I woke up the following morning. Daniel slept next to me. I awoke with sore and stiff muscles from the tiring day with Geoffrey. The guilt had been washed away after Daniel's affair with Rachel was exposed. It is as if the veil of blackness was gone from my heart and only an ethereal feeling of freedom lingers. I knew that I could not blame him then. I had to think, plan what I was going to do. The walls of our marriage had collapsed, and I had to decide if I wanted to rebuild them or begin on a new foundation. Revenge entered my head, exposing Rachel's husband, Ruan. But then that would expose my secret too. Let's lying dogs lie, I said to myself. Let him remain in his ignorant bliss for now.
I had done it too, I had no right to criticize. But, he proceeded and slept with Rachel in my bed. The house was the same way I had left it, the warm glow of dawn seeping through the windows, projecting shadows on the floor. Andrea phoned later, hours later, effervescent in tone, none the wiser about the tempest raging in me. "How was the masquerade?" she asked. "It was a shock," She flashed, suspecting something was wrong but so self-absorbed as not to notice the signs. "I have to go, I'll call you later."
The weekend dragged and concluded in a weight of suffocating despair. I lived, I smiled where I was supposed to, I laughed where I was supposed to, but there was this broken piece of glass inside me, one wrong step and I'd break into pieces. Daniel and I danced with each other, tango-ing through deceptions, our gazes skirting the truth between us like a minefield. He had come back to work on Monday and had kissed me on the cheek but not touched me at all. The irony was not lost on me. He had found his pleasure outside of me, and I had found mine too, but now we were trapped in a mood of silence with each other, neither of us giving in.
Andrea called again on Monday afternoon, I picked up the phone with a sigh, no flash of humour in my tone. "What's wrong, Hettie?" she asked, a bit more anxious than accusatory. "You've been odd since the party."I took a breath, the crushing pressure of unsaid words squeezing around my chest. "I learned something, something I didn't seek out," I sneered, choosing each word like they were tender seeds that might develop into a garden of truth or a weed of deceit. "When I came home on Friday evening, Daniel was screwing our next-door neighbor Rachel." Andrea let out a sound, and the line was quiet for a second. "Are you sure?" she finally gasped. "Yes," I said, my temper rising like a stormy sea.
It had been Andrea who was the catalyst, who had led us into this quest, but even she was surprised at this development. "What are you going to do?" she asked, her tone flavored with confusion. "I don't know," I replied, staring at the wall, the pattern in the wallpaper blurring as I considered my choices. "But I know I can't act like it never happened. I can't just continue on like nothing had happened." Her silence was louder than anything she might have spoken. Both of us knew, and she knew, that the game had changed. We had gone further down the dark path than we could have ever imagined, and now I was at a crossroads, my marriage in jeopardy.
"Geoffrey called me." Andrea's voice was so much a contrast to the contemplative quiet that had occupied my afternoon. "He's in heaven. He says he had the best time with you." I swallowed, his name hitting me back in a flash of remembrance to the party and then the next day at his house. The feeling of his hands on my skin, the taste of his tongue, the way he looked at me like I was the only woman in the world. It was a bag of half-and-half emotions, half of them wanting so desperately to be ashamed that I had done what I had done, and the other half of them this weird feeling of freedom. "What did he say to you?" "That it was a wild ride." She laughed again, her laughter ringing at the far end of the phone like a growl. "You know the way he gets when he's like that. He demands more, Hettie." "To be honest, me too." I'd spoken, before I could unsay the words.
The line fell silent again, and I worried she'd hung up. "So what's it going to be?" she finally said her voice now stern. "I don't know," I told her, the burden of the question firmly on my shoulders. "But I do know one thing for certain, I can never turn back to how it was before." Andrea and I had an odd relationship. We were best friends, but both of us were enabling each other's worst behaviors. We had been drawn to each other like moths to a flame, sharing secrets too hot to be kept. At least Martin, her husband, knew about her escapades and even participated. Daniel and Rachel had done something that neither of us could ever imagine being done.
Rachel's husband, Ruan, was a giant of a man, with a laugh that could thunder and a heart as big as his biceps. He had no clue his wife was having an affair, and I couldn't help but feel sorry for him. Rachel was a petite woman, with reddish-brown hair that flowed in loose waves down around her dainty face. She was always the type to fade into the background, disappearing into the crowd of the block party with a blush on her cheek. But I was seeing her differently now. She had claws, and she'd sunk them deep into Daniel. Ruan is a mainline pilot and gone from the house for periods of weeks at a time, and I think this made Rachel feel shut out. The irony that it was because I was alone with her husband that I had been in the arms of a married man was not lost on me.
My affair with Geoffrey did not cool and we screwed like animals in rut, our trysts happening more and more frequently and less and less privately. We did not care who knew about it. I longed for the fierce passion that he could elicit from me, far from the pallid affair that I had had with Daniel. The more I could consider Daniel and Rachel, the less guilty I would feel for my own sins. Truth was, I had come to adore the power I held over Geoffrey, the manner in which he looked at me as though I was the sun and he a planet circling around me.
Andrea liked the freedom as well. She and Martin were swingers, and she believed my setup was the solution for taking our foursome to the next level. But while I reveled in the excitement of it all, I couldn't envision myself in the swing lifestyle. Oh, Hettie," she teased one evening over a bottle of wine. "You're halfway there already. Why not just go for it and live a little?" "But it's different," I protested, swirling the rich red wine in my glass. "You and Martin are a couple." You know and you agree." I couldn't envision myself as a. a. single swinger. What is a single lady swinger called? what?
" Her eyes sparkled with mirth.
