I'm tempted to trot, but I stop myself.
I have done nothing wrong.
I have no reason to run away.
I almost get to the elevator when Alex catches up with me and pulls me into the empty office across from the front desk.
He closes the door behind us. The room smells like it has recently been painted. It's completely empty with nothing but a chair near the far wall.
“Where are you going?” Alex asks.
“Away.”
“Listen, I'm sorry. I had no idea you were coming.”
“Yes, I know. Otherwise, you would have continued lying.”
“I'm such an asshole. I know that. I've just been working so much and I've been so overwhelmed with everything. Can we talk about this?”
“How long has this been going on?” I ask, crossing my arms.
He hesitates.
“You wanted to talk so answer me.”
I whip my hair around and walk over to the enormous floor-to-ceiling window. I look down at the street below and stare at the restaurant where I just got takeout at for my fiancé and contemplate how much my life has changed in the last twenty minutes.
Alex walks over to me and puts his arms around my shoulders. I brush him off, but he does it again.
“I'm really sorry, Emma. I'm such a dick. I'm such a shit-head.”
“You're also a liar and a cheater,” I say.
“I know.”
“How long has this been going on?” I ask him again.
Again, he hesitates.
“Listen, you were the one that wanted to talk. You want to explain yourself? Then do it. Tell me the truth.”
“Jen is my boss,” he says.
She's also ten years older than you, I want to add, but I bite my tongue. I want to hear what he has to say.
“The truth is that, and this is really difficult to say… we have been together for a long time.”
My mouth drops open. A part of me thought that this might be a one-time thing. Not that that was okay, but at least it would be…
“What are you talking about?” I ask, feeling all the blood drain away from my face.
“Jen and I have been together since before you and I met. We've been dating for about five years.”
“Dating? She's married. She has two children.”
“I know, but it was just something that happened and then it kept happening. I knew that she did not want to divorce her husband and that was okay with me. I didn't want anything serious either.”
“You didn't want anything serious?” I ask. “We have been together for two years. We've been practically living together. You asked me to marry you.”
“I know,” Alex says. “I didn't want anything special with her. When I met you, I knew that I wanted to have a life with you.”
“So why didn't you stop seeing her?” I ask and shake my head.
“I tried,” he says with a shrug. “We never really saw each other outside of work. This occasional rendezvous over lunch, a few times a week, that's just something we started doing five years ago and it just continued. It never got serious and it never got past that point of just…sex. We became something like coworkers who slept together occasionally, at work.”
I stare at his beautiful toned face, his luscious lips, and his thick ash blonde hair. I can't believe that this is the same person who I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with.
Outside of our very demanding jobs, we have practically spent every minute together.
We stopped hanging out with friends and acquaintances. We missed family dinners.
We stayed up late talking into the night when we had to be up early the next day.
When I met Alex, I never thought that I would ever connect with someone like this. I never thought that there would be a person who intuitively understood every part of me. Then he came along and suddenly all of these things that I thought were important no longer were. I thought that he felt the same way.
Tears start to gather and I blink to make them go away.
A big gulp forms somewhere in the back of my throat.
I'm crying because I caught him cheating on me, but it's more than that. There's this dissipation of trust. There's this feeling that this life that you have been living for two years is nothing but a lie.
“Emma, please,” Alex says, tugging on my hand. “Please don't cry. I hate to see you cry.”
I pull my hand away and wipe a rogue tear with the knuckle of my index finger.
“I can't believe that you've been lying to me for so long,” I say quietly. “Our whole relationship is a lie.”
“No, it's not,” Alex says, shaking his head.
I cock my head and look into his eyes, unconvinced.
“I know that I shouldn’t have been doing this. I know that I should have cut things off with Jen a long time ago, but you have to believe me when I say that it didn't mean anything. It was just a stupid physical thing. We have been doing it for three years up until we met. I broke things off for about a year. Then we were both working late one night and it just happened again.”
“So, you broke things off at first?” I ask, my voice cracking.
“Yes, when we met,” Alex says urgently.
“And then when things got a little bit too boring with us, you just went right back to her?” I ask.
He reaches over to me, but I turn away from him.
This time, however, I don't just pull away. I forcibly remove his hands off of my shoulders.
“No, that's not what happened. It was just stupid. It was something we did for a while and it's just like… a bad habit.”
“Well, in my opinion, cheating is not the same thing as smoking. The problem is that you never gave it a second thought about what it would do to me. You didn't care how much it would hurt me. You don't care about any of that.”
“I did,” Alex says, his voice getting more desperate. “I still do.”
“No, you don't,” I say with a sigh.
Before he can say another word, the door swings open and Jen walks in. She’s tall and elegant with hair that looks like she has just walked off the red carpet. On the outside, she is a much better match for Alex than I am. When Jen stands next to him, I can almost see that glitzy, airbrushed magazine photograph of the two of them, smiling with their big pearly whites from ear to ear. Hell, they would even look good on the cover of Coast.
“Emma, I just wanted to stop by and apologize. This was very disrespectful and a terrible thing to do. I'm really sorry. It should have never happened.”
I give her a slight nod. As a woman who writes for a living, it is not lost on me that her veiled apology is not really an apology at all. There is a detachment, not just in her tone but also in her choice of words.
“I promise you that this will never happen again. From now on, our relationship will be strictly professional,” Jen adds.
“I don't really care,” I say quietly but sternly. “You can do whatever you want because I'm not going to be with someone who treats me like this.”
Jen nods and looks at me with sympathy but also admiration.
I've had enough of this. I take a deep breath and walk toward the door, but when Jen reaches out and touches me with her manicured fingers, my whole body shudders.