violet wanted him to come to her house. Not only because she wanted to see him. Not only because she wanted another night with him. Not only because the sexual pull was still there.

She wanted the terms to change. So much of the relationship had happened on Jerry’s terms. His timing. His room. His bed. His rope. His disclosures. His silences. His disappearances. His returns. His decisions about what she was allowed to know and when she was allowed to know it.

She did not want the ending to belong entirely to him too. She wanted him in her space for once. Her room. Her bed. Her objects. Her rules.

And she genuinely wanted him to see the sunset lights. He had loved the “portal” lights in her room before. He still had the “portal” she had given him. She knew he would appreciate what she had added since then. That was part of the old connection too: sunsets, light, color, beauty, the small visual language they had shared from the beginning.

That was what made it complicated. She wanted the terms to change. She wanted some agency over the ending. And she still wanted to show him something beautiful.

Real life kept pushing through the flirtation too. “Some of us have responsibilities to manage,” she wrote.

“Is that so?” Jerry answered.

“My folks are in the hospital.”

“Oh no. Both of them?”

She told him they were fine, more or less, mostly a pain in the ass as usual. They had both fallen at home and they were working on getting her mother to a nursing home.

Then she sent him a picture from the hospital parking lot. “The sunsets from the hospital parking lot are unreal,” she wrote. “It’s a relief not having to do it all. It’s been stressful but at least right now they are being taken care of.”

He responded with the little heart and pinched-fingers gesture. That was part of what still made the connection hard to flatten into one thing. There were still small moments of recognition. Shared sunsets. Private jokes. The visual language they had built together. The feeling that some part of him understood something in her, even after everything that had started to come apart.

It was hard for Violet to accept that everything had not been real. Not because she was naive but because parts of it had truly felt real.

The laughter had felt real. The sunsets had felt real. The music, the long conversations, the tenderness, the way he sometimes seemed to listen, the way he could seem moved by something beautiful or sad or sacred — those things had not felt fake when she was living them.

She was not trying to hold on to a fantasy she knew was empty. She was trying to understand how something could contain real feeling and still be built inside so much deception.

Some part of her still hoped the person she had believed she knew was in there somewhere.

That hope was smaller than it had been, but it was not gone.

“Every day this week has been incredible,” Violet wrote about the winter sunsets.

“Yes it has,” he replied. “I was able to get one evening.”

Then he sent a picture of himself dressed in a red jacket and green makeup near a Christmas tree, giving the camera the finger.

“That’s incredibly disturbing,” Violet wrote. “Did you go out in public like that?”

“Yes.”

“Are you supposed to be the grinch???”

He answered with a target emoji.

“Just when I thought I knew all your kinks,” she wrote.

“There’s always more to learn,” he replied.

The line was playful. At the time, it sounded like another joke, another opening, another way to move the conversation toward sex.

Later, it would land differently. Because there was more to learn. Far more than Violet understood.

“I knew you liked the jellyfish costume but you can keep your creepy wigs lol,” she wrote. “I’ve also been saying the same thing……”

“Ready to learn something tonight?” Jerry asked.

“Are you???”

“We can see,” he answered. “If you’d like. I’m tying up a few loose ends now. Anytime you’re ready.”

There it was again. The opening. The shift.

The ordinary conversation had become sexual possibility, and the sexual possibility had become another invitation back into his space.

Violet told him she was ready. She told him she was naked, just out of the shower.

“See you soon,” he said. But that was not supposed to be the plan.

“The plan was for you to come to me,” she reminded him.

He said he was stuck. She sent a question mark.

“I just made my bed and it’s so comfy,” he said.

“So is mine,” she replied.

“Come to me?”

“I always come to you.”

“And I’ll come there the next 3 times.”

She did not believe him. “No you won’t.”

He insisted. “I will.”

“You don’t make promises,” she wrote.

“I’ll promise 2,” he said. “The next 2.”

“You can’t be trusted.”

