The Other Other Woman (6 page)

Looking back now, I imagine it probably freaked Matt out when I ended my marriage. I texted him the next morning asking him to call me ASAP. He immediately offered his help. Did I need him to come and get me? Could he call his lawyer for me? He was every bit as caring and supportive as I would have expected him to be. He was my rock. He seemed really worried about me and my safety. He kept asking me if I was okay, telling me that if there was any trouble at all to call him, day or night, and he would jump in the car. In reality, he was probably about to shit his pants from the sudden pressure. Maybe he thought I was going to need him to help me financially or take care of me somehow, but I had no expectations of him and at the time, I really didn’t know what I wanted him to do.

It wasn’t fair to expect him to leave his wife for me at that point. We weren’t even technically “dating” yet. We were just friends with an instant affinity. Not to mention, I had two little girls, just three and six years old. I knew for a fact that he would never want to start over like that. I got that message loud and clear from conversations we previously had about our children. It was all I could do to concentrate on the day to day. I kept telling Matt that he needed to do what worked for him but that I just couldn’t keep up the charade on my end.

There was a lot of drama surrounding my separation from my husband. He went off the deep end, actually, understandably so. He was losing his wife, his best friend, and his entire support system in one fell swoop. He was having crying fits in front of our kids and screaming obscenities at me or worse, telling them I was soulless, compassionless and inhumane. We had a lot of couples friends in our neighborhood, people we had basically raised our children with, and I didn’t want to tell them what was going on between us just yet. But I knew I could confide in Brady.

Chapter Three

I met Brady at my children’s daycare. He was a teacher in the room with the school-agers. I would see him walking around. You usually notice a male teacher because it’s not something you see very often in daycare. I would always nod or smile, but it wasn’t until my oldest went to Pre-K at the elementary school that I really spoke to him. I liked him instantly. I could tell right away that under that overly enthusiastic “HEY LET’S SIT IN THE YELLOW CIRCLE!” voice, he was every bit as jaded and sarcastic as I was. He was a total cutie-pie too, although I knew right away that he was gay. He was not especially tall but had lovely blue eyes and a very genuine smile. He almost always wore black, head to toe, and he had a shaved head that he covered with a gray newsboy cap.

He had a gift for calming people. He was always very cool and collected with a very soothing nature. He could calm the “helicopter” parents down when they would get upset because their little poopsie had a tantrum over the building blocks. And then he would lean over to me as if to say, “Are you believing this shit?” I would stifle my laughter until they left and he would say, “Good grief, lady, UNCLENCH!” I loved that he saw me as one of those “cool” moms.

We often talked about running and home renovation since it turned out he lived right in the same neighborhood as me in a house that needed about as much repair. I gave him some home renovation catalogs and he gave me his iPod so I could steal his running playlists. We ended up becoming Facebook friends soon after, and since we both have a major love of coffee started texting and meeting at Starbucks once in a while just to chat. This made my husband pretty uncomfortable. Not because Brady was gay, but because he probably knew I was telling him how unhappy I was at home.

Brady knew of Nate but didn’t have much contact with him since he worked the afternoon shift. He knew that Nate had quit his job, thinking it would spur him into finding one much better. But our situation worsened as there were very few jobs out there for someone with no skills other than those that were considered hobbies to most employers. I often told Brady that I was frustrated with Nate’s lack of forward propulsion, and that I didn’t know if I wanted him depending on me for the rest of my life. Brady offered to ask a couple of his friends if they knew of anything in the art industry that Nate might be suited for. But of course, in the middle of a recession, there was nothing available.

Brady was actually able to find a new job with a Director’s title, though, so he left our daycare. We continued our Starbucks chats and went out to dinner every few weeks as well. I had only ever mentioned Matt to Brady once before, that I had this broker “friend” who seemed to be flirting with me and that he was pretty easy on the eyes. That was right after my branch visit in April. It was all very black and white to him, however, and he gave me the “He’s married. You’re married. He’s a douche for even texting you… Don’t even go there” speech. So I didn’t mention it again and quickly changed the subject.

