The Betrayal

For us, the first time that happened was very mixed up.

It was as if he wanted to destroy us before we had really begun by having an argument. Making me leave him.

It started very simply. We had spent most of the weekend in his bed and things had been mighty fine.

And then I asked if I could leave some contact lens cleaner in his bathroom.

He paused for a moment. I can still remember that hesitation five years later.

Taking me by the hand, he led me into the living room and pulled me down so that I was straddling his groin.

“I have something I need to tell you”

But I was ahead of him. After almost six months of having him constantly in contact, over the Easter weekend he had gone suddenly AWOL.

Maybe it’s an over-developed mother’s instinct for things that are ‘not quite right’, but something in my head had flagged up an alert. At first, I thought, it’s Easter, there’s footie and alcohol, he’s a party animal and is just sleeping it off somewhere. Two days after Easter, he responded to my concerned text enquiring whether his physical status was alive or dead but with nothing more than what I would call a ‘holding’ response.

Two days after that, Joanna Cake did what her shyer and less determined alter ego would never have done. She took the bull by the horns and called him up. He said everything was ok. So she suggested that she bring forward her next visit by one week and drive up that evening. To her three enquiries as to whether this was what he really wanted, he replied affirmatively.

As I said in the beginning, it had been a fabulous weekend on the sex front. There were many orgasms and then there were toys and some more climaxes. There was no doubting that sexually, we were extraordinarily compatible. And, for all that time, I thought I had misread the situation.

But, suddenly, he was trying to tell me something.

“There’s someone else isn’t there?”

The wind was completely taken out of his sails but he began to recount the details of his infidelity.

Part of me started to ask if she was prettier than me and then kept quiet. Of course she would be.

She was guaranteed to be a decade younger than me. I had tried to compete on those terms before with The Catalyst and almost destroyed myself.

I wasn’t going there again. I would just withdraw quietly without a fight.

So I didnt shout or lambast him for his betrayal.

I got off his lap and sat beside him looking straight ahead whilst two big fat tears rolled down my cheeks to be followed by two more. I didn’t cry or sob, I just leaked with disappointment.

I made him feel like a cad until he had no choice but to hold me and try to comfort me again.

It was at that point that I told him I needed to go back to bed. I feel safe there in our warm cosy haven where everything can be made right.

Not for sex but to be held in an environment where I felt secure.

I asked him if he loved me and he told me that he did.

When I could delay my departure no longer, I packed up my things and drove away, still uncertain as to my future course of action.

But, as I drove, I went through the phases.

The tears, the anger, the resolution that he had to go in the name of self-preservation.

And then part of me asked about the nature of his transgression.

Was it really so bad to have mentally thought about straying but not following it through – even if that was only because the subject of his fantasy was unwilling.

Did I want to give up on what could so obviously become something really good just because of hurt pride about a mental infidelity?

I called him and explained what I was thinking. It became clear that he did not want to end it either – especially when there was no other Proper Girlfriend material on the horizon, said Little Voice inside my head.

But I shoved her roughly to one side and clung onto his assertion that he did want to try to make this work.

I understood that his own little voice had tried to destroy us and reclaim him for his old life by making me finish with him.

This was a turning point

However, Little Voice would use his fondness for Sam and this aberration to pollute my own security with The Question on a regular basis for the next five years.