It sounded like banter. It sounded like two people teasing each other before sex, but Violet meant it. Jerry likely knew she meant it too.

She knew by then that his promises were not worth much. She knew how easily he said whatever served the moment. She knew how quickly an assurance could become a loophole, a misunderstanding, or something he would later claim she had interpreted wrong.

Still, she went. Part of her wanted the night. Part of her wanted answers. Part of her wanted to see what he would reveal now that she knew more. Part of her still hoped the person she had known might be in there somewhere, and that maybe, somehow, she could reach him.

And part of her had become something closer to a witness than a lover. She was no longer there only because she wanted him. She was there because she was trying to understand what she had been through.

When she arrived, Brian was still there. That made her uneasy, simply because she did not know him.

Jerry, meanwhile, was excited about something else. He had gotten a giant screen for his bedroom, with a projector, and he wanted to show her.

For a little while, the night became almost ordinary. He was proud of it. He wanted her to see how big the image was, how it transformed the room, how the wall could become a screen. They watched a little television from the bed. The room was dim. He was pleased with himself in the way he could be when he had something to show her.

It was the kind of moment that could have felt intimate if Violet did not already know better. A man excited to show a woman something new. A woman lying beside him. A room arranged around comfort and display. A small domestic scene that might have suggested closeness if it had not been built inside so much deception.

Then Brian went out. Violet felt herself relax. Not completely, the way she might have months earlier. But enough.

Then Jerry began tying her. By then, rope had become part of the language between them, though Violet did not even understand yet that people would call what they were doing a scene. She did not have the language, the framework, or the safety expectations for rope, restraint, pain, and marks.

She only knew what was happening between them and in the room, in the moment, she had still been able to separate the danger from the feeling.

Until the moment someone started banging on the front door.

At first, Jerry tried to ignore it. The banging continued. Then it continued again.

The sound moved through the room in a way Violet could not dismiss. It was not part of what was happening between them. It was not controlled. It was not erotic. It was an outside force entering a space where she had already given up physical control.

Then came the bedroom window. Brian was outside, banging there now, saying he had forgotten his key. Jerry left the room in frustration.

He left Violet tied. For a few seconds, she was not thinking about desire. She was not thinking about whether this was still erotic, or safe, or something she could explain away later.

She was thinking about the facts. She was tied up in a small house with two men.

One of them had tied her. The other she did not really know.

If either of them wanted to hurt her, there was almost nothing she could do.

She did not believe danger was imminent, but her body suddenly understood the full extent of her vulnerability.

She was restrained. He was gone. Someone else was entering the house. The room was no longer private. What was happening was no longer contained.

And Violet understood, in a way she had not understood before, how much of her safety depended on Jerry’s choices once he had tied her.

Not her choices. His.

She had consented to being restrained inside the fantasy of trust. But outside the fantasy, the facts were suddenly very simple: her body was not free, the door was not controlled, and the man who had put her in that position had walked away.

The realization did not rise to the level of panic, but she was experiencing a level of fear that she had never before felt in this space.

The realization of her vulnerability also brought clarity. He had done little to earn the trust required for the situation.

The night continued, but something in her had shifted.

Then he bit her again. They had never discussed biting, not even after he had done it the first time. He had never asked if she wanted it. She had never agreed that it belonged in what they did together.

He bit the inside of her thigh hard, where the skin was soft and sensitive, and it hurt. A lot.

Enough that she knew it would mark. The bruising lasted for weeks. Violet would see the new year and a whole new chapter still marked by Jerry.

In the moment, Violet still could not find the words to tell him to stop. She did what she had done before. She carried it inside the intensity. She let the night keep moving. She did not stop everything and make him account for what he had just done to her body.

Later, she would send him a picture of the bruise. Her body had kept the record.

She stayed the night. By morning, Violet was not there to be reassured. She was still trying to understand.

