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“You too, darling,” he says, and the line goes dead.
I replace the receiver back on the telephone on auto pilot. I sit staring at the telephone for a moment, looking at it as though it’s somehow the telephone’s fault that I have just possibly had my suspicions confirmed.
I hate to think badly of Tyler, and I so badly want to trust him, but the evidence is piling up now and it’s getting harder and harder to ignore it and keep moving along on some sort of blind faith in Tyler.
When I think about it, three people have told me Tyler is a cheat or a player, both of which to me mean similar things. One of those people may or may not have had an agenda being that she was Chloe’s friend. The other two though, if anything, they would be on Tyler’s side surely, especially Angela. When a guy’s sister tells you he’s cheated on his ex-wife, you believe her.
So ok, he has a past. A not very nice past, but it has been and gone and it doesn’t mean he will do the same thing to me. Maybe he learned from cheating on Chloe or maybe he only did it because they were over each other anyway.
Or maybe he is a serial cheater, and I’m fooling myself thinking I’m somehow special to him and he won’t do the exact same thing to me. Isn’t that how most cheaters get away with it? Because every woman that gets with him thinks she can somehow be the one to change him.
I sigh. I just don’t know anymore. One thing I do know for sure is that whether Tyler is cheating on me or not, he lied to me. If it had just been the client’s name, I could have given him the benefit of the doubt and thought he got two clients mixed up with each other. But he even told me what was meant to have happened and there’s no way he would get that story wrong, and after such a massive fuck up, he wouldn’t have gotten the wrong client’s name either.
I sit and think. What could he have been doing that made him feel like he needed to lie to me if he isn’t cheating on me? I come up with a blank. I can’t think of a single thing that makes sense. If he was doing something personal that he didn’t want to go into detail about, he could have just said that.
The more I think about it, the more agitated and yes, angry, I’m getting. It most definitely looks like Tyler has been taking me for a ride. I want to confront him, to scream and shout and demand that he tell me the truth. But I won’t. At least not yet. Because everything I have is either an assumption or something circumstantial or someone else’s word and until I have real, hard proof that something is going on, it will be all too easy for Tyler to lie his way out of this and make me look paranoid. And that will give him the head’s up that I’m onto him and he will be even more careful about covering his tracks.
I’m not quite sure whether this is me deciding to give Tyler the benefit of the doubt until I’m sure one way or the other about what he’s up to, or whether I’m just riding this thing out now until I get some concrete evidence of his wrong doings, but either way, I feel a bit better for having a plan, no matter how simple the plan may be. And the plan is simple – watch and wait – because if Tyler is cheating on me, at some point, he will make a mistake and I will catch him red handed so to speak.
And simple or not, any plan is better than just sitting debating the matter in my head until I want to scream in frustration because all I have are questions, questions and more questions and no satisfactory answers to them.
14
SUMMER
It’s been a week since the barbecue and almost a week since I called Malcolm Croft. I’m no further forward in learning why Tyler lied to me about where he went during the barbecue, but it doesn’t feel as though he’s cheating on me. I know it could well just be wishful thinking on my part because I obviously don’t want him to be cheating on me, but it feels like more than that.
He's been so attentive to me these last few days and we’ve had a lot – and I mean a lot – of red-hot sex. Neither of those feel like things that would be happening if Tyler had someone else on the side besides me. And besides, he’s hardly been out of my sight all week. As far as I know, he hasn’t had any on site meetings this week, and every lunch time, we’ve eaten together. We’ve also left the office together and ended up at either his place or my place. There surely just hasn’t been time for him to be cheating on me.
Maybe he was seeing someone else before we got serious, and he went to tell her they were done last week. Maybe he really went to a client’s property, and he did just get mixed up. Maybe I got mixed up. Maybe the client lied. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Here I go again with all of the questions and none of the answers, and actually, feeling like Tyler isn’t cheating on me makes the matter even more convoluted and all of the secrecy makes even less sense.
Still though, I know that I have to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least for now, because the more I think about it, the more sure I am that this is just me being paranoid.
“Last one,” Tyler says, waving The Deathly Hallows Part Two DVD case at me. “Are you ready to have your mind blown?”
I laugh and nod my head. I have to admit I have really enjoyed these movies. I kind of thought that perhaps I was too old to appreciate them properly before I started watching them.
Tyler gets up and puts the DVD on and then he comes and sits back down beside me on my couch, and we snuggle up and start watching the movie. Now I have managed to push my misgivings to one side, I’m much happier and I have to say there are far worse ways to spend a Saturday morning than cuddled up with Tyler watching a fun movie. I got so into our Harry Potter movie marathon that Tyler actually brought the DVDs here, so we didn’t have to stop watching them when we decided to spend last night at my place.
Just over two hours later, I lift my head up off Tyler’s shoulder as the movie ends.
“Wow,” I say. “I have to admit those were better than I thought they were going to be. Once the first one is out of the way, and I suppose the second one to some extent, they really are amazing.”
Tyler picks up the remote control and turns the DVD player and the TV off. He puts it back down on the coffee table in front of the couch and then he smiles at me.
“But which is better? The books or the movies?” he says.
“Call me old fashioned, but the books. I loved the movies, but the books are always better than the movies,” I say.
“And that is the right answer,” Tyler says with a soft laugh.
“Oh cool,” I say with a grin. “So, what do I win?”
“This,” Tyler says, and he leans forward and kisses me softly on the lips.
I kiss him back and wrap my arms around his shoulders. He pushes his hands beneath my hoody and runs them over the bare skin of my back and then they come around to the front of my body and knead my breasts.
Our kiss turns from a soft and gentle kiss to a hungry, passionate kiss as Tyler’s tongue darts into my mouth. I take my arms away from his shoulders and undo his jeans and push one hand into his boxer shorts. I grab his cock in my fist and begin to pump my hand up and down. Tyler moans into my mouth and his kneading of my breasts becomes more frantic.
