Velvet Redmond Stevens
You can read Part 1 of Diary of Affair here
It wasn’t long before I became hopelessly smitten with the married-man of my dreams. It was a slow-burning, blossoming bouquet of roses, curling around the edges of my heart, invading its core like worms digging deep with claws, implanting slicing thorns, and holding my heart captive with their fragrant petals.
He awakened me. I had accepted the fact that I did not know how to pick men. Abuse shadowed me. Sexual. Emotional. Physical. I coped by blocking them out; pretending men didn’t exist in my world, they merely roamed the fringes like faceless mermen, silenced beneath oceans of pain.
My passion for Andrew was a consuming fire without conscience. My brain shut down. I opened to him like a wilted flower receiving first rain after a long drought.
He texted he wanted to give me a kiss for my birthday. We met secretly in the lounge. I, on the couch, him standing over me, he bent down and laid the sweetest, most passionate kiss upon my lips. I swooned. Oh, joy! God, it felt so sweet and tender, smoldering with passion. He swept me up in his arms, eager to devour me. He began kissing my cleavage and tearing at my clothes. He soon wanted more.
I was embarrassed of my house, which I was too depressed to decorate beyond the look of a generic motel room. Having family pictures up made me sad. As soon as we hit the bedroom, things moved fast. We had sex, and I regretted it and I said out loud, under my breath, “It wasn’t that good, I shouldn’t have done this.” Let’s just say a bit of Viagra would have come in handy.
He wanted to make it up to me, I think, so he begged me into the lounge restroom, and it was good. And thereafter, it just got better. We met at my house, two or three times a week for “lunch.”
I healed his dysfunction; he made me feel alive. I soaked it in like cotton.
We said we loved each other, but he said, “Love doesn’t change anything.”
He gave me nothing more than texts from a made-up email account and quick, lunchtime sex. But, he loved his wife, was a devoted dad, and he told me, “I know what I have at home.”
I never once told him to leave her, but deep down, I desired the “fairytale.”
I was ready to end it.
I prayed for willpower on the way to work. When I arrived, he was gone. Summoned for jury duty. He had left silently on Friday, packed his desk. Through rumor, I heard that he might not come back at all, something about a transfer request.
Why? Why didn’t he tell me?
I will never allow myself to wander these woods again. Snow White brushing away the branches of fear and confusion, running into dark matter. I see what I am, what I was.
It’s an ice pick stuck in my heart that bleeds out each day.
The heart of the mistress is a mangled knot, damaged dark blood, a fawn whose heart was pierced by the hunter’s arrow long ago, a slow and steady bleed.