Jerry got up to go to the bathroom. That was when Violet noticed the notebook again. She had seen it before near his bed. It was not exactly a journal. It seemed more like a calendar/journal, the kind of thing a writer might keep nearby to jot down ideas, appointments, fragments, reminders. She had had one herself for many years.

She had never paid much attention to it. Jerry was a writer. Writers kept notebooks. Violet had always assumed that was what it was.

And under normal circumstances, she would never have looked. She was not someone who snooped through another person’s private things. She did not like the feeling of it. Even then, she did not feel good about it. But by then, the circumstances were far from normal.

He had deceived her for a year. He had kept separate worlds so cleanly that Violet had spent nights in his room, taken showers in his bathroom, left things in his house, and never once seen a single trace that made the truth visible. She kept thinking about all the nights she had spent there. The showers she had taken there. The things she had left behind and picked up later. The ordinary evidence of a life that should have betrayed him at least once.

If there were all these other women, where were they? Not the women themselves. The traces. A hair tie. A product in the bathroom. A stray earring. A note. A forgotten object. Something on the floor. Something near the bed. Something that made the room feel shared with someone she did not know existed. But there had been nothing. Not once. That was what disturbed her.

Jerry could seem careless. Chaotic. Disorganized. A man who lost track of time, lost track of plans, lost track of what he had said and to whom.

But the more Violet learned, the harder it was to believe the concealment had been accidental. He had not just hidden information. He had kept worlds apart. And he had done it well.

So when he was out of the room, Violet glanced. Not carefully or thoroughly and certainly not with a plan. Just enough. And there they were.

Names. Lots of names. Names attached to different days. Notes she did not expect. References that made her stomach tighten because they suggested more than scheduling. More than casual dating. More than the few partners he had chosen to disclose.

It was the first time Violet got a real sense that his kinks and fetishes went much deeper than she had known. Until then, she had known only the version of kink he had shown her. Rope, impact, the toys in his room. The things he introduced without much discussion. The things he made feel private, almost improvised, as if they belonged mostly to the two of them.

But the notebook suggested something broader. More people, more activity, more structure.

A personal, sexual life that existed outside what he had disclosed to her, and possibly long before he had let her understand what she was entering.

It did not give her the whole truth. It gave her the sickening confirmation that there was more.

She did not feel proud of looking. She did not feel especially guilty either.

By then, Jerry had used privacy as cover. He had used vagueness as cover. He had used the appearance of disorder as cover. And Violet was beginning to understand that if she wanted the truth, she was unlikely to get it by asking him directly.

Still, she tried. When they talked that morning, she did not come at him like an accusation. She did not want him to feel interrogated. She knew if she pushed too directly, he could become vague, slippery, or unreachable in some other way.

So she kept it casual. She tried to come at things sideways. She also wanted to learn more about him to help her put the pieces of him together in her mind.

She asked him how he had converted to Christianity, and how he had ended up in ministry. He had not grown up especially religious. That much she knew. But he had clearly studied theology extensively. He had thought about it, read about it, built language around it. He knew how to talk about doctrine, belief, sin, salvation, death, hell, justice, and meaning.

When she asked, Jerry told her the story. He talked about how he and his wife had decided they wanted to get right and bought Bibles. They started reading the Bible together and they joined a church. He talked about how little he had known before that, how much he learned, how deeply he got into it.

Then Jerry talked about how that eventually led him toward ministry.

He liked talking about it. He said he could talk about religion all day. Violet believed him. That was not the problem. The problem was not that Jerry had failed to think about big ideas. He had thought about them constantly. He had studied them, wrestled with them, written about them, turned them into language and identity and performance.

But that was not what Violet wanted to understand. She did not want to know whether Jerry understood theology or spiritual ideas intellectually. She knew he did.

She wanted to know what it had done to him. So she tried to share her own experience. She talked about her own spiritual life. About how, for her, faith had become less about doctrine and more about relationships, the big ones, the small ones. The personal and the common. All relationships.

