My heart stops.
I swing open the door, forgetting that seconds ago I had hoped to give my husband a sexy surprise. I rip the tie off my neck and throw it at my husband just as he notices me with a regretful expression.
He catches the tie and hangs up the phone immediately. “How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough,” I say flatly, standing naked in the dimly lit bathroom.
“It’s not what you think.” Mike reaches for my arm in desperation.
I pull away, grab a towel from the rack beside me, and cover myself before I can be humiliated even more than I’ve already been today.
“What is it then, Mike? Because it sure sounds like I’ve been right all along.” I won’t let the tears fall from my eyes. I can’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry. I won’t let him think he can talk his way out of this one.
Mike’s eyes meet mine and I try to ignore the regret and sincerity that seem to be there. “I want to make us work, Alexa. That’s what you heard. You heard me making sure that nothing gets in the way of showing you that I still love you.” His strong, masculine features crumble with remorse. “I can’t lose the boys or you.” He holds up his phone to me. “Here, call back the last number. You’ll see it was just a business call.”
This time I let him pull me close to him. “I deserve more than this, Mike. I can’t keep doubting you this way. I deserve to be with someone who is faithful. I refuse to lose you and my dignity at the same time. If you don’t want to be with me, then stop fucking with my head and set me free.”
He tilts my head up to meet his gaze. “I’ve made mistakes, Alexa, but they’re not all what you think. There are things I can’t tell you. Not now, anyway.” He presses a kiss on my forehead and closes his eyes. “I will make it better between us. That’s what I was doing. I want no one but you. I know that now.” He looks at me with such sadness, I can’t help but be crushed inside too.
“Then tell me now,” I say coldly, pushing him away from me. “Are you cheating on me?”
He sighs and runs his hand through his messy salt-and-peppered hair. “I’ve made mistakes that I’m not proud of.”
My breath hitches and it’s as if I can see my entire heart shatter on the floor below me. Even though it’s what I’ve thought all along, hearing him finally admit it hurts far worse than I ever imagined.
“I want you to say it.” I press him to say the words. I need the full truth.
He looks down regretfully. “I’ve made mistakes, but I love you.”
“Say. It,” I repeat coldly.
His eyes met mine with shame. “Yes, I’ve cheated on you.” He tried to pull me to him. “I can’t lose you. I love you. It’s the stress of my job, and the late nights…my judgment hasn’t been what it should have been. You’re right—you don’t deserve this, but I can’t lose you.”
My eyes freeze on his.
Tears fall.
Tongue-tied.
He kisses my forehead and pulls me in tightly, whispering in my ear that he loves me and begs for my forgiveness.
“It has to be over, Mike. You can’t keep doing this to me. I won’t stay with you if you keep doing this. I’ll take the boys and we’ll leave.”
He takes me possessively in his arms and runs his hands gently through my hair. I’m too hurt and confused to react. I’m not sure what to do. I love him; I know I love him.
“I love you, Alexa. I love you and our family more than anything in the world, and I’ll fight for us. There’ll never be anyone but you again.”
I snap away from him. “There. Shouldn’t. Have. Ever. Been. Anyone. Else. In. The. First. Place.” I have to breathe between each word to keep the tears from spilling over.
“Alexa, there’s a lot you don’t know. When this is all over, I promise to tell you everything. But you need to trust that I’m committed to us, and I’m going to change. Life just got away from me, but I don’t want that life. I know that now. I want us.” He kisses the top of my head. “Please give me another chance.” He traces his hand across the top of the pillowy towel clenched to my chest.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever trust you again.” My words make him wince with hurt. The very foundation of our relationship was built on intrinsic trust. Mike knew that it was the one thing I loved most about him after what I went through when Jamie left. Until now, I thought nothing would ever hurt that bad, but the sting of Mike’s betrayal of trust is a harsh reality to take.
“Are you willing to try to forgive me?” He places my hair back behind my ear.
