“Sure.” Mark sighed. He looked tired. I felt like I was seeing the real person, suddenly, under the sarcastic façade, and I felta wave of affection for Mark. He took a breath. “You know, I feel for Paul but I’m also jealous of him. I got married way too young, and I feel like I missed out on playing the field, on dating. I don’t think anyone should stay with the person they met when they were fifteen. You miss out on too much of life. So the last couple of years, I’ve been making up for lost time. But…with you, I feel like I actually connect. I actually want to date you, not have a one-night thing. So I guess I’m being persistent, because I think you’re a tiny bit attracted to me. And if you could be leaving soon, I have to make a move. Am I completely off-base?”
“I may have to leave soon.”
He raised his eyebrows, catching the dodge, a tiny smirk on his lips. “I’m not young anymore. I have to put myself out there instead. And I don’t want to see you get hurt by whatever is happening with Paul.”
“I appreciate that.”
He leaned over and took my hand and then leaned over and kissed my knuckles once. In spite of myself, my body reacted just a little. He slid his chair a little closer.
I wondered if Paul was with his ex-wife right now.
Mark leaned over and carefully kissed my cheek. Then Mark leaned a little closer and I pulled back and shook my head.
“No, no, Mark.”
What was I doing? I didn’t even know if things were over with Paul. I wasn’t even sure I liked Mark.
Mark observed all of this with a gimlet eye, then shrugged, shaking off the spell. “Well, if anything changes with Paul, or goes wrong, I just want you to know that I’m here as a friend, or a date.” He stood up and smiled. “Or just as a welcome distraction.”
Oh, he’s good, I thought.
He grinned, grabbing his coat on the way to the door. I showed him out with a little heat flushing my cheeks red, irritated that he’d managed to get a reaction.
Paul had made me like him, and it made me angry that I was being loyal to Paul even though Mark was offering me a perfectly good no-frills fling. What if it was the wrong call?
Tomorrow I would call Laura and tell her all of this. Well, most of this, anyway.
Even though Laura knew most of my stories, there was one story that I had never told her. Laura knew about Farid, my handsome Iranian-American boyfriend from grad school, the one who helped me get my first job as a journalist. Laura knew Farid had hurt me, and she assumed that he was the reason I didn’t trust men.
But Laura didn’t know about Colin, the last guy I had actually dated…and the one who put me off dating entirely. She didn’t know about Colin because Colin was married, and because throughout the entire relationship, I wasn’t sure whether I had found the love of my life, or was a horrible monster, or was just a complete idiot. In retrospect, it was that last one.
In my defense, I didn’t know Colin was married when I met him. He certainly didn’t volunteer the information. The whole thing happened right before the pandemic, when I was already a financial writer and was still going into the office for meetings. One day at the coffee machine, I found myself chatting with a boyishly cute data analyst who had a desk on the same floor as my boss. It was a casual conversation about coffee pods and the terrible impact they have on the environment and our desire to find alternatives that didn’t involve spending five dollars at Starbucks, but he was dry and clever, and I liked him right away. It took two weeks to find out that he was named Colin, and a couple weeks more before I got the courage to drop by his desk when I was on his floor for a meeting. After that, he startedtracking me down whenever he saw me in the hallways. We always made each other laugh, and he was around my age, but I tried not to think too seriously about the possibility of dating him. I was such a pessimist at that point that I assumed it would go nowhere.
Then one day, he caught up with me outside the building and suggested we grab lunch together, and then a couple of days later, we got dinner after work on a Friday. He seemed to genuinely like me, and we would text occasionally and send each other jokes. At this point I was telling Laura about the ‘cute data analyst,’ but I still hadn’t told her his name, not wanting to jinx things or make her too hopeful.
After a few weeks of this, we spent a night together, but it never quite became a regular thing, because he only seemed to be available every couple of weeks.
I know, I know.
The shoe fell a few days later when I started joking about a future together, speculating on the names of future kids. He looked at me with a pained expression and told me that he stilltechnicallyhad a wife. But it was okay, he said, because they were basically living apart.
Yes, he did tell me that story about how they were still together but emotionally separated. Yes, he did say that they were still living under the same roof but only because they had a five-year-old and were figuring out how to break the news to their child that their marriage was over.
I went out with him for another month, believing that. I slept with him two more times before I figured it out. The thing that’s hardest to explain—the thing Laura would never believe, even though it’s true—is that I actually believed him when he said it.
“Oh, that’s just New York,” I told myself, “where it’s hard to get an affordable apartment. No wonder he still lives with his ex-wife.”
No. He was just living with his wife.
Over the last few years, I’ve had plenty of time to think about why Colin did what he did, and here’s what I’ve come to believe. Some married guys are sociopaths, planning the whole seduction ahead of time, but I think Colin didn’t plan it. He was able to lure me into an affair because he did really like me. He enjoyed our friendship as much as I did. I think he was genuinely falling for me, maybe in some part of his mind thinking that I might be a better fit than his wife, taking pleasure in the brand new relationship phase, where you’re excited to send texts to each other and make little jokes and do check-ins—the shiny new relationship stuff that you don’t ever experience again once you’re married. When he told me that he was ‘separated,’ I think in Colin’s mind, that was a way to lessen the blow, to spare my feelings. He probably thought it was kinder that way, that it would make me feel less used while he decided what he wanted. It gave him options: to run away with me if I was perfect, or to claim that he had worked things out with his wife. He got to date while still being married.
I broke it off, not him. That’s the one shred of dignity I have about the whole thing. I broke it off when I realized he was lying not only to me but to himself. He could convince himself that what he said to me was true, in the ninety minutes between when our date started and when it ended, which was why he was so good at lying.
So Colin isn’t even what sent me into a tailspin. What broke me was when the next married man hit on me. And three months later, the next one. I started to feel like I must be sending some signal—some vulnerable signal—some flashing light. I am the one you cheat with or the one you cheat on. They sense something damaged in me, and it reels them in. Even on dating apps, I kept getting the guys who said their relationship statuswas ‘complicated,’ until finally I deleted all the apps from my phone.
My mother died around the same time, so I was also dealing with that, with a lowkey fear that I was destined to end up the same kind of train wreck, sliding down a path of fancy cocktails until I landed on a cheap bar stool, embittered and alone. I didn’t want to date married men, so I might as well not date anybody.
Perhaps that was why I’d attracted someone like Paul, caught in the midst of a messy divorce. Perhaps it made sense that he wanted me only because I was going to leave soon. Maybe the attraction was that somehow, deep down, he knew that nothing real could happen.
