please come out,” he pleaded with me from the other side of the door.
He looked as nervous as I was when I finally opened the bathroom door and asked the question I didn’t want to know the answer to.
“When did this start?” I choked out, trying to not cry again.
He hesitated for a moment as tears filled his eyes. “Kate, you’re my best friend, a great mom and a fantastic wife. I love you more than anything in this world,” he rambled.
“Just answer me!” I cut him off.
Letting out a heavy sigh of defeat, he finally began. “I ran into her in October at the last home football game. She was ahead of me in line at the concession stand, and when she said ‘Hi’ to me, I noticed she looked really bad. I asked if she was sick or something and that’s when she told me how her husband had just left her for another woman. I felt bad and told her to email or call me if she needed someone to talk to. I gave her my business card, but didn’t think much about it after that. The next week was when she contacted me for the first time. Kate - I swear to God we talked only by email at first, and I thought nothing more of her than a friend.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed and was quiet for a few minutes, trying to absorb everything he had just told me. As much as I didn’t want to ask my next question, I knew this was something I needed to know. “When did you “almost” sleep with her?” I point-blank asked him.
His face instantly turned white as a ghost, and he started stuttering around.
“Aaron,” I snapped again.
“The night before Thanksgiving,” he whispered, looking down at the ground.
My memory was racing to remember that day. Then all of a sudden everything clicked. “Are you kidding me? Wasn’t that when the girls spent the night at Kristie’s house while you were at the Creekside and I stayed home all by myself?”
Creekside was a local bar in our town that we had hung out at from the time we were old enough to drink up until we had kids.
For a second he wasn’t so apologetic and almost seemed irritated with me. “Whoa, wait a minute here. Don’t go blaming me for you being home all by yourself. That was your own fault. Remember how I planned a nice romantic evening at home for just the two of us. You were fine all through dinner until I started kissing your neck. That is when you got irritated and accused me of planning the whole thing just so you would have sex with me.”
“So I turned you down for sex and that gives you the right to run uptown and try to get it from your ex-girlfriend?” I shot back at him.
I could tell my words angered him, but he did not yell back. “No, that’s not what happened and you know it. Remember how after dinner we sat in silence watching TV. I asked if you wanted to go out for some drinks. You got mad about that too and told me to go by myself.”
Remembering the fight and knowing that I was the one who started it, I calmed my tone.
“I’m sorry I was grumpy that night, but that doesn’t give you the right to leave me to go meet up with her.”
“I never had any intention of meeting up with her. I was sitting at the bar in Creekside with our friends when she came in with a group of girls. As soon as she saw me, she walked over to us. She was drunk, and I could tell she was coming onto me, so I left to go home to you. But when I crawled into bed next to you and kissed your neck, you sighed in disgust, shoved my hand off your thigh and scooted as far away from me as you could get. I was hurt by your constant rejection, so I grabbed my pillow and went downstairs to sleep on the couch. But the longer I lay there, the angrier I got, so I went back to Creekside.” He knelt beside me and grabbed both of my hands. “I swear I didn’t go there because of her. I just wanted to drink a few beers to help calm myself. But she was still there and wouldn’t leave me alone and by the end of the night, I was drunk too. That’s the only reason I went back to her house.”
Jerking my hands away from him, I sat there feeling like I could vomit at any time. “Stop! Please stop!”
“No, Kate, I can’t. I have been lying to you for far too long, and I can’t do it anymore. You deserve to know the truth.”
I don’t know if I can handle the truth, I thought.
“We went back to her house. It got pretty heated, but I swear I stopped it before it went that far. I left her house right after that. I was so disgusted with myself that I cut off all ties with her. At first, she wouldn’t take no for an answer and called nonstop until finally I screamed at her to leave me alone. After that, all I did was concentrate completely on you and me, but things never got any better there.”
“What do you mean things never got better? I wasn’t aware that our relationship was so bad and that we were working on it.”
“Are you serious? Kate, it has been nine months since we last had sex.”
“What in the heck does our sex life have to do with this?”
“Kate, it has everything to do with it. I take full responsibility for my lying and going to her house, but how can you sit there and act like there is nothing wrong with our sex life? We have only had sex maybe two times a year since Mia was born, and before that, we only did it when you wanted to get pregnant.”
By the way he was pacing back and forth, it was obvious he was getting angry again. He then stopped in front of me with the most hurt look in his eyes. “You make me feel like I make your skin crawl every time I touch you. It’s almost like you are disgusted to even be with me intimately. Do you have any idea how that makes me feel?”
“I’m sorry. I had no idea I made you feel this way. Why didn’t you tell me any of this before going out and having an affair?”
“How can you even ask me that? This is the one and only thing we have ever fought about, over and over again, and it has been going on for years.”
“Aaron, you’re my best friend, and I love you more than anything in this world. I’m sorry we don’t have the best sex life. I’ll just try harder at wanting to do it with you more often.”
He looked like he had been slapped across the face. “You’ll just try harder? God, Kate, this is exactly what I’m talking about. Do you know how that makes me feel, knowing you have to “try” to want to be with me?”
He turned his back to me as he stared out the big picture window that faced the street. There was an uneasy silence before he finally faced me again. A few minutes ago, he appeared to be very sorry for what he had done, but now he looked like he had just plain had it with me.
“You have no idea how much I love you, but I can’t do this anymore. I can’t continue to be with someone who has to “try” to be with me.”
I stared back at him completely stunned. Somehow, the tables seemed to have turned.
“Aaron—what are you trying to say?” I asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.
“Kate, I know you love me, but I want you to be in love with me. I want you to love me the way you used to. But you’ve changed Kate, you’ve changed.”
I cut him off. “What do you mean I’ve changed?”
“You
