February Sucks Next Chapter
This story is a follow up to George Anderson's "February Sucks." I felt the story was very well-written, impactful and thought provoking. However, some aspects didn't sit well with me so I decided to write a follow up to GA's story. I tried to stay true to the characters GA laid out as much as possible.
A quick synopsis of the story. Jim and Linda have had a very rough February because of the cold winter and being stuck indoors. At the end of the month they go out to a club with their four best friend couples to celebrate the end of the brutal month. At the club, the stud, local NFL player, Marc, walks over to their table and asks Linda to dance. During the slow dance Marc lets Linda know that he would like to spend the night with her. Linda leaves Jim at the club with the four couple friends and sneaks out to go off with Marc. The next afternoon she comes home, realizing she has hurt Jim, but doesn't understand the level of his devastation of her actions the previous night.
Linda tells him that the sex she had with Marc was the best of her life, but that she was happy to be back home to her husband and children. Jim believed that he had a great ten-year marriage to Linda prior to her actions that night; however, he tells us if it wasn't for his two young children, he was fairly certain that he would divorce her. For the sake of the children he wanted to find a way to make things work with Linda. Then Jim has his own temptation at the next outing with the four couple friends.
BlackRandy1958 edited this story, and I'm very thankful to her. She made the story significantly more readable. HOWEVER (wink), I think I will be seeing red marks all over everything I read for weeks. Yes, there were that many grammar errors.
While I provided a synopsis of the original, I believe reading it in full is very worthwhile. In my opinion it is a great story, and deserves a much higher score. This writing is because I had a problem with a certain aspect of it.
I also want to thank Gerald Anderson for allowing me to write a sequel to his story.
*
It was exactly seven weeks since that fateful, or should I say faithless, night when my world fell apart. For the sake of my children I had been trying to find a way to make my marriage with Linda work, but I still didn't see how that's going to be possible.
Two weeks after the event Linda started seeing a therapist to try to figure out how she could do what she did. I felt it was probably more the fact that she wanted advice on how to save her marriage. For my part I had been spending a great deal of time with L.W. He was a family friend from my Granddad's time. He'd mostly retired from law practice, but was still sharp as a tack, wise as Sophocles, and tough as nails when it came to anything our family needed. I had gone to him for advice on the legal ramifications of a divorce, so I had told him the whole sorry story of what Linda had done to me. Since he knew the whole sorry tale, I continued to see him once or twice a week to discuss my thoughts with him, and to try to find a path through the hell in which I found myself. I guess Linda had her own therapist, and I had mine. The only difference being that mine wasn't charging me.
Three weeks earlier I started going to the counseling sessions with Linda. In both the discussions with the counselor and my talks with L.W. I could see the potential that maybe one day I can get my head wrapped around that this may have been an anomaly; that Linda behaved completely out of character; that she was truly sorry and regretful. I could even maybe possibly wrap my head around her losing perspective for that one night, as she tried to explain to me in her letter.
The ghost that I felt would always be there with me and in our marriage was the level of disrespect and uncaring she showed me, and that I would always feel like a victim; as if she had something over me or gotten away with something that I could never do anything about. Like I said, an impotent victim having to suck it up, and accept his lot in life.
Realistically, I know that most people essentially settle for their mates. I mean, when I first met Linda, if I had the chance to date and marry Kate Upton, let's not kid ourselves on who I would have picked to date. Linda is an attractive woman, but more than that she had a sense of style and knew how to make herself particularly attractive, and that was essentially the reason that Marc even noticed her that night. She also had to know that Marc just wanted her for that one evening. She picked that one evening with him over the faithful loving and caring man of the ten years we've been married, over the next forty or so years we could have together, over having a harmonious and loving home and father to her children. It's one thing to have lost to Marc on our first date, but to lose to him with everything I had on my side of the ledger? That was devastating! If my best over the last ten years was not good enough to keep her from going with Marc for just one evening, then what did I have to offer to her? To any woman!?
Thinking of Kate Upton, I couldn't help to think of what Dee and Jayne had said what I would have done if I had the opportunity to be with a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. I have to admit that if I had the opportunity of being with Kate Upton for one evening, I would be extremely tempted. However, I could potentially MAYBE POSSIBLY see cheating on Linda if Kate Upton came onto me when I was out of town, and I KNEW with almost certainty that Linda would never find out and be hurt by it.
