Those words from his mouth shot through the air and hit me like a .357 Magnum aimed point blank at my chest. My ears started ringing and my head throbbed. I slowly slid down to the floor, for fear I might pass out with a thud.
“I love you, too,” she whispered back.
He kissed her. “Run in the morning?” She groaned into his chest.
I sat there in the darkness of the closet, with my legs numb and my heart shattered into a thousand jagged shards.
I had been right about him. I always knew Julian was a man capable of love. I had been the one who said the version of him every other woman met was not the real version. I had been the one who said he was just careful, and that if you were patient enough, the part of him he kept locked down would unlock.
I had been right about every single thing I’d ever known about him. I had been wrong about one thing only. The woman.
The tenderness had been saved for her. TheI love youhad been saved for her. Every part of him I had spent years earning the right to access had been waiting for a widow with a kid to walk in and snatch it.
She had not even asked. Didn’t earn it. He had given her everything I had been earning for years,easily.
It wasn’t fair.
I had to swallow the bile climbing up my throat. Having to stand there and watch them make love wasn’t the thing that made me sick. Hearing them profess their love for each other? That destroyed me from the inside out.
I had been with Julian more times than I could count. He had never looked at me like that. He had never touched me like that. Never held me like I was the most precious thing in the world after we finished.
With me, sex was great, so I thought. But this? This was something else entirely. This was a man completely undone by a woman, taking her apart to undo her as well, then putting her back together again with his own tenderness. He never came close to giving me that.
He looked happy. Truly, deeply happy. I looked at Alyssa, cuddled inhis arms, and a hot, burning fire of jealousy ignited in my gut. It consumed me, eating away at my rationality, because she had everything I wanted.
That should be me.I thought, the words repeating in my head like a mantra.It’s supposed to be me.My vision blurred with heartbroken tears.
I hated her. I hated that bitch for taking what was mine, even though deep down I knew he had never really been mine to begin with.
I stayed there for another hour, frozen in the dark, watching them sleep, torturing myself with the sight of their perfection, until my legs could no longer hold and the silence of the room became deafening. I had to leave. Had to get out before I did something stupid, before I burst out of that closet and screamed until my throat bled.
I did not have a clock. My phone was in my coat pocket in the foyer. I had no way of measuring how long I waited. I waited until I heard the sound of their breathing in sync, and then I waited longer, because I knew if I was wrong about them being asleep I would be caught.
Finally, I opened the closet door, one millimeter at a time. I needed to get the fuck out of there. If Julian caught me I would be beyond mortified. Knowing him, he’d probably have no mercy and call the police and have me arrested. He wouldn’t understand that my intention was not to watch him and that woman fuck. I thought they were over. How was I supposed to know?
I slipped out of the closet and held my breath, crossing the bedroom on the balls of my feet, with my heels in my hand. I tiptoed out into the living room, and took my coat off the rack. I was surprised they didn’t notice it when they came home. Lucky me.
Then I realized, the chime would sound if I opened the front door. I could not leave.
Morning was going to come and I heard him say they would go for a run. I just needed to be in a part of the condo where they would not find me and wait for them to leave in the morning.
I turned around and walked toward the kitchen, the clock on the microwave said two fifty-six in the morning. I had been in his closet for nearly five hours.
I needed to find a room he was not going to walk into in the morning. The penthouse had guest rooms, so I went to the first one, and pushed the door open.
I immediately realized it was a child's room. I panicked, until I realized no one was in there. The bed was made up, a navy comforter with race cars on it. There was a small desk against the wall with crayons in acup and a coloring book open to a half-finished page. There was a basketball on the floor next to a bookshelf, and the bookshelf had children's books on three of the four shelves.
There was a framed photo on the dresser. I picked it up to see it was a photo of Julian, a boy I recognized to be his nephew, and Julian’s arm around another little boy I did not recognize. I looked closer and realized the boy resembled Alyssa.This was her son?Julian was looking at the camera with the face of a man with a family. The face of a man with a son.Hers.
He had given this room to a child who was not his. I had been at his condo a few times over the years, and I had not been invited past the kitchen.
I began to see red.
I closed the door of the room and walked further down the hallway until I found the laundry room. I went inside and closed the door. I sat down on the floor with my back against the dryer, pulled my robe tighter around me, and I stared at the wall.
I sat like that until I started to shake.
She just got here. What did she have that I did not?
