That REALLY escalated fast. (Hoosjim's 14th)

[hoosjim]

(Continued from above...)

...So, she finds me at the small town café in the middle of nowhere. And we are like the only two people on the street. (Okay, so actually, we ARE the only two people on the street, this is a REALLY small town and it's early on a Saturday, but... I think it woulda seemed that way even with a somewhat crowded street). I kinda half smiled and she approached me, head down. And I will say this here, because it absolutely described her demeanor the entire day Saturday and again yesterday, but she was... submissive. And I know that prolly sounds chauvinistic or whatever, but I can't think of a better way to describe it. When she approached me it was shyly or hesitantly, she would stand slightly behind me if we were waiting for a table or looking at something or the like, I would take her hand and lead her and she let herself be led with no pulling or deviation, she would meet my gaze but then drop her eyes, particularly if talking about something difficult. And she was sorry. Or said so, and sounded sincere. There were no excuses-- what she did was "wrong, and stupid" and it "hurt" me, and she had been "dying inside" thinking of it. She had talked to Jessica (MC/IC) several times and had asked her if she should even come, if she shouldn't just stay away, and Jessica had said "no, you two should see each other, just for a little bit... we'll go from there, but follow his cues... he may or may not want to touch you or hold you or whatever, and you need to respect that-- what you did was a serious betrayal of trust-- you hurt him badly and he has a right to feel that way."

We walked. Down an old railbed and out of town. We talked. I took her hand to emphasize things I said, and then I held on to it because it felt right. Our fingers intertwined, just naturally. We found an old bench by the wayside. I led her to it and sat down, she next to me. She started crying and a lot came out. She had been in contact with Om for longer than just since last week. SOB hadn't waited one week past when I angrily confronted him in August. He had called my W's bff initially, feigning concern over whether I might hurt my W in anger. Later, he called her, usually on Wednesdays when he know she didn't have to see patients and would be more free to talk on phone. Sometimes, according to her, she talked to him. Increasingly, as time went on, she did not, though the never stopped completely. She said that if she saw the caller ID ahead of time, she would often just let it ring, but sometimes she would pick up, and, when she did, she would sometimes put him on hold until he hung up (which she can easily play off because she often has to 'abandon' personal calls that way due to office workload and dynamics--I am a sometimes victim of that myself) but sometimes talk to him. For a while she said she still got nostalgic about the attention, or laughed at his jokes, but eventually she grew to dread it. She knew it was wrong, but she thought it was harmless. She told herself that she was just trying to keep the peace (she thought i'd've gone after him, and I very well might've, FWIW) that it was harmless, and that she didn't have to risk hurting anyone else's feelings, that no one would know. And she feared he would come by the office (a possibility he had "mentioned", or say something about the affair to our son with whom he had been friendly-- he went out of his way to track down and talk to my son at an athletic event last fall, an incident that I told my W about at the time, and I now wonder if he meant that as a veiled threat. And so she told herself it was harmless, but she knew better. "I should have told you, I should have and I am sorry, so sorry... I don't know how you can ever forgive me, but I am sorry."

She never saw him, although he repeatedly left messages on her office voice mail telling her how much he was "into her" and how he "really hoped he could see her" and telling her where he would be on any given night. She would sometimes drive by OM's old hangout, just to see what it felt like, or maybe see if his car was there (this I already knew, though I had not told her, though obviously I knew about the Christmas shopping trip which she HAD told me about back in December), but she had not even done that since early January.

Finally, last week, on one of the few occasions she had picked up, he told her "he had joined a gym." She couldn't remember if she had told him which gym chain she was a member of, but it was the same one. There was a gym near his house, he said, and he worked out there at the same time every Saturday. That fateful Saturday, nine days ago, she decided to go before that time that he had said, thinking she would see him in passing as she left. To "prove to herself" that there was nothing there, that she could trust herself.

She had been, she said, feeling increasingly close to me. She liked the way we were starting to flirt, she thought I seemed a different person, stronger, more dominant, more protective, and she liked that too, but she also was remembering how we were when we first met, that she had loved me, how good a father I was. And she felt the pull towards me. But she didn't trust herself. She kept her walls in place

Nor had she ever trusted herself, or a relationship with any man. She had experienced years of betrayal and rejection herself. (And most of this history, I already knew though not how profoundly it affected her at least how profoundly she said it affected her.) She was dumped several times as a teen, her first three boyfriends, two for girls she thought were friends, then ostracized by her group of friends, and her teammates, blackballed by her basketball coaches because her parents wouldn't suck up or "play ball", losing her scholarship offer, then becoming pregnant the first time she ever had sex, in college, and then being rejected and called a slut and a whore by the basketball player she had slept with (and by his friends and many of her own friends because why would a star athlete lie), having nowhere to turn as the "good catholic girl", certainly not her family, she had made the biggest mistake of her life, and had an abortion. All alone. And that too haunted her. As she went forward, she had never been able to give herself fully to a relationship, never trusted herself and rarely trusted others that much to let them in. She gravitated towards abusive relationships (the dude she was in the process of leaving when we met bounced her down a flight of stairs once, and slugged her another time).

And then she met me. And I was nice, and handsome, and sweet, and soon-to-be-successful, and she was wildly physically attracted to me... Maybe too much. "You scare me", she told me on more than one occasion back then, usually as we were in each others' arms. And I did scare her. We had at least three "official" starts and stops. She had a hard time saying "he's my boyfriend" or the like, and, when we got engaged, it was after an almost exhausting "will we, wont we" courtship. And at least one breakup where she went to some other man for a short while. And by that point, my trust in her was damaged. And between the two of us we never really connected in a fully open and intimate sense that binds married couples together.

Here, now, in the present day, we on these forums know where we had gotten to... and that point and everything that came before culminated in that Saturday morning...

(Continued in next post...)