The Red Signal (Grace Livingston Hill Book) (27 page)

Caught Cheating, Recovering From Him

“Did you think about him when we had sex?” my husband asks me.

It doesn’t dawn on me at that point that it’s the same question my ex-husband had asked me about Trevor way back in 1994, when I met the man who would become my husband after I divorced the first one.

I am standing near the front of my closet in our bedroom, backing into it in fact, farther away from his hurt-filled query and peering countenance. Trevor is sitting on our bed, right on the edge, looking up wearily for my response.

Shaking my head from side to side as I busy myself with ripping off my jeans, I don’t yet let any words leak from my mouth. It would sound nice to deny his question – to look like the good and perfect Christian wife that so many women at my church pretend to be – but I cannot do it. I must break out of the pack of pretenders. 

Plus, I know God is watching me, and I fear lying before Him more than lying to my husband.

“Don’t ask me that,” I say, continuing to shake my head.

“That means you did,” Trevor says, looking down sadly. “How could you, Seine?”

For a split second I let the guilt wash over me. Here I am again, swimming around in the aftermath of another emotional affair, feeling like I’m taking all the guilt for getting too close to another Christian man who has played around in the absence of Trevor, who still doesn’t attend church with me after all these years.

Why must I take pressure from people for admitting how I feel while they lay low with their sneaky secrets?

Wait a minute!

Why am I getting dressed-down by this wannabe Boy Scout who had admitted to going to one bachelor’s party that had a naked woman right there in front of the guys, and going to a strip club when he was in New Orleans, all after we were married?

I’m not taking this crap lying down. Especially since Desmond and I never even got to the “good part” – thank God – and there was never any kissing or sex between us. Why do I feel like I take more heat than folks who actually went out and slept with someone other than their spouse? Perhaps that’s just my paranoia. After all, I can feel how much the Lord is holding this marriage together right now.

“Don’t sit there and pretend like you’re a Boy Scout and that you’ve never had a bad thought!” I lob back at Trevor.

That gets him. He acquiesces.

“I know,” he says.

After all, it was out of his own mouth that I felt like I pulled teeth the last time we got into it over a guy. That was when I confessed to falling for Kenny at work in 2004, back when I rejoined the company for an 8-month period.

In the wake of that confession, Trevor and I ended up having some good talks, and during one of them he finally admitted to imagining what a woman or two might look like without any clothes on.

Wouldn’t it be sexier to think of them in a bikini?

That was my odd random reasoning upon listening to my husband’s thoughts, but then again, I’m not a man – so I don’t think like one. But that was back in 2004, and we’ve been through a lot since that point in our marriage and lives.

We had only been married eight years back then, coasting along, before anything too serious rocked our marital fellowship. That is, anything other than the wedge I felt had been driven between us when I decided to seriously turn my life over to Christ in 2000 and join a large church – and Trevor decided not to attend with me most weeks.

When Kenny and I re-clicked at work, talking about all sorts of Christian situations – even trying to get an Indian developer saved by giving him “The Purpose Drive Life” and another believer’s book for free, it was a good feeling.

Our “friendship” started getting a little uncomfortably close, however, and in the end, I was grateful when that contract assignment ended.

Today, on this day in November of 2011, I’m once again in the aftermath of an emotional connection that’s been broken suddenly, away from a man that I never should have been that close to in the first place.

§ § § § § § §

Desmond was in my life for 14 months, ever since the day I was first introduced to him as the leader of our technology team at church. He was only 29 then, a good 12 years younger than my 41 years – but with his ability to hang around and relate to older people, coupled with my blessed great genes of looking younger, we collided on a chemical level.

Yeah, it’s true that a younger woman – other than his jealous wife – was in the running for his attention (along with any other cute women at church that caught his eye), but once my main competition moved away, the interests that Desmond and I shared in entrepreneurial things and Internet ventures grew off the chain.

