Monday, January 23rd 2006: Start affair with Jim. 5:32 PM.

    Wait, no. That’s not how it happened. This isn’t the sort of thing you plan. Though she did say to her reflection in the bathroom mirror one morning not long before then, “I’m thinking about having an affair with Jim.” Just to try it out, as if she might ever say it to someone out loud, her mother, her sister, Phyllis drunk at some office event. She’d shrugged when she said it like it was no big deal, just something to do.

    She’d been thinking about being reckless, doing something hugely irrevocable, making a massive mistake that she couldn’t undo. She’d also said to the same reflection (once the steam from the shower had been wiped away with her palm), “I want to fuck up completely.” Again, just trying the words out on her tongue. She thought the language wasn’t really her, but it felt good when she said it and she smiled at herself after.

    It wasn’t so much that she was bored, just that she felt suddenly claustrophobic in her own life. The walls of the apartment she shared with Roy were moving in a few inches every day. The wedding date started to feel more like a deadline than a day of celebration. Wedding prep was more like a chore, something she was obligated to do. She found herself one night picking table settings with her eyes closed, whichever one her finger landed on was the one they’d use.

    Still, this wasn’t something she planned. Or she at least never expected she would ever actually go through with it. She mostly just watched his shoulders and wrists and didn’t bother tying to keep herself from fantasizing. She mostly just stopped feeling guilty for the flirting and the glances and the lingering touches as she walked past him on her way to the bathroom. It was liberating enough just to let herself not care if anyone noticed or, more importantly, if he noticed.
    
    A part of her was dying to have Roy accuse her of something. She wouldn’t deny it. She said to the mirror which was now a stand in for her fiancé, “Jim and I, we’ve been sleeping together for a while now.” She imagined him throwing things around their apartment, his face red with anger. She would sit there quietly on the couch until he’d gotten it all out of his system and then he’d leave.

    Really, she was looking for a way out, but she knew she could never see Jim as just some exit sign so she decided he would have as little actual involvement as possible. What she had planned was just some sort of imaginary affair that he wouldn’t even have to know about. To her steamed over reflection she said, “So I was wondering if I could come over to your place after work. Just hang out for a while,” and she pulled her bottom lip between her teeth in that way she knew he liked, she saw the way his eyes darted to her mouth whenever she did it. And he would say yes.

    For two weeks, this was going on in her head, this pretend affair. Tuesdays and Thursdays were the days she imagined she would find herself half naked in Jim’s lap on his couch while Roy was playing poker with the guys or having a beer with his brother. It would be frantic and rushed and she’d get home by 9 at the latest, hair slightly out of place and one of her socks still under his coffee table. In reality, she was at home, folding laundry or watching TV. She would go to the bathroom just before Roy was supposed to be home and take her hair from her barrette, redoing it with a few misplaced chunks. It was subtle enough that she didn’t think he would ever actually notice, but daring enough that she felt emboldened.

    And obviously it wasn’t something she planned because it started on a Monday and Mondays were never part of the original plan.

    But it had snowed all day, four inches by the time they got out, and Roy had to stay late because one of the deliveries was late getting there and there was Jim with snowflakes falling softly into his hair and his eyes even greener when put against the surrounding pure white and he had smiled and laughed gently as she made her way across the parking lot to him, slipping a little as she went.

    “Need a ride, Beesly?” He was clearing snow off his car and he looked at her over the roof, his eyebrows raising and his nose red from the cold.

    “You’re adorable,” is what she might have said if he was simply her own reflection. There in the midst of falling snow she said, “Um, yeah. If it’s not too much trouble.”

    He pushed a pile of snow over the side of the car she was standing on and she had to quickly step back to avoid it. He was laughing at her and she tried to feign anger. “Sorry, you’re just kind of in the way there.” And it was probably that grin of his that did it.

    She bent down and carefully balled a clump of snow in her hands. He had gone back to clearing off his car so it was easy for her to hit him with it right in the chest. When it hit him, he turned to her with hands in the air in mock surprise as he looked down at the snow all over his black wool coat.

