I watched my husband closely over the next three weeks. Sometimes I felt like a total crazy person because I would smell him when he came home to see if he smelled like a woman’s perfume, or had a freshly showered scent on him. I let him know if he couldn’t put forth the effort that I had been putting forth for months, to communicate and to tell me things before they happened, I couldn’t continue on like that. I genuinely needed him to tell me if she was going to be at an after work thing, so we could talk about him going and if that seemed like a smart or safe idea. Because I knew he would know beforehand. There were times he got frustrated, telling me he felt like I was his mother sometimes, even going so far as to telling me I was a warden and our flat was a prison on planet bullshit.
Whatever that meant.
Even with all of that though, I didn’t know where to start when it came to trying to process the cheating. I didn’t know how to stop pulling his work clothes out of the hamper if I had a shift and he got home first. I didn’t know how to stop checking his pockets and phone for any trace of a lie or a slip. This wasn’t the way to healing or how you were supposed to reconcile. I knew that. And, I was trying to believe what he said when he promised he would put in the effort.
And he had…
Put in the effort.
He’d been home on time, every night. And I knew even on the days my shifts would run late because he had to sharehis location with me now. I turned it on, on his phone. It was a condition for trying to make it work. He gave me full access to his phone, we went to therapy together and separately. I hadn’t picked up any extra shifts, so on my off days I could be sure to be here when he got home, and on days we had off together, we could spend time together, working on us, and our relationship. On my off days, he invited me to his office for lunch, or we’d meet up at a different restaurant somewhere close to his office. It was part of us trying to rekindle ‘us’. When we would have lunch in his office, he introduced me to his newer colleagues, the ones that were hired around the same time as Becky. He introduced me to all of them.
All except,Becky.
He wouldn’t even acknowledge her.
He had walked right past her the first time we’d had lunch in the sandwich shop on the ground floor of the building he worked in. It was his favorite spot, one we used to frequent. They had fun named sandwiches and even had soups as the weather was getting colder. It was a cute little mom-and-pop shop. The owners were in their later years, but they quickly learned our names and our tastes when we came in to try something new. They knew everyone who came in.
It was sweet, everything he was doing. All the ways he was putting in the effort and dealing with my crazy. He kept his cool even when I was freaking out because I thought I smelt something on his clothes, or when he didn’t answer his phone when I called to verify where I was meeting him for lunch one day.
…I just…
I wasn’t ready for anything. Emotionally, my body felt like it was always anxious and waiting for the other shoe to drop. My body was on edge constantly, my nerves completely shot. Physically, I wasn’t sure if I was ready for more than kissing, and even that felt like too much sometimes. Like the thought of him touching me, knowing he’d kissed her…it gave me the ick! And, he knew that, but it seemed that he was determined to press on as if nothing had changed.
I wasn’t so sure that’s what I wanted anymore. The day I put my foot down, turning him down when he tried to move to second base, he got frustrated. He knew my boundaries. Didn’t mean he had to like it.
I was struggling, not knowing if I could trust him again. I wanted to, but I was also still waiting on all of my results from the STI screening to come back clear. Then we neededhis results, and for those to be clear also before we went anywhereclosetothere.
I did not need sex clouding my judgment or emotions.
Things had been going well, but it had only been three, almost four, weeks. I was still on guard. I checked his phone randomly, but not every day, so it wasn’t like it was a scheduled thing. I also found an old tablet he didn’t use anymore when I was going through things in the apartment and couldn’t stay still. I plugged that in, just to make sure I wasn’t losing track of anything that he could have been deleting. He didn’t know about that, so even if he was deleting anything off his device, I could see everything in real time before he deleted it. He had everything linked up through his Apple account. Thanksgiving was tense with our families. His mother was watchful over him, making sure that they talked multiple times a week.
There had been nothing on either device for the entire month. I thought about stopping, I thought I was being a little too paranoid, that he was actually committed to working on us, that Becky knew when to back off. I was starting to feel like maybe,just maybe,I’d be able to slowly take that first step back. Because there wasnothing!
Literally not a thing! Fortwoof the last four weeks anyway. I saw messages on his tablet once it loaded, that weren’t on his phone.
He’s been lying to me.
Again.
I could feel the disappointment wash over me like it was trying to cleanse my heart and soul of the foul man he was continuing to be. The worst part about this was probably that the message he was sending her weren’t even bad messages. They were messages of him telling her to leave him alone. It’s the fact that he hid it.
Wednesday, November 13th, 2:37pm
Caleb: Stop harassing me.
Monday, November 18th, 11:46am
Caleb: I mean it. Leave me alone.
Thursday, November 21st, 4:57pm
Caleb: You were reassigned. Kindly stay in your department. I’ve been very polite up to this point. At this point, I’ll risk getting fired over this affair if it means getting away from you.
Why didn’t he tell me about these?
I couldn’t understand this, understand him. These looked like he was defending himself from whatever she had said to him. There weren’t any texts coming in from her. Almost like he had unblocked her long enough to send the messages, then block her after each one. It seemed like a no brainer to tell me about this. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t tell me. I was already getting a migraine from work, so I was trying not to think about it too hard.
*****
