I packed my bags, left Nikki’s house, and stayed in West Hollywood with a friend named Holt, a movie producer who I had met in Florida. I was homeless again. And my career, my life, and my environment seemed to have gone completely stale. In the process of running away from myself, I had thrown it all away. I was too old to live like this.

I told Jay all this on the phone one day, and as soon as I mentioned that I needed to change my surroundings, he said, “I’m on my way. I’m taking you out of there.”

He packed his dog Caesar into the back of his Range Rover, and drove in from Phoenix that day. It was so romantic; he was rescuing me. I packed one little Louis Vuitton suitcase, threw it into the backseat of his car, and never looked back. Two months later, we returned to L.A. and fetched the rest of my belongings from Nikki’s house.

People have always told me that when you meet the person you’re supposed to be with, you’ll know right away. And Jay proved that he was the right guy every day. We were similar in so many ways, especially our ridiculous sense of humor. On the outside, he was an arrogant jock; but on the inside, he was a wily little prankster, kind of like a perverted Bugs Bunny. He’d do things like pay our friend Duane one hundred dollars if he’d let a girl shove an Altoid up his ass and leave it there all night. (Strangely, Duane seemed to like it.) He made me laugh and feel like Jenna Massoli, and I began to lower my guard and tell him things I had never told anyone.

I had never been with a man who was able to make me feel safe before Jay. During a short feature dancing tour, a man in his thirties started slipping me threatening letters after my shows. One night in Seattle, I woke up to the sound of him pounding on my door. I called Jay and told him that I was scared and didn’t know what to do. Within half an hour, he was on a plane to Seattle.

Gradually, I began to get comfortable with Jay, to love the little things like the way he’d tiptoe around the house in the morning trying not to wake me or begrudgingly let me do emasculating things to him like plucking his eyebrows and giving him facials.

The only problem was that I wasn’t comfortable being comfortable. It wasn’t a feeling that had been part of my reality in the past. Since Jack, I’d been emotionally incapable of settling down with someone and letting my guard down, because it meant giving someone the opportunity to have the upper hand over me. Yet my entire hopes and dreams rested on settling down and having a family. So with everything going so well with Jay, I was determined to break my own cycle. It proved to be a lot harder than withdrawing from Vicodin, because running away was a habit that had been reinforced for so many more years.

So I began to question and doubt things, which was poison to the relationship. Jay is a dominant man. It’s the only way he knows how to act. So every time he tried to control me in any way, I pulled away by instinct. One of our more unfortunate similarities is that we both have a fierce temper —he’s an aggressive German and I’m a hotheaded Italian— so our happiness slowly became punctuated by fights. And after every fight, I’d leave him. It was a trait I’d inherited from my father: when in doubt, pack your bags and go.

But Jay never called and begged for me to come back like every other man. Instead, he’d change the locks on me. If I was gone for more than a few weeks, he’d have someone find me and try to talk me into coming back, because for some shady reason he knew people in every state. We loved each other, but we were completely devoid of the communication skills that could solve our problems.

Eventually, a friend of ours named Gary intervened. He checked us both into a hotel around the corner from Jay’s house, and counseled us for three days straight. To make the relationship work, he told me, I needed to stop trying to make every guy I dated compensate for all the love my father and Jack had never given me. I needed to be less needy. I needed to accept his status as the alpha male of the house —or at least pretend to. Most importantly, I needed to realize that running away every time we fought over something trivial was not a constructive way of getting attention.

At the same time, he told Jay to start listening to me more, to apologize when he was wrong, to offer me some semblance of emotional stability, and to find a way to compromise on our differences of opinion —all without losing what he thought of as his power. I suppose almost every problem in a relationship, whether it be romantic, political, or creative, comes down to power —who has it and who wants it. I came away from the meeting with the realization that I needed to be with someone who was as dominant as he was, but who also had my best interests at heart. And that person was Jay. He had everything I wanted in a male, except maybe sensitivity.

We went through a small period of paradise after the intervention. In fact, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Fooling around in public places became our favorite pastime. We had sex in the middle of the day in the crowded pool of the Delano hotel in Miami, in the changing rooms at Victoria’s Secret in Beverly Hills, and in a dozen restaurants, from Bed in Miami to Balthazar in New York.

As my relationship with Jay deepened, Wicked began slipping farther away. Beyond Joy’s friendship, I didn’t feel like the company was in my corner anymore. Steve, who had married Joy’s sister, was juggling so many contract girls that he hardly had time to return my calls or ask permission for anything he was doing that involved my name.

The tipping point came when Steve hired a guy to take care of the websites he owned, which included my site. The guy kept calling and asking for my social security number, my conversion rates, my retention, and other pieces of financial information that were none of his business. I constantly told Steve that I didn’t trust this guy, but Steve didn’t do a thing. I did some number-crunching with Jay, and nothing seemed to add up correctly. It was clear to us by then that the Internet was not just about promotion, but potentially a massive source of profit —when it comes to early adapters, the porn industry always gets to new technology first. So I made one last try to reach Steve.

“He’s ripping me off and he’s ripping you off,” I told him. “I’ve helped build this company on my back. And maybe I could tolerate it if the money was going to you, because you worked your ass off to make me who I am. But I will not stand by and watch this chintzy-ass motherfucker get rich off me.”

Steve didn’t back me. He just let it go. The guy will not confront anyone. Between the website and the new girls who kept streaming into the company, things were getting uncomfortable at Wicked. They now had eight contract girls, only two less than Vivid.

And so, like most of my relationships, as soon as I saw the warning signs, I decided to leave before something worse happened. Over the years, I had noticed that women in the adult industry didn’t seem to be valued. The stars were just disposable products with a shelf life of a few years. If women wanted any respect —especially in an industry built on their objectification— they needed to be more than just a pretty face on a box cover. Every big adult company was run by a man. I was talking with Jay about it, and we realized that there was absolutely no reason I had to work for anyone else once I left Wicked. I could blaze a path I had seen no other woman take and start a successful company of my own. I could run my own website, produce my own content, call my own shots. I could be not just a porn star, but a porn CEO.

However, before even attempting the potential nightmare of starting a business, I wanted to leave Wicked with dignity, because they had done so much for me and, until recently, never even came close to betraying me.

So I met with Steve. He sat at his desk as he had five years earlier, obscured behind disorderly stacks of paper. He didn’t seem to have aged a day. His eyes twinkled no less brightly and blinked no less nervously.

I told Steve that I loved him and appreciated everything he had done for me. But it was time for me to leave the nest and see if I could better myself.

The last words I said to him were, “I’d like your blessing.”

And he said, “Jenna, I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to ever feel like you are being forced to do something against your will. So go and do your thing.”

I hugged him, knocking half the papers off his desk in the process, and turned to leave the office.

“But remember,” he said before I reached the door. “You still owe me one more movie.”

I wasn’t just leaving a company, I was losing my best friends. Joy and I managed to remain close, but Steve and I never talk anymore. It breaks my heart, and I know it breaks his heart, too.