I’d spent the last, lazy half hour of the day pretending to work while my best friend stood in front of me chatting with the man I had once fallen most desperately, painfully in love with. I knew and felt that it was never the good sort of love, the healthy sort of love, but the painful, foolish kind. The kind where you are shown every day that they don’t love you, hell, they don’t even want you, and yet you just can’t let that motherfucker die.
J was giving advice to S about his recent break up. I know. He’d just broken up with someone else, why the hell would he want me? I knew they’d broken up, I knew he was still in love with her but I just couldn't get rid of the feeling. I couldn't work out which was worse, not being able to see him and constantly thinking about him or seeing his goddamn face every day and not be able to get it out of your head. I was sitting at my desk, just behind the two of them, staring at my screen in what I hoped was a focussed way (and yet not-too-focussed way – that would give the game away) and typing made up words onto a made up document so it seemed that I wasn’t listening to every word they said. Which I was.
The worst part was that I had started to be so cold to him. I had to be. I couldn't let him in any further otherwise I thought I would actually break. The coldness was my effort to keep some dignity for myself, and if I am completely honest, to punish him for not feeling the way I do. I wanted him to hurt the way that I did.
It’s a terrible tale, and I’m ashamed to tell it. But there I was, stuck in a fucked up one way love story. It wasn’t always this way. I seem to remember there was a point when I hadn't loved him. When I didn’t even consider him.
We’d managed to work together for nearly a year, eight months or so, when I had a silly dream about him one night. It wasn’t even particularly graphic, we were just pressed up against each other in a bar, in a crowd of our friends. It was the feeling that really through me. I had this incredible sense in the dream that what we were doing was illicit, and that we were both complicit in it. During the day I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and it had felt so real to me that I was heady with it. I went down to talk to our resident agony aunt (the receptionist) J2. Even she had had one, about the most unlikely Casanova in the office. Her advice was to tell him, you can then both have a laugh about it and you’ll be able to move on.
It wasn’t until I practically rammed into him, coming around the corner from the kitchen that I blurted out ‘Oh I just remembered that I had a dream about you last night’ and promptly walked off. I sat down and about five minutes later I had an email from S asking what this dream was about. And that is how it started.
I admit my part in all of this. I am aware that I made a series of choices that got me to this point and that at any moment it could have seriously come back and bitten me on the arse. I knew that going in but I played the game and fell right in. A sucker for the adrenaline. I can’t imagine what else I was thinking. It wasn’t as if my relationship at the time suddenly meant nothing, although perhaps I acted in that way.
It fucked me right up. I had never made one mistake in my life that has made me so unhappy. S and I never slept together. But instead of making love we made intimacy with each other that mutually went beyond the boundaries that either of our partners would have been happy with. So I didn’t tell him. I raised another up to the same level as him in my heart.
After a while I realised I’d actually broken it. What was whole before became deformed and twisted and only selfish. I don’t know what I wanted from S. I wanted sex, and passion, but I also wanted intimacy and a friendship so intense that it would make me forget how lonely I was, and how few real friends I now had. To fill up the part of me that others couldn’t fill. I never told S this, I just became disappointed, painfully so, when he didn’t give it to me.
Our affair was very post modern. Next to nothing of a physical nature but hot as lava over technology. He would text me such things that the memory of them would stop me on the stairs in the middle of the day. I would blush making tea and the sugar spoon would shudder in my hand. Coming to work was a unique mix of pleasure and pain, because just to see him would make me wet, and yet we would barely speak to each other. A month of headiness. Of heightened feeling. Those feelings were so high but the foundations they were built on were weak.
I didn't separate sex and emotion well back then and the passion I was feeling and receiving didn’t satisfy me, it left me craving more. I couldn’t tell if we were just playing a game of if it was real. The jokes and games always continued but they culminated in him picking me up in the mornings. He talked about touching me as he drove. He asked if I wanted to touch him. I felt shy. So he said he would go first. He touched me, touched me on the thigh. Then he pulled up my dress and touched my bare skin. I sighed with shock and pleasure and fear all the while feeling how heavenly it was. Heat rushed to my face and I felt feverish. He brushed his hand up over my thigh, then dipped it in between my legs. He touched my underwear, then pushed it aside to put his fingers inside my cunt. I was wet. He told me to touch him, so I put my hand on the bulge in his trousers. He removed his hand from my warmth and unbutton himself. I placed my hand through the zipper and felt how warm he was. Burning. Then as he slipped his fingers back inside me I realised how large his cock was. My confidence rose and I pushed my hand further inside his zipper until I met with flesh, and my hand surrounded it. It was shocking. He pulled in the car park and we composed ourselves.
I couldn’t stop myself, I didn’t want to stop myself and I wanted more of him. But after that morning it was never the same. A peak had been reached, a line had been crossed and all of a sudden it wasn’t just make believe. It wasn’t a game any more and we had both done something that we not only couldn’t defend, but couldn’t dismiss as ‘just flirting’ or just words. That evening I got the text I’d dreaded, and the beautiful short sweet affair was over.
I was more okay than I thought I would be. Life went on, and surprisingly it wasn’t much different than it had been before. I went to sleep with the person I still loved I woke up next to him. He still made me laugh and I still loved stroking his soft cheek. But now, instead of being whole, these simple things and an undercurrent of unhappiness in my heart. I knew what I had risked, and I knew how capable of hurting D I was. I realised that I had foolishly gambled that for someone who was no longer replying to my texts.
S and I still laughed together at work, but now I looked at him a little longer. I stopped going into the kitchen when he was there because I didn’t want him to think that I gone there to get him alone. I was terribly terribly conscious of myself and forever conscious of him. It was what I imagine having a child is like – a sixth sense for knowing where they are. The days he was out seeing clients was terrible. Empty. What was the point if the only reason I was now here was to see him? Suddenly my life had a new, self destructive focus and that was S.
Then all of a sudden, a text. Out of the blue. It started again. Nothing as passionate as the first time and more cautious. An offer to drive me home. I accepted. I showed him the new flat I shared with Dan. I showed him the whole place and then the bedroom. He said ‘so this is where the magic happens’. Then he thrust me up against a wall and asked me if this is what I wanted. Was this the way I wanted it? Did I like it when he did this? His hand slid up my skirt again and I watched his face discover that I had taken off my underwear at the office. His beautiful large fingers slipped inside and me and he fingered me in a way that D didn’t. I don’t know if I preferred it but I relished that it was different. I couldn’t speak. I felt shy and scared but I didn’t want him to stop. He came closer to me and I wrapped my arms around his neck and felt his burning cheek next to mine. He whispered that he wanted to fuck me. He wanted to turn me around and fuck me with his big cock from behind. I didn’t let him. Jesus Christ I wanted to, but there was something fucked up inside me that said if I didn’t fuck him, then what I was doing wasn’t as bad as I thought it was.
He told me he cared for me after he came on my tits. It was so foolish. I believed it for a few months longer, and then one day I realised that he didn’t actually want me at all. That was such a painful epiphany. He’d never wanted me, but had just seized the opportunity of me wanting him.
It’s only the time that has passed now that lets me reflect on this. It was a terrible, foolish time in my life that I will never ever be able to undo.