Once again, I found myself spending my wedding anniversary away from my husband. Heck, I figured since Trevor and I hadn’t planned anything special to celebrate anyway – nor had we arranged for a babysitter – it was simply easier to let the winds of opposition draw us apart, and me into the presence of another man.

It seemed innocent enough, and it was at first. The night that Trevor and I had been married 13 years, I was invited to a meeting held in the pastor’s office, with about 10 key people in attendance.

“Oh, Seine’s here,” our pastor noted as I walked into the space.

I hesitated. “Is it okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, come on in,” he said.

I took a seat in the corner at the oddly shaped table with four strange little uncomfortable black chairs that fit beneath each side like a puzzle piece. There I was, falling back, feeling the effects of being drawn into the inner sanctum of so-called important people at church.

The fading light shone through the spacious windows on my left, lighting up Desmond in his wearied but still energetic after-work state.

He fought for me that night, said I was instrumental in bonding two church locations together – and when the pastor tried to ask me about taking a job in the office, Desmond stood right there among everyone and spoke about how much he needed me to remain his administrative assistant instead.

The talk got so heated and was so oddly open, I put my hands to my mouth in a gleeful, bashful, embarrassed shame. A deacon offered Desmond a Kleenex from a rectangular box of tissue thrust in front of his face, saying that he was sweating.

No one perhaps knew how close Desmond and I had grown at that point, more than a year after we’d met. Maybe we didn’t even know it ourselves, though the calls from him had become more frequent – and I smiled to myself when I’d check my cell phone and see a message that began with “Good morning, Seine!” from him.

I especially loved it when the text message was several hours old, coming in around 9:30 a.m. or so, showing that I was one of the first things on his mind. I liked it when I wasn’t so desperate as to have already checked my texts too early in the morning, but had the wherewithal and had practiced enough self-control to not see the message for hours.

Inevitably, I’d be texting him right back, or better yet, hearing his sultry and joyful and playful voice in my left ear as he sat in his car at lunchtime or walked through the hallway at work on the way out to the parking lot, causing an echoing sound that sometimes forced me to ask him, “Where are you?”

It got so deep that when Desmond finagled to bring me to the new church location where he worked – and I schemed to stay there another month – we got even more comfortable spending those dark days in the control room, many times just the two of us, talking about any number of things.

Sure, there were the chats about Christian books like “His Needs, Her Needs,” and lots of good Scripture banter – but it all seemed to serve as a precursor to what we both knew was on the way. Or would’ve been on the way, if God hadn’t have stopped it with a quickness.

The way we giggled over inane compliments or double-entendres reminded me of the same thing Trevor and I used to do when we met at our jobs in Chicago back in 1994 and the attraction was super-heated. When Trevor showed me how to open a paperclip and stick one end of the wire into a shallow well of black ink ensconced within a cartridge for the printer, we chuckled like adolescents.

It amazed me that I was feeling those feelings again with Desmond – a man who I just couldn’t picture as my husband, no matter how attracted we became to each other. First of all, it wasn’t just the age difference, but also the difference in height. I would look even taller than comedian Kevin Hart’s girlfriend looming over him, leaning over and sliding my legs to the side to try and make up for what he lacked in height.

Nevertheless, when Desmond asked me if I’d seen “There’s Something About Mary” and brought up the masturbation scene, it felt completely normal to have that conversation. We were growing closer on a more personal level, not like those staid and stuffy relationships with some church people who pretend they’ve never even uttered a curse word.

Somehow Desmond was likening the Ben Stiller’s movie plight to my relationship with my husband, when the character was advised to please himself – (something I don’t recommend, by the way) – before he went on a date so that he wouldn’t appear desperate.

“You need that,” Desmond kept stressing. “You need that connection with your husband.”

“Don’t come in here thirsty,” I said, throwing out a word that I noticed younger people said. I was always trying to do that in his presence, to show him that I could relate – and not only pull slang from the 1970s, but from the twenty-tens as well.

