At 20, I changed jobs...and was ecstatic. I worked for a small company, had my own office, liked what I was doing, and was paid well above what I should have been for the time and the job.
I was hired by the Office Manager, a 39 year old man that wore cowboy boots religiously. Different pairs for different outfits. Tons of them. Being married to a cowboy, and having gone through a brief period in my teens where I fronted like a country girl, I thought it was cute. He wasn't particularly attractive, yet not unattractive either. Reddish hair that was thinning, a beard, the slightest hint of a tummy. Yet, intriguing.
I remember several months into the job sitting in a meeting with him and several co-workers. I looked at him, and although I had no reason to think this, the thought hit me like a ton of bricks.
I KNEW that I would have an affair with him.
He had never flirted, never acted inappropriately, never given me any indication of anything.
Yet I KNEW.
And ironically, shortly thereafter, something shifted. He pulled me aside and asked how things were going with a certain person in the department I worked in. This employee had been notorious for being difficult to work with, and the person that held my job previously had quit because she could not stand working with this person.
And I told him that while she was challenging, things were okay. Meanwhile I am thinking that it would be crazy to bitch, I was still a relatively new employee, and I liked my job!
He suggested that we go to lunch or have a drink after work (I had just turned 21) to discuss this further. RED FLAG NUMBER ONE! Of course I could have said no. And of course, I didn't.
We met up after an all day Saturday training that I attended, he was there too. We drove in his truck all around the city, talking about everything and everything...including my annoying co-worker. We never ate, or drank, just talked and talked and talked. He had lost a child to a terminal disease a couple of years prior, and his pain was very raw. His wife was morbidly obese, and had essentially shut down after their daughter died. He worked all the time, spent time with their son, and that was his life.
As the evening grew later, and we were parked on the side of a busy street talking, he looked at me and asked when my husband would be expecting me home. I looked at him, knowing that my look was daring, and said "I don't really care when he expects me home."
This opened the floodgates. He pried, and I opened up. About my marriage, my disappointment, feeling alone.
At some point, I think he took my hand. And we talked on and on, until he finally took me back to my car.
When we got there, I looked at him and thanked him for listening, and sharing with me. And I think I was mid sentence when he took my face in his hands and kissed me. And then I got in my car, and was so disoriented that I started driving the wrong way home.
The next week at work was a blur, I literally could not eat, I had butterflies constantly. Discreet office style flirting started, and rapidly escalated. We went to lunch together one day, and after that decided that we should lay low.
It took a few weeks for the relationship to become sexual. It was a slow progression of little touches here and there, to being called into his office and kissing once the door was shut. There is no way that others didn't suspect something.
Blow jobs after work in random parking lots became a part of my routine, Valentines Day came and we exchanged gifts behind a restaurant early that morning. With a me having a husband that worked nights, he would sometimes come over and visit. I remember clearly sitting on his lap and eating pizza with him while my 1 year old son was in his high chair eating dinner. And I remember clearly shoving the guilt aside and pretending that it wasn't there.
I was careless, very careless. I think I almost wanted to get caught. I wouldn't clear the caller ID. Suddenly went from not caring about birth control to caring about it. My husband, my oblivious husband, started noticing things. And so clever and sneaky I became, all while reassuring him that there was NOTHING going on.
Office Manager and I carried on this relationship for 9 months. It was never hot and heavy in a sexual manner, and the sex wasn't that great. He had NEVER gone down on his wife, yet did it to me. There was something empowering about feeling him cum in my mouth while someone was making copies 4 feet outside of his office door. His eyes lit up when he looked at me, and more than anything we talked. Without a doubt this relationship was far more emotional than physical.
I tried envisioning us together in real life, yet could never see it working. I was intrigued with his marriage, his daughter that had died, I found many things about his "real" life so interesting. The one time that we got a hotel room, he broke down crying while talking about his daughter and her death. At that moment, I knew. I knew that I was an escape, a fantasy, a release. And that was it. I think he knew that he was the same to me.
We ended it on decent terms, we were both feeling like it had ran it's course, and obviously there wasn't a future for us. It was hard to work together after the split, he treated me much differently than other employees. I was angry with how he was treating me, and out of spite I had an isolated sexual encounter with one of the young guys that worked in the warehouse at the company. And then I told Office Manager about it, wanting to hurt him. He didn't care one bit.
His cold shoulder hurt, we had ended on good terms, so it confused me. I finally called him out on it after I was given a half assed performance review in a manner that he would have never given one to anyone else. And he admitted that he was having guilt issues, and that it was hard to be around me.
I ended up confessing to my husband after the relationship had ended. He cried. I cried. It was terrible. I will never forget how shitty I felt. And yet, he was forgiving. To date, we had one of our best times having sex the night after I had told him. It was one of the few times in 13 years of sleeping together that I felt that he was very "present" and in the moment. There was a raw, emotional, intensity to it. It is so unfortunate that it took his knowledge of an affair to be that way. And even more unfortunate that it was a one time thing. We began writing to each other in a journal daily, and that helped. It wasn't always pleasant, but it was healing to both of us.
Office Manager decided that for his own sake he needed to talk to my husband. He called him, and apologized to him, and apparently they had a nice little chat. So nice that Office Manager decided to go to my house and apologize to my husband in person. And so he did...on my 22nd birthday. They sat around and chatted like I wasn't there. It was surreal.
And that was that...after that everything was okay. Working with Office Manager went back to normal. Things at home went back to normal. And slowly, my husband slipped back into his old habits. I suggested marriage counseling, and he refused to go. I went to counseling alone. Where, again, I was met with the attitude that STATISTICALLY my marriage would not last. How encouraging is THAT?
While things weren't great, they weren't horrible. And I wanted another baby. We talked long and hard about it, and it seemed like for once we were on the same page. I refused to get pregnant if things weren't okay, if there wasn't hope. Yet, there appeared to be hope, and so we tried to heal our marriage, and tried to get pregnant. After 9 months, I was finally pregnant, and we appeared to be doing okay. As okay as we could be. And 9 months after that, our second son was born. I made the conscious decision that he was our last, and had my tubes tied at the age of 23. Most doctors wouldn't even approve of this at such a young age, but because I had high risk pregnancies (long, unrelated story), he approved.
To this day, my second child, my precious boy that cracks me up, represents hope. And while I know that the hope within my marriage is gone, he represents a greater hope to me. I have never looked at him as a child that was supposed to heal a broken marriage, because that isn't a child's job. To me, he represents effort, and hope for better times. And while I can say with certainty that the effort has been made, over and over again, I realize that the hope is bigger than within the four walls of my home. The hope is for happiness, no matter which direction it is found, no matter what it takes to get there.
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