The Other Mrs.(48)

An angry round burn on the palm of my hand smiled back at me.

I got to my feet. I wiggled my sleeping legs to get the blood back to flowing. Pins and needles stabbed at me.

The city around me was bedazzling. There were lights everywhere. In the distance, streets buzzed, buildings gleamed.

I stayed there all night. Will never came for me. Because our life together wasn’t always sunshine and rainbows. We had good days, we had bad.

There were days we were a match made in heaven. There were days we were incompatible, completely out of sync.

Our time spent together, no matter how good or bad it may have been, came with the realization that he would never know me as he knew Sadie. Because what the other woman gets is another woman’s table scraps, never the full meal.

Moments with Will were hidden, rushed. I learned to steal my time wisely with Will, to make moments happen. I went to him in his classroom once, let myself inside the room when it was empty, took him by surprise. He was standing at his desk when I came in. I closed and locked the door behind myself, went to him. I hitched my dress up to my waistline, shimmied onto his desk, parted my legs. Let him see for himself that I had nothing on underneath.

Will stared down there a moment too long, eyes wide, mouth agape.

You can’t be serious, Will said. You want to do this here? he asked.

Of course I do, I told him.

Right here? he asked again, bearing down on the desk to be sure it could hold the both of us.

Is that a problem, Professor? I asked, spreading my legs wider.

There was a twinkle to his eye. He grinned like the Cheshire cat.

No, he said to me. It’s not a problem.

I bounded from the desktop when we were through, let the dress fall back down my thighs, said my goodbyes. I tried not to think about where he would go from there. It’s not easy being the other woman. The only thing there is for us is disdain, never sympathy. No one feels sorry for us. Instead they judge. We’re written off as selfish, scheming, shrewd, when all we’re guilty of is falling in love. People forget we’re human, that we have feelings, too.

Sometimes when Will pressed his lips to mine, it was magnetic and electric, a current that charged through both of us. His kiss was often impassioned, fiery, but sometimes not. Sometimes it was cold and I would think that was it, the end of our affair. I was wrong. Because that’s the way it is with relationships sometimes. They ebb and they flow.

One day I found myself speaking to a shrink about it. I was sitting on a swivel chair. The room I was in was tall with floor-to-ceiling windows. Heavy gray drapes bordered the windows, stretched from ceiling to floor. There was a vase of flowers on a coffee table between us, oversized like everything else in the room. Next to the vase were two glasses of water, one for her and one for me.

My eyes circled the room, went searching for a clock. Instead they found shelves of books on mental illness, emotional intelligence, mind games; graduate school diplomas.

Tell me, the shrink said, what’s been happening.

That was where the conversation began.

I shifted in the chair, adjusted my shirt.

I cleared my throat, fought for my voice.

Everything all right? the shrink asked, watching as I shifted in the chair, as if getting comfortable in my own skin.

I told her everything was all right. I wasn’t shy. I never am. I kicked my feet up on an ottoman, told the woman before me, I’ve been sleeping with a married man.

She was heavier set, one of those women who carry the weight in their face.

There was no change in expression other than a slight lift to the left eyebrow. Her brows were thick, heavy.

Her lips parted. Oh? she asked, showing no emotion at what I’d said. Tell me about him. How did you meet?

I told her everything there was to tell about Will. I smiled as I did, reliving each moment, one at a time. The day we met beneath the tracks. His hand on my wrist, saving my life. Coffee in the coffee shop. Us leaned up against a building, Will’s voice in my ear, his hand on my thigh.

But then my mood turned sour. I reached for a tissue, blotted my eyes. I went on, telling her how hard it was being that other woman. How lonely. How I didn’t have the promise of daily contact. No check-in phone calls, no late-night confessions as we drifted to sleep. There was no one to talk to about my feelings. Alone, I tried not to ruminate on it. But there are only so many times you can be called by another woman’s name and not get a complex.

She encouraged me to end the affair.

But he says he loves me, I told her.

A man who is willing to cheat on his wife, she said, will often make promises to you that he can’t keep. When he tells you he loves you, it’s a form of entrapment. Cheating spouses are masters at manipulation, she said. He may tell you things to keep you from ending the affair. He has both a wife and a lover on the side. He has no incentive to change.

It wasn’t her intent, but I found relief in that.

Will had no reason to leave me.

Will would never leave me.



SADIE


I lay there half-asleep, shaken from a dream. In the dream, I was lying in a bed that wasn’t mine, staring up at a ceiling that was also not mine. The ceiling above me was a trey ceiling with a fan that dropped from the center of it. The blades of the fan were shaped like palm leaves. I’d never seen it before. The bed sagged in the middle so that there was a trench my body slipped easily into, making it hard to move. I lay in the strange bed, trapped in the crevasse.