My head spins with confusion. Does his admission really change anything? This entire time, I was in therapy with Mike because I suspected he was cheating on me. I had him sleep in a separate room because I thought he was cheating on me. I’ve been excited about a weekend away, hoping to woo him back even though I’ve suspected he been cheating on me. I’m doing all these things and still living in the house with him, trying to make things work and keep our family together, even though I’ve suspected he’s cheating on me. Why is it that now that he’s finally admitted that I’ve been right all along, I want to leave him? Nothing has really changed, other than my suspicions have been confirmed. My biggest fear until that moment was that he wouldn’t choose me and the kids in the end. Now that he says he has chosen us, why is it hard for me to forgive him?
I’ve tried hard to keep my integrity and to turn myself into a strong, independent woman in my marriage and seem to be failing miserably. Would staying with him, knowing what I know, make me weak—pathetic perhaps?
Will I always live in doubt?
Will my kids ever forgive me if I leave him?
Will people perceive me as a fool if I stay?
So many questions spin through me that I feel sick.
Mike kisses my head again and looks at me with those dark, alluring eyes that used to have me hypnotized. “Please don’t give up on me.”
I press my head against his chest as he wraps me up in his muscular arms. I can hear the rapid patter of his heart, and helplessly fold into him. “I don’t want to, but you haven’t left me with much of a choice.” The anger finally erupts from me. “I’m not the one who gave up, Mike!” I pound my fists on his chest. “You gave up. It’s all you. How do I know you won’t give up again?”
He lets me hit his chest one more time before he takes my wrists in his hands and pulls me up to him again. “I never gave up on us. Things got out of hand. I made a mistake.” He turns me around and has me pressed up against the door with my hands pinned above me; my towel slides to the floor. “I can’t live with myself if my mistakes cause me to lose you. I realize now, I don’t want to lose you. I love you, Alexa.” Mike’s gravelly voice tears at my heart. I can hear his pain in each syllable. “I will spend the rest of our lives showing you how much I love you.” His voice becomes soft and husky as he slides his knee between my legs and kisses my neck. “Please let me show you. I love you so much.” He teases me with his tongue and it reminds me how badly I’ve missed his touch. “I miss sharing a bed with you,” he says in a whisper as his kisses move toward my mouth. “I miss everything about us. I want us to go back to the way things were, but you have to let me in.”
My body tenses when he slowly slides his hand up my thighs. “I want to believe that.” I know deep down that he’s saying what he thinks he needs to, to get me to stay. Mike has always tried to use sex to make up for being late, or show his love for me, and it makes me sick that he’s doing it now. This isn’t a simple fight that can be cured with a kiss. He’s just admitted to cheating on me.
I don’t want to lose him, but don’t want to lose me either. Isn’t this what I’ve been working for all this time in therapy? Haven’t I always told myself that I wouldn’t walk away if he truly wants to get our relationship back on track? I haven’t ever seen him this broken—this raw—and it’s tearing me up, making me unsure of what to do.
I can feel pieces of myself falling away with each tou
ch that I allow him, losing all sense of myself. There’s no denying that each kiss makes me feel wanted and desired again. A feeling that has been absent for too long to remember.
Need.
Desperation.
Passion.
Loss.
Love.
They all swirl through me like a black hole of sadness that he has caused. I take a step back from him, knowing that anything that feels this wrong shouldn’t be happening. He has already taken so much from me that I can’t give him the little piece I have left.
“Alexa, don’t,” he protests.
“If you really do love me, then you wouldn’t think this was ok. It’s not ok. We are not ok. You need to be a part of our lives again and show me I can trust you before this…” I say pointing my naked, shaking body, “will ever be yours again.”
Mike stares at me in disbelief when I turn and grab my clothes from the bed, and walk out the door feeling more proud and more myself than I have in years.