    “How dare you,” he said and she was suddenly close to him. And her hands were suddenly gripping his coat’s lapels and she was kissing him. She felt the cold, wet snow from his coat falling down inside her own as his arms went around her.

    “Get in the car,” she said as he pulled back from her. She didn’t wait for his answer, just walked around to the other side and got in. She watched him stand there for a second before he finally tossed the ice scraper into the backseat and got in the car.

    As he turned the key in the ignition, he said, “You really should not have done that before I had to concentrate on driving in the snow.” She watched his hands shake a little as he put the car in reverse. “Fuck,” he said under his breath, closing his eyes for a second and shaking his head before turning to look out the back window as he pulled out of the parking space.

    She was smiling to herself. She felt powerful and confident and beautiful and this was no longer just an idea in her head, just something make believe that she hoped would get her out of her own life. This was happening now. He was driving slowly on the unplowed roads in the industrial park and at a stop sign he turned to her, “Where are we going?”

    She turned her face to the window and caught her muted reflection among the shimmer of untouched snow on the ground. She saw the flush in her cheeks and the persistent smile on her lips and said, “Anywhere.”

January 30th, 2006 6:05 PM: Meet Jim at Terry’s Motel.

It was her idea, the motel just outside of Scranton, the meeting there instead of going together. That first night at Jim’s house, fumbling in his bedroom until they heard Mark come whistling through the door just as final pieces of clothing were coming off, it hadn’t been right. He’d gotten dressed again too quickly and she snuck out the back and waited in his car until he could find an excuse to leave. She sat there for five minutes in the cold until he came outside.

“Sorry,” he said quietly, turning the heat on high for her.

She felt defeated at the thought of going home now. Because even though their frantic tongues and hands of earlier were enough to constitute the most unfaithful she’s ever been to anyone, she knew if she went home in her current heated state, she’d find herself in bed with Roy almost immediately. And somehow that seemed to contradict that whole point of this. Or maybe she just didn’t want to think about sleeping with Roy while thinking about Jim.

Still, she turned to him and smiled, said, “It’s okay. I should probably get home anyway.”

She watched his face fall at that and leaned over, pressing her mouth to his firmly. His hand moved to the back of her head as he kissed her back and she found herself awkwardly in his lap, the steering wheel digging into her back.

That hadn’t been right either and he’d driven her home with both hands on the wheel and his eyes looking straight ahead. At every stoplight, she expected him to turn to her and try to talk about it, what had happened. He didn’t though and she was grateful. This seemed to her like the sort of thing people didn’t really discuss. She didn’t imagine other people having affairs ever sat down to talk about their feelings or where it was going. It just happened.

She wanted so badly for things to just happen.

“Take me to a motel,” she told the full length mirror on the back of the door. She was wearing heels, and old pair of black pumps she’d worn once to a wedding and forgotten about. Wearing them with her usual work clothes though and she didn’t think it had the right effect. But she pulled the skirt up just a little, exposing some of her thigh and watched her legs in the mirror and then said it again in the most seductive voice she could manage, “I want you to take me to a motel, Jim.”

She heard the shower go off and quickly shoved the shoes back under her bed and slipped into her normal work shoes just as Roy was coming out of the bathroom.

“You better hurry, we’re gonna be late,” she said to him as she pulled her hair back into her barrette. She held her face close to the mirror and smiled a little.

At work, neither one of them acknowledged that anything had happened. She felt electric with desire and secrecy. She walked by his desk on her way to the bathroom and let her hand run along his shoulders, her index finger just barely grazing the back of his neck. She felt his eyes on her and they burned in way that left her feeling dangerous as she pushed the bathroom door open.

She took her hair down out of her barrette and fluffed it a little, pulling it around her shoulders and trying to flatten it down just a bit. It was fruitless though and she thought about blow drying it tomorrow and wearing it down. She thought about how his eyes might look when she walked in like that. How he’d know it was for him and how he wouldn’t be able to say anything.

“I want you,” she mouthed silently to the face in the bathroom mirror.

The motel idea came to her as he was writing up an invoice. The movement of his wrist had her searching the internet for someplace cheap, not too far but not too close. The sort of place people wouldn’t go looking, not that anybody would really be looking. She liked the idea of going out of town to meet discreetly at a motel where rooms were just forty bucks a night.