The way people treated each other. The way they cared for each other. The way they noticed who had power and who did not. The way they demonstrated concern and care for people who were the most vulnerable.

For Violet, a spiritual life had to come down to how a person lived. How they cared. How they showed up for themselves and others. How they held themselves and others accountable. How they told the truth. How they recognized harm they cause and made genuine amends. How they recognized power. How they carried responsibility for the effect they had on other people. She spoke of all this from her experience, all the times she had been humbled by her own human limitations and the grace of others.

That was the part that mattered to her. Not only whether someone avoided doing harm in the abstract, but whether they understood the responsibility that came with relationship, especially when power imbalances were present. Their self-awareness, their willingness to tell the truth even when the truth might cost them, their willingness to do right by other people even when no one else is watching.

Jerry could talk a great game. He could talk about feminism. He could talk about misogyny. He could talk about the harm done to women by religion and patriarchy. He could talk about racism, sexism, homophobia, power, justice, institutions, and moral failure.

But Violet could not see that awareness reflected in the way he treated people, women in particular, in his own life.

He could talk about women as a harmed, maybe even vulnerable class. But in practice, he treated individual women as objects of appetite, comfort, validation, sex, and escape.

That was the place she was trying to reach. Not by accusing him or laying out a case. Just by offering the bridge. This is what spirituality means to me. This is what relationship means to me. This is what responsibility means to me.

Jerry nodded vaguely and made what could have been interpreted as sounds of agreement.

Then he kept talking. Not in a way that built on what she had said. Not in a way that made her feel he had really taken it in. He simply returned to the track he had already been on, back to the ideas he wanted to discuss, the language he wanted to use, the version of the conversation where theology stayed large and abstract and safely away from the actual terms of his life.

That was when Violet noticed something she had not noticed before. He did not seem to actually be listening. When she spoke, he seemed to be waiting. Patiently waiting for his turn to continue. She had asked him questions, but he wanted to talk about what he wanted to talk about.

That unsettled her, because for so long she had believed he listened carefully. She had believed that was part of the connection between them. The eye contact. The stillness. The way he seemed to take in what she said. The way he made her feel, especially at the beginning, as if her words mattered to him.

Now she wondered if that had been true. Maybe he had listened sometimes. Maybe he had listened when it served intimacy, when it helped him learn her, when it helped him mirror something back, when it gave him the information he needed to become the person she was likely to trust.

But in that conversation, when she was not offering him vulnerability to use, when she was trying to talk about responsibility, harm, relationship, power, and how a person’s beliefs become conduct, he seemed barely able to stay with her.

He nodded, maybe agreed. And then he went back to himself.

For someone so preoccupied with death and hell, Jerry did not seem able to connect those ideas to his own behavior.

Violet did not believe in hell. But she did believe in salvation.

Not the kind Jerry talked about. Not the kind organized around doctrine or punishment or eternal consequences. The kind that happened between people. The kind built out of care, responsibility, repair, mercy, honesty, and love.

People saved each other. That was what she believed.

He seemed concerned with saving himself. And even that seemed conditional.

As soon as being a preacher stopped getting him somewhere, he seemed to have dropped it. The language remained. The references remained. The ability to talk about big ideas remained. But Violet could not see the purpose underneath it.

Where was the purpose in his life? Suddenly, she could see nothing of actual substance. Not anymore. Not beyond alcohol and women.

He admitted to her that morning that he had exactly two vices — alcohol and women.

Violet was flabbergasted.

Women.

Not dishonesty.

Not selfishness.

Not the need to be wanted.

Not the harm he caused while chasing attention, sex, comfort, validation, and escape.

Women.

He had placed women in the same category as alcohol, a simple vice. A temptation. A weakness. A thing he consumed and struggled to moderate.

Not people. Not actual human beings with feelings, histories, needs, bodies, risks, boundaries, and lives of their own.

That told Violet more than he probably meant to tell her. And she began to understand something she had not fully understood before.