“You’re my forever.” No three words meant more to me than those when Mike whispered them in my ear as we sat in the sand and watched the sun set on the horizon of the Jersey Shore. The three words I love you no longer held truth in them to me. Jamie destroyed that phrase for me when he left NYU to return to Ireland two years ago. You’re my forever held promise and truth in them that I didn’t think I’d find again.
It’d been a little over two years since Jamie left abruptly when he got word his dad had cancer and needed him home. I understood he had to leave. It reminded me of the time I wasted away from my mom when she was dying of cancer, and I didn’t want him to have the same regrets. I wanted him to be with his dad, especially because that was the only family he had left. Our relationship was better than ever after spending a year and a half in New York City together, and I would have never imagined he was capable of treating me like a piece of trash like he wound up doing, so easily discarded.
I knew something had changed in Jamie when he left me to go back to Ireland. I saw it in his eyes that night when he left. At first, Jamie called every night, and I thought he’d keep his promise and come back to me. But after only a month apart, Jamie’s phone calls became less frequent. By the time his father passed away after only a little over two months, I could tell he was completely shutting me out of his life, and would snap at me every time we talked on the phone. One night when I returned home from working at the coffee shop, Jamie left a message on my answering machine to tell me he wasn’t ever coming back and I needed to move on. He didn’t even have the guts to tell me over the phone.
He left me a message to break my heart.
I know he didn’t want to hear my tears or listen to me try to convince him to let me come to him. I told him over and over when I sensed him pulling away and stopped telling me he loved me that I’d move to Ireland for him. I wanted to be by his side. Isn’t that what we promised each other?
I’ll never forget the coldness and disconnect in his voice on the answering machine that night. I must have listened to it a million times, crying each time. It didn’t sound like Jamie at all. The life in his voice was gone, replaced by emotionlessness and indifference to never seeing me again. My heart broke into a million pieces that night and I never thought it would ever be healed again. I tried to call him several times and convince him to let me visit and talk things out. He never answered, and soon, his number was disconnected and he had moved, leaving him lost to me forever.
I wondered night after night what I could have done to him to make him treat me that way, but there was nothing I could imagine, other than he’d found someone else. Perhaps it was self-preservation, imagining him being the bad person in the situation rather than believe I did something so horrible to turn him against me so suddenly. I never thought I’d be able to trust another man after he broke me. The man who once promised to never hurt me and to always love me was gone and had been gone for too long for me to mourn any longer. I couldn’t save the little part of my heart he left behind for him anymore. I needed to open my heart to someone who deserved it.
Mike was that man.
I met Mike in a business management class in the second semester my junior year at NYU when we were paired for a project a year ago. After Jamie left, I submerged myself in working at the local pizza parlor as a waitress and hanging out with my best friend, Lee, and some of my friends from home. Being paired with Mike on the project was the first time I spent any amount of time with another person other than my tight circle of friends, and was also the first time I was actually looking forward to any type of socialization with a man who wasn’t an old friend.
Mike was the first guy to strike my attention since Jamie left me last year, and how couldn’t he? He was tall, much like Jamie was, but had short, spiky black hair and equally dark eyes that were hypnotic to look at. Physically, he was very different than Jamie, with a sleeker, fit build, rather than a broad, muscular rugby boy body. He seemed like a bad boy to me because of the Celtic knot tribal band around his bicep and he had an air of confidence about himself that I found sexy as hell.
We worked together almost nightly for a month to complete the project, and he always made time each day to talk with me and get to know me in a subtle way, asking questions about my family life, my hometown, my interest in design, and of course he finally got to Jamie. Over time, I gave him bits and pieces about my relationship with Jamie, and its inevitable demise. I told him how Jamie was my first love—my first everything. The more I talked to Mike about Jamie, the better I felt about my current situation. I realized our relationship was doomed to fail at the start. Not only because his home was Ireland, but also because the deep, all-consuming love we both had for each other could have never stood the test of time. I only wished my heart was the one to have lost the love first, instead of his. I wished I didn’t still love Jamie, and perhaps I always would, but the more time I spent with Mike, the more I was sure that I would never let what Jamie did to me hurt me again.