That was the thing that was bothering me most. Linda turned her back on me that night and didn't care how much it would hurt me. That night was the most devastating of my whole life, and the one person who was supposed to be my life partner, love me and care about my well-being the most could have very easily alleviated all that pain. To do that she wouldn't have had to even work hard at it. She just had to be present. Instead of doing that, she had been the cause of that devastation. When the chips were down and I needed her the most she turned her back to me and went to another man. How the hell was I going to be able to get over that?
Our marriage counselor had been giving Linda and me different exercises that were supposed to help us get "passed this." The one she had set for us for that week was to go back to the "scene of the crime" essentially. No, not go back to the same club necessarily, but to go out again with the four couples we were out with that evening. Wednesday, I had met up with L.W. and discussed how I felt that this could only end up being a disaster. I wasn't ready to see our "friends" again. I wasn't sure that I was ever going to be ready for that. L.W. took a few minutes and went into deep thought, and told me he didn't think it was a great idea, either, but that I had committed to giving my best effort to try to keep my family together. That I should go through the steps that the marriage counselor laid out. That way if things didn't work out, I could at least say I gave it my best shot. He also chuckled that there was always the chance that the marriage counselor knew what she was doing.
There we were another Friday, this time in April, exactly seven weeks since that fateful evening. Linda and I walked hand in hand into Michael's, a local restaurant that offered dancing over the weekends. Both Linda and I were dressed up, and as usual for these outings, she knew how to dress to make the best of her attractiveness. That was the crux of this whole thing. Yes, I was primarily trying to stay with Linda for the sake of the kids, but I couldn't help to think to myself that I still loved this woman deeply, and that I was still very much attracted to her.
All of our friends were already there and they were in the midst of an animated conversation. Seeing us, Dave nodded in our direction and immediately everyone's attention turned towards us and the conversation immediately died down. They all looked uneasy and uncomfortable. That matched my own feelings. I hesitated and stopped about seven feet from the table. Every cell in my body wanted to turn around and just leave. I turned to Linda to tell her that I was leaving. But that's the thing about a ten-year marriage. Linda immediately knew what I was thinking. She squeezed my hand, looked at me lovingly, but with fear on her face, and quietly whispered to me, "please." I squeezed her hand back, nodded okay, turned to the group and tried to plaster a smile on my face.
They say "fake it till you make it," and that's what I did. I think we all did that at the start of the evening, and with the help of some liquor, soon enough, we were all joking around and hanging out, even though there was that elephant sitting in the middle of the table that everyone was very much aware of, but trying to avoid at all cost.
The first time someone came over to ask Linda to dance the whole table went silent, and the uneasiness came back. Linda's whole body was frozen and she had a petrified looked on her face. She opened her mouth to try to say something to him, but she couldn't get a word out. The best she could do was shake her head from side to side to indicate no. The man pulled his hand back and the smile on his face turned to a bewildered look. It's one thing to be turned down for a dance. It's quite another for a woman to react to him as if he was an axe murderer.
Linda looked at me with a guilty look on her face, and apologized. That's the thing about hurting someone you love so deeply; you start walking on egg shells and you're afraid of offending them for things you had no business feeling badly about. But that trust was gone, and things were no longer rational or logical. We were both really walking on egg shells around one another. That ease of relationship, that confidence that you don't have to explain yourself and that your life partner knows with certainty that you're coming from a place of love, caring and trustworthiness was gone. The question was if it would ever come back.
"Jim, I'm so sorry. I swear I wasn't flirting and I didn't look in his direction once. I didn't want him to..."
I held her hand, smiled at her, "Linda it's all good. I know you didn't. It happens. You did nothing wrong."
She smiled a little, but looked deeply into my eyes, her eyes flicking back and forth between focusing on each one of my eyes to see if I meant what I said. I didn't completely blame her. Her reaction did not come out of nowhere. There had been many fights and recriminations on my part towards her over the last several weeks. That's the other part of betrayal taking place in a marriage. You start questioning times she was late in the past, times she had gone out with friends, times that she got up to dance with other men, and I had thrown all those things at her face over the last seven weeks. As I said, logic, trust, and rational thinking go out the window when everything you had come to believe, that you can trust this ONE other person in the world with your life, with your well-being, you find out is not as true as you had once taken for granted that it had been.