He had just recently met a new boy named Justin that he was very excited about. Justin was tall and blonde and totally adorable, a little younger than Brady, maybe 27 or so. Brady showed me his pictures, and we gushed about him instead. Then we hatched a plan to get a bunch of our mom friends together with him and his gay friends for a night of dancing up at our local lesbian bar within the next month or two.

The next time I talked to Brady, however, I was in a bit of a panic. I texted him to see where he was. He responded
having a cigarette outside,
so I just drove over there. I told him I had asked Nate for a separation. He immediately raised his eyebrow at me and, taking a drag, said, “Does this have something to do with that old douche?” I grabbed his cigarette and took a drag myself. I don’t even smoke. “Um, no, not… really?”

“Do we need to go get some coffee?”

“Probably.”

I wasn’t about to tell him just how close Matt and I were becoming. I admitted that we were still talking fairly often, that I valued his opinion, and that he had been a really good friend to me so far. Brady was not impressed.

“I think you are playing a dangerous game here.”

“How so? Nothing has happened… yet”

“‘Yet’ being the key word. I just think that it’s making it way too easy for you to make impulsive decisions. I know you aren’t happy, but you married this man. You have kids by this man. Are you sure you can’t work it out, somehow?”

“Brady, I can’t even stand to touch him. Not even just to kiss or hug him. I’m so completely pissed when he gets near me; all I want to do is punch him in his stupid face. Who quits a job without having another one when you have two little kids at home? Who?! He does. Because he knows that
I’ll
find a way to get by. He has an entire history of nothing but selfish behavior. Why should I have to put up with that for the rest of my life? He doesn’t have to contribute anything to this family, but I should just suck it up?”

“I know, but you don’t think counseling would help?”

“Counseling is not going to make me find him attractive. I’m not sure that we ever had much of a spark anyway. And now, ever since I lost weight, it’s like he’s even more clingy and starved for affection. I can’t even walk across the room without him trying to paw me and it makes me crazy.”

“But if it wasn’t for this other douche, would you still feel this way?”

“He’s not a douche. But yes, it’s been like this for years. How are you supposed to be attracted to or have any respect for someone who acts like a spoiled 15 year old? He won’t take on the simplest task without me having to practically write him an instruction manual. He simply refuses to grow up.”

“Well, have you figured out what you are going to do about the house?”

“Not really. He’s not going to be able to afford it on his own, so I will keep it for as long as I can so the kids don’t freak out. He’s going to go stay with his friend for now and try to get an apartment eventually. Even then, he’ll probably need a roommate to help pay for it and figure out how to do everything for him. He’s never paid a single bill in the entire time we’ve been together.”

“Yikes. He’s about to get a rude awakening.”

“Sure is,” I nodded.

“Okay, well I just hope you know what you are doing.”

To be honest, I didn’t know how I was going to pay for everything myself. I figured my mom would help me with a lot of the girls’ necessities, just as her mother had helped her when she left my dad. But I didn’t question my decision at all. I hate to say it, but once he was out of the house, I felt immediately at peace. No more having to come up with excuses to avoid affection and sex. No more having to be his therapist while he went on and on about his unhappiness and lack of confidence yet watching him sit on his ass year after year in front of the television, never doing anything to change his circumstances. I was solely responsible for me and my two daughters, instead of three children.

Matt became my happy place. In the summer, he finally got his Burlington client to agree to a meeting, and we made our plans to work in a Raleigh visit around that. Our once-playful flirting seemed to intensify by the hour as we started counting down the days until we saw each other again. Where we had once discussed meeting up for a cup of coffee or a quick lunch, it had now become, “I really need to be alone with you for a couple of hours.”

