"You know I'm still in love with you," she said. She stretched her lean runner's body alongside mine on the couch.
"I know."
"So I'm gonna have to leave him, you know."
"I know."
She said it as if she were suggesting that she might kill him. Our first kiss in 10 years was sweet and awkward and intense. I crushed my mouth into hers and felt her grind a little against my cock.
Her husband and daughter were asleep upstairs.
That was the end of September. Last Friday, she told me over the phone that she hopes that someday I find someone to love who's as quirky and smart and funny as I am. I sat on the bathroom floor of the studio apartment I had moved into just 10 days earlier, and struggled to not weep. She was supposed to be driving in from Lincoln to see me that day. Instead, she was telling me that even though she was still passionately in love with me, this was probably the last time we would ever speak.
I want to tell you a story. But I'm not sure what that story is. The woman on the couch? Let's call her M: the epic love of my life. My soul mate, if you believe in that sort of thing. 10 years prior, we had a brief, intense affair that I and my marriage never recovered from.
So let me just lay out for you a couple of scenes to start off with. They'll tell you a little something about me, if nothing else. On the Monday before our last conversation, M's soon-to-be-ex-husband, B – who had moved out in November when M asked him for a divorce – showed up at her door in Lincoln, looking disheveled and exhausted. He had been awake for 3 days and was running on coffee and cigarettes. He had broken into her email account, and had been reading for the last 72 hours the most intimate and uncomfortable details of his wife's infidelity and disloyalty.
We lived in different states, so the majority of our relationship since she told me she still loved me had been conducted from in-box to in-box and included dozens of awkward and innocent love letters, long lists of our favorite foods, bands, restaurants, places we wanted to visit, suggestive photos, and what can only be described as soft-core pornography.
He was broken.
OK.
Now, turn the clock back maybe... 3 years. It's 7:30 in the morning. I'm standing at the bar of the smallish bungalow in Denver where I live with my daughter and my ex-wife. After she asked for the divorce, I had stayed in the house, living in the basement for a few months, because I couldn't afford my own place, and because we thought it would make the transition from normal, nuclear family to broken, failed family easier for our daughter, who was 6 at the time.
And here's the thing. I was holding a cell phone. I had only been sleeping for about 90 minutes a night for weeks. I was exhausted and disheveled. My ex, L, was in the shower getting ready for work. I was about to wake our daughter, D, up for school. But before I did, I decided to read the text messages L had been exchanging with several men she had started seeing after our split. They were intimate and uncomfortable. Sexual, describing in exquisite detail acts and hygienic practices she would never have imagined doing with, to, or for me.
I was broken.
So, you see what I did there? Of course the parallel breaks down a bit, because B had the courage to confront M, whereas I did not. And possibly he could still save his marriage at this point. I could not.
You're probably thinking I'm an asshole now. When I tried to tell this story to J, the bartender at City Grille, I think that's what she thought, although she was too much of a professional to say so. You (and J) may be right about that. But I swear to you, we never touched each other, aside from that first night of kissing and telenovela-level melodrama, until B moved out.
I've made this sound sordid and trashy, but it wasn't. It isn't. Not really.
It's a love story, 10 years in the making, and even now, even after M wished me the best in all my future endeavors, even after she asked me to never call her or email her again, even after she defriended me, I still can't, or won't believe that it's truly over. I'll cool my jets. But I still have hope. She's not going to reconcile with B. She still loves me – she told me taht. There's hope for us yet. I'm a romantic, you see.
A romantic.
So I'll tell you our story, bit by bit. But in the meantime, I have a separate life to lead. I live in a stellar neighborhood in my favorite city in the world. I have great friends and interesting acquaintances. A brilliant and hilarious daughter. A strange relationship with my ex-wife and a possibly stranger one with a once-and-possibly-future girlfriend. I eat delicious food and drink amazing beer. And I'm going to tell you these stories too.