He laughed along with me, and said, “Right!”

But what was he getting at? Had his wife tried to convince him at that point that I was after him or something? Heck, she only knew half the story. I know now that he was the type who didn’t tell the whole truth, so help him God – yet I didn’t know it then.

In my heart of hearts, I think it was all a set-up. Perhaps it was my cue to start complaining about a lack of sex with my Trevor or something – and the inroads for Desmond to tell me how much I deserve to be connected.

I really don’t know what was truth and wasn’t.

“One get the man, one get the dance,” Christian rapper Lecrae would later rhyme, talking about a married man who put his arm around his wife as they walked with their child in the park. When the woman he’d been sleeping with showed up, he didn’t even look her in the eye – not once ounce of admission or acknowledgement.

Yes, I ended up getting that stern, side-faced no-look that said everything from Desmond in time, the height of hypocrisy from a man whom I’d roll around on my marital bed talking to on the phone, falling for his sweet talk of why his wife should understand him making room for another woman in his heart.

He told me I was the closest person to him on the team. At first I wanted Desmond to say I was the closest person at church to him, but we both knew that would’ve meant I was closer to him than his wife – and that wasn’t true.

“I really do love you,” I said that day, and I should’ve known I was in trouble, sitting on the floor of my bedroom, confessing that kind of thing when I shouldn’t have.

I heard Desmond smiling on the other end, glad that he’d finally drawn me into some kind of secret trap – a net of broken hearts and empty promises and bad dreams that he’d been collecting since the day he saw evil appear right in his own front yard as a little boy.

Yes, I was getting a little bit of the dance – but thank Jesus I didn’t get the man. I got a much better one.

§ § § § § § §

The proverbial stuff started hitting the famous fan when Desmond and I grew closer and closer, leaving my best friend Sherrie in the dust. Healthy and super light-skinned, Sherrie has a penchant for baking up the best delectable cupcakes and wedding desserts and the most amazing caramel nut brownies that could rival any Starbucks version you’ve ever tasted.

It was me that tried to encourage her to step out from under the wings of her hubby and begin selling those goodies around town – even shipping a few packages all around the country – and start making a tidy little profit from her business.

I’ve known Sherrie plenty longer than I knew Desmond. I met her way back around 2005, and though our friendship took time to develop, eventually it became seriously tight – especially after we joined the New Light Church together.

Sherrie even became a member of the technology team, and as new folks came and went, she and Desmond and I became a fast trio of friends. It was safe to have the three of us lingering in the parking lot on Wednesday nights or Sunday afternoons – and even during those other days when ministry meetings took up our time.

She was kind of like the chaperone I dragged to lunch with the Italian guy Kenny and me at my old job on my last day of work. That way, we could spend time together as friends without it looking suspicious.

However, as the flesh wants what it wants, and tries to rise up to defeat us before God’s Spirit saves us, Desmond and I soon enough left Sherrie in the dust of the old location and grew closer to each other in our own, more private space of the new location.

There were times that we’d talk, just the two of us, for hours during service and afterward in the parking lot. Once we joked about leaving a teenage ministry worker in my minivan, entertaining Desmond’s young son, perhaps, and playing games on her phone while we talked for an hour and twenty minutes.

“I felt sorry for her, but…” Desmond told me afterward, and we once again dissolved into laughs. The heart wants what the heart wants – and I was enthralled that we could spend the time it takes to almost watch an entire movie, gushing in one another’s face, loving and admiring each other’s brains (and other body parts) and getting so lost in how fast time can move.

All right, back to the stuff hitting the fan. (Expect rabbit trails into Desmond-land here and there.)

Sherrie was already carrying anger and jealousy, is my personal opinion, over Desmond sweeping me away to another church location and us fawning over our new “love” for one another. 

I tried to talk to her about it one day in her car, after I’d left the new location and went back to the old one, seeing as though their later service was later than the service I’d left.