The last night of our project, Mike pushed our books aside and looked at me with his fiercely protective brown eyes in a way that left no doubt he cared about me. I couldn’t imagine what was making him act so seriously then, when our conversations were usually laced with sarcasm and jokes, even when talking about Jamie. But that night, I knew something was different. He took my hands in his and brushed his thumb over my knuckles, shocking me with the tenderness in his touch. The only other times we ever had physical contact was when we hugged hello or good-bye—like friends do. But the intimate way he stroked my hand felt as if he was able to reach the small piece of my heart that remained.
Mike used his other hand to direct my gaze toward his so I could see the honesty he was imploring from me with his dark eyes. Mike was honest, almost to a fault at times, but it was all part of his confidence that I found attractive. His eyes burned into mine when he traced his hand across my chin; shocks of pleasure tingled through me.
“I need to ask you something, Alexa, because it’s been eating me apart for weeks now, and I can’t take it anymore.” He squeezed my hand gently, as if he was trying to conjure courage. It made me smile to myself, to think of a guy like Mike being nervous to ask me a simple question, especially after some of the intimate conversations we’ve had. When he began again, I realized the reason behind his nerves. “Do you still have feelings for Jamie?”
I smiled up at him, finding his vulnerability endearing. “Mike—”
Before I could get out my answer, he interrupted, “I mean, I’m sure you still care about him in some way, but I guess what I’m really asking is what would you do if he walked through those doors right now and apologized for everything and wanted you back? Would you do it?” He winked at me, looking more like the confident man I had come to know. “Or would you stay with me?”
He was such a mix of sweet and salty that I found him hard to resist. I didn’t break my gaze from his and felt safe enough with him to be honest, like he wanted me to be. It’s something
I had thought of many times over the past year, and with him in front of me, eyes full of hope, I admitted the truth that I knew was in my heart—Jamie was never coming back for me. If he tried, I wouldn’t go back to him. I was too strong of a person and had too much pride to let someone possess my heart the way he did again. The one thing that I gained from the careless way he treated my heart was I was able to see just how strong and independent I really was. I didn’t give up on anything in my life when he left. I didn’t hide in a hole and let him make me feel worthless. I knew I couldn’t give up on my dreams because he took such a huge part of them away from me.
Did I hurt? Hell yeah. There were times I didn’t think I could get out of bed. But I did, and every day things got easier. As I sat there with Mike, watching his cocky smile reappear at the corner of his full lips, I realized that perhaps the pain I went through with Jamie was to get me to where I was now.
“If Jamie walked through the door, I would stay right here with you.” I looked down shyly. “That is, if you’d want me to stay here with you.”
“I’ve never wanted anyone to be with me more than I do you, Alexa.” He lifted my hand and placed a kiss on my knuckles. “I want all of you. Your heart, your body. Everything,” Mike said, with his confidence beaming. “I know I’ll have to work for it. All you need to do is give me a chance to show you how good love can really be.”
“What are you asking me?”
“I’m asking you to be my girl.” He didn’t wait for my answer. He leaned in and took my face in his hands and whispered, “I won’t ever hurt you the way he did.” He placed a soft kiss on my lips, making my heart feel alive again.
Mike decided to come back home for a week over the summer to New Jersey with me after our first full year living on our own in the city. After we graduated from NYU, we took a year to travel and figure out what direction we wanted to take in our life. I loved that through that year in the real world, Mike seemed to have decided that the one direction he was sure he wanted to take was with me, and spent every day making me feel a part of his dreams. In a few weeks, he was about to start a job with a major commercial construction company in the city, and I would be starting a graduate program at Tisch School of the Arts in photography while working as an intern for an interior design company in the city. Our lives were about to get exponentially busier, and it was nice to have the next few weeks to be together to enjoy the summer and reminisce about the free and exciting places our year off had taken us.