Now

After Queenie left that night I went inside and contemplated going to bed, but I knew sleep wouldn't come anytime soon. So I sat on the couch and thought. About not only the night's events but the entire relationship for the last year and a half.

Dating a married man is not for the faint of heart and not something I would recommend to anyone. But you don't always have the say-so in who you fall in love with. I'd watched my parents marriage finally fail due to infidelity and swore I'd never do that, and look where I was now. The man who'd cheated on his wife had now cheated on his girlfriend. Dr. Phil has said that the best way to gauge future behavior was look at past behavior. Was Beloved just a skirt chaser? Was this a flaw in his character that was a part of who he was, or was this just a lapse in judgment? I didn't know.

And what about what he'd said about not meeting any of the women he chatted with? Was that true or also a lie? My gut said it was true. Of course, nothing at that point was for certain. I just knew that my heart was breaking but in some way I deserved it. I imagined how Wicked felt when she realized what was going on between Beloved and myself. I wondered what kind of lies she told herself to make it less painful. What kind of lies he had told to appease her.

It was nearly four in the morning when my phone rang. Beloved had walked the two miles back up the street to the nearest payphone.

I need to talk to you. Can I come over?

Right at that moment I just wanted to slip in a coma and die, but the initial shock had worn off and I said yes. I met him on back out on the front steps of my apartment building. We talked for the next hour. About everything. Mostly he talked and I listened. I found I had very little to say.

Beloved stayed the night, lying next to me in bed. He initiated sex and I complied. Our first and only sympathy fuck. It was awful. I knew I could have turned him down and he would have simply fallen asleep spooning me. But nothing is ever that simple. If we were going to try to work things out then sex seemed a good place to start. We were always good together that way. And I felt that I had invested too much in the relationship to let it go so quickly, no matter what had happened. I'd moved 40 miles from my hometown to be near Beloved. Had up-rooted Cherished from another school for the upteenth time. I just couldn't bring myself to kick him to curb just yet.

The next morning I made up a lie about being sick and puking all night to Cherished, and ran him over to Queenie's house so she could take him to my nephew's birthday party that was still scheduled for later that day. I was exhausted emotionally and didn't feel like I could fake everything being ok. Beloved probably could have but I didn't have the initiative. Beloved had to run to his house the next morning to meet with his dad, and after he returned to the apartment went back to bed thinking that when I came back I would crawl in next to him. I had told him I would, but when I returned to the apartment the coffee started to kick in so I sat on the couch and watched TV. Around noon he awoke and joined me.

I told him if we were going to try to work this out that he would need to accept things were never going to be the same between us. Maybe we'd come out stronger for it, maybe not, but regardless my love had changed. I wasn't going to withhold love from him or build walls or do the things he expected me to (like revenge cheating), but I needed time to heal. I would need time to tell me if this relationship was salvageable. Only time would be able to do that.

We've spoken of the texting episode since then many times. He has admitted he really has no reason for why he did it. He doesn't know, or if he does he doesn't say. He did say it had absolutely nothing to do with me, as in how I treated him, my appearance, or our sex life. I'm not entirely sure I believe that, either. Do people really stray who are happy with their partner? I think of the movie Fatal Attraction, and Michael Douglas's character seems to say so. He had a beautiful wife and family and when given the opportunity fucked Glenn Close's character silly for a weekend, seemingly because he could.

Makes me wonder. Makes me question everything about relationships and whether or not you are meant to find someone you can spend the rest of your life with and be happy. Is monogamy a myth? Are we meant to be with one person or many? How do you know when you've found 'the one'? Is there just one?