The Woman At The Door Daniel Hurst (online e reader TXT) 📖

and charm. I had also found myself sneaking a glance at his left hand to make sure that there wasn’t a ring that might indicate that he was a married man and therefore unavailable.

But there was no ring, so to me, that meant he was fair game.

That was why I plucked up the courage to ask him out for a drink at the end of one of our sessions when I was feeling particularly confident with all the adrenaline running through my system after a hard workout alongside him. I had been hopeful that he would accept the invitation and felt that he liked me as much as I liked him. But I was wrong. Not about him liking me. I could tell he found me attractive and interesting.

Rather, I was wrong about the fact that he wasn’t married.

Devon told me that he did indeed have a wife and that he just didn’t wear his ring during his personal training sessions because it made it difficult to grip certain weights and he didn’t want to scratch it on any of the equipment. Instead, he kept the ring in his locker and put it back on at the end of every shift. To say I felt stupid was an understatement, and I had apologised to him and tried to make light of it. Fortunately, he took it all in good spirits and didn’t let it affect the way he treated me going forward with our future sessions together. But for me, I wasn’t able to leave it at that.

I was in love with Devon.

So I had to have him.

The problem was that he was taken, and that was how I had first come to be browsing the internet reading the message boards about other people like me who were in love with people they couldn’t have. I saw how I was not alone and that there were so many people out there who felt depressed, lonely and utterly defeated