She emailed him the address, her message simply saying, “Meet me after work.”

There was a bag already in the backseat of her car. As she had packed it that morning, she thought maybe she was getting ahead of herself, but then she found the black negligee with the tags still on it. It was sheer with lace trim and it was something she had bought to surprise Roy with a year ago. Ultimately, he’d done something thoughtless and she’d gone to bed early and alone in flannel pajamas. Now she tore the tags off and placed it along with the set of work clothes and the small Ziploc bag of makeup.

As the thin, smooth material had slid from her fingers, she felt life pulsing through her as if she was waking up for the first time in years.

This is how she came to find herself in the motel’s cramped bathroom, letting the material flow over her skin as she put it on. She thought for a second that maybe it was too much, but such a thought seemed sort of ridiculous considering the situation she was in. “Why not take it a step further?” She asked herself, looking at how her darkened nipples peaked through the fabric.

Jim hadn’t got there yet. She had sent him a text message with just, “Room 8.” She was thankful for last minute thinking and the small robe she’d packed with her other things. She pulled it on over the negligee and watched out the window for his car. She was suddenly nervous and before she could find something to occupy herself with, to calm her down, she saw his car pulling into the parking lot.

She was clutching at her robe to keep it closed as she answered the door. “Hi,” she said quietly. But the robe was still short and his eyes took their time getting to her face.

“Hi.” His voice was rough and quaking a bit.

She was suddenly aware of just how much neither of them knew what they were doing.

But that was the point of this, she thought. So she let the robe fall open again and watched him swallow hard and try to keep his eyes on hers. She let it fall off her shoulders slightly and then he was kissing her, pushing the robe even further off her shoulders with frantic hands. And soon the robe was on the floor and they were on the bed and he was saying, “Jesus Christ,” as his hands moved down over her body.

Her hands moved to loosen his tie and that’s when he froze. His mouth left her throat and he pushed himself up so he was sitting back on his heels between her legs. His lips were slightly swollen and he was breathing hard. She liked thinking that she could have such an effect on someone and reached for his hands to pull him back down again, but he wouldn’t let her.

“What are we doing?” He asked her, breathless and shaking his head.

She folded her arms over her chest, feeling too exposed, too vulnerable. This was not how it was supposed to happen and she wanted to cry.

“I don’t know,” she told him, sitting up and bringing a pillow to her chest.

He moved his legs out from under him so he was sitting on the edge of the bed. “Yeah.”

The walls were too thin and they sat their in silence for a while, listening to the teenage girl and her father argue in room seven. Room eight was quiet except for the murmur of the television. And she was silly enough to believe that a motel like this was full of people like them, having secret sexual encounters on the uncomfortable beds that squeaked every time you moved. She was silly enough to believe they could be those sort of people, that he would want that.

She moved a little closer to him and leaned her forehead against his shoulder, letting herself cry. Her hands found his and entangled themselves. “I’m sorry,” she said.

She could feel him relax then and he moved his arms around her, bringing her face to the crook of his neck. “Stop,” he said, “It’s fine. Look, it’s okay. We don’t have to-”

“I’m so stupid,” her lips moved against his neck and he was warm.

“You’re not.”

She brought her face back so she could look him in the eyes, “I thought this would help me get away from Roy.”

He didn’t say anything, just looked at her. She could see him processing it, that she was essentially using him, that it meant little to her besides being a means to an end. His eyes turned dark and her hands gripped the collar of his shirt. He started shaking his head just as she started to say, “No, see it’s not- I thought it could mean nothing, just be an affair, something I could do to-”

He pressed his lips together, frowning in that way and nodding. “You were just bored. I get it.”

He was standing and pulling his coat back on while she just sat there, trying to think of the right thing to say. She reached out to grab his hand but he shook it loose and just smiled sadly at her before closing the door behind him.

And so she was back in the bathroom getting dressed again, trying desperately just to not feel anything besides the cold porcelain of the sink as she leaned towards the mirror. “It’s just that there’s too much love there to let me do this thoughtlessly,” she said quietly, closing her eyes and resting her forehead against the glass.