For Jerry, religion was not necessarily a way to live. It was something to think about. It was something to talk about. Something to use as language, as identity, as depth.

But Violet did not care what people believed nearly as much as she cared what they valued. And she did not believe values were proven by vocabulary.

Values were proven by conduct, by behavior. By repair. By truth. By how someone treated the people closest to them. By what a person did when honesty cost them something. By whether their stated concern for other people ever became a change in behavior.

Jerry could talk about justice. But Violet had seen very little evidence that justice organized his life.

He could talk about harm. But he did not seem especially interested in the harm he caused. He could talk about oppression, power, gender, and institutions. But in his own intimate life, he had built a private system where women received different versions of the truth, different access to information, and different explanations depending on what he needed from them.

The problem was not that Jerry lacked ideas. The problem was that his ideas did not appear to govern him. They adorned him. They gave him a language of seriousness. A way to seem reflective. A way to be the kind of man who cared about the world, who understood harm, who had thought deeply about injustice and meaning and redemption.

But when Violet looked at his actual life, she saw something much smaller. She saw a man at the center of his own system. A man who wanted women to orbit him.

A man who wanted credit for vulnerability without the burden of accountability. A man who could discuss morality as long as the conversation did not require him to become more moral.

During that visit, Violet asked him about something else too. She had recently tried to go back and look at their first messages on the dating app. She wanted to see the beginning again, not sentimentally, but clearly. She wanted the record. She wanted to compare what he had said then to what she knew now.

But the conversation was gone. He was no longer in her list of matches. So she asked him about it.

Had he unmatched with her? He said no. He said his profile had been taken down. Not that he had deleted it, not that he had unmatched her. He made it sound casual, almost as if it were one of those strange things that just happened. He did not really know why, he seemed to suggest. They had removed it. That was all.

But that did not make sense to Violet. If a dating app removed someone’s profile, surely they would tell him why. They would cite a violation, a report, a policy issue, something. Profiles did not disappear from an app for no reason. He did not offer anything additional, of course, so Violet was again left to wonder whether someone had reported him and what he may have done. Using a fake name on a profile wasn’t a crime, but she now knew jerry was capable of worse. It was another piece of evidence that she would never be able to put in place.

She would have stayed longer if she could have. Not because she believed the conversation would save anything. Not because she thought there was still some perfect answer waiting inside him. But because she wanted to keep listening. She wanted to see what else he would reveal when he was comfortable. She wanted to understand more than the fragments he had chosen to give her.

But she had somewhere to be. As she walked out the door, he promised again that he would come to her the next two times.

It was almost funny by then. Not because it was amusing of course.

Because it was so perfectly him. A promise made at the moment of departure. A promise designed to soften the imbalance. A promise that cost nothing because he did not have to keep it yet.

Violet did not really believe him. She had long ago realized that the reason she always came to him was less about practical reasons like a suspended driver’s license and more about control.

But she had not entirely stopped hoping either. That was the difficult truth. Some part of her still wanted him to come to her house. Not only because she wanted to see him. Because she wanted the terms to change and because she wanted some agency over the ending.

She still wanted to show him the lights. She wanted him in her space for once. Her room. Her bed, her toys, her rules. She wanted to know what would happen if the center of gravity shifted away from his house, his bed, his rope, his timing.

She did not yet know exactly what she wanted from that shift. Or maybe she did.

But she was not ready to say it plainly, even to herself.

She left without knowing it would be the last time. There was no dramatic ending. No final confrontation. No clean severing line where everything became clear at once. There was only the room he kept pulling her back to, the rope, the knock at the door, the mark on her inner thigh, the notebook she wished she had never had reason to glance at, and a morning conversation about God and morality with a man who could not connect either one to the way he treated people.

And then there was one more promise she did not trust, but had not fully stopped wanting him to keep.

She has not seen him since. At the time, she did not know that yet.

As it turned out, that was a good thing.

It was also not the end of the story.