We had danced around the topic of sex through our texts and phone calls, but it was mostly conversational in nature up to that point. “This is what I hate about sex with my wife…” “Well, this is what I hated about sex with my husband…” We hadn’t really discussed it as far as what we wanted to do with or to each other, but it became abundantly clear that we were both extremely curious.

I admitted to him that I checked out his shoes when I was down there in April. “It’s totally involuntary, it’s just something I do when I see a smokin’ hot man,” I explained. I could practically hear him grinning and running his fingers through his hair.

“Well, I don’t know if you noticed but I also have really big hands…”

“Yes, I did notice that you have very nice hands,” I replied suggestively. “You seem very confident discussing this particular topic, Matthew. I’m not sure what to make of that.”

“I’m very confident, baby, no problem there. I mean, let’s be real, here. I can’t imagine that something small is going to look good, and it’s probably not going to feel good. And I want you to feel really, really good. Really.”

“Really?” I teased.

“Yes, really. And… I’m used to four hour bike rides. STAMINA, baby!”

“Well, I think that covers everything then! See you in six hours!”

That ramped up the heat of our conversations significantly. I suppose, in the past, I would have considered myself to be somewhat of a prude–not so much when it came to the actual having of the sex–but at least the discussion of it. To me it just wasn’t a topic you necessarily analyzed over a midday phone conversation. Yet I found myself sitting on a bench outside in the courtyard of my office building listening to Matt tell me in explicit detail about all the places on my body that he eventually intended to lick. I didn’t bother to mention to him that I never cared for oral sex in the past, from anyone, because now I would suddenly catch myself daydreaming about how that might be with him. His strong hands wrapped around my hips and thighs, drawing me forcefully closer to his perfect lips, my hands running through his hair, desperately grabbing on to him, while he gazed up for my reaction between tongue strokes.
My God he could be a sexy motherfucker when he wanted to be
. He was never vulgar though. It was as if he just “got” me, and every word that fell from his mouth was phrased exactly the way I needed to hear it.

If the phone calls were racy, the texting and emailing was worse. We were truly terrible, horrible, no-good people. After dropping a good 20 pounds, I was feeling pretty good about myself by this point, and decided I was going to do something I had never considered before: take a “provocative” picture and send it to him. I figured I had a pretty good butt overall. So I put on my most adorable pair of silky light pink panties with little hot pink hearts. There I stood, slightly bent just so in front of my bedroom mirror to get the perfect shot on my iPhone. I was so proud. I would have rather died a horrible painful death than to share that with anyone in the past, but sending it to him made me happy somehow. I knew that it would surprise him and please him, and that he would know exactly what to say. I was right. He received the file on his phone and immediately told me I looked absolutely incredible. Then he made a point to view it on his laptop to tell me again that I looked even more delicious on the big screen. That was awesome.

It was not awesome when about a week later my friend Katie in New York sent me a late night text.

Hey chickadee, whose butt is that on your Instagram page?

I’m sorry, what was that?!
Heart attack commencing in 3… 2… 1….

Yeah there’s a pic of someone in some pink panties up there! Is that you?! Damn girl, you are getting tight! :)

PARDON!?

HOLY SHIT! HOLY SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!

I was not aware that you could have “followers” on Instagram; it was a fairly new camera app for me. I had only used it once in the past to take photos of my kids for Facebook. The only reason I even used it this time was just in case I wanted to edit my buttcheeks, and I didn’t even do that!

You can imagine how happy I was to learn that my soon-to-be-ex mother-in-law was also a follower, as well as a few message board people, my second cousin twice-removed, and someone named Squid that I didn’t even know. I hoped he was nice. My heart continued to pound out of my chest as I frantically deleted the picture and the entire list of contacts. Maybe no one else saw it. I prayed no one else saw it. Katie assured me that even if someone else did see it, at least my ass looked fabulous. I struggled awkwardly to explain to her what possible reason I could have for taking a picture like that.
Well, um you see, I’ve lost some weight and I just wanted to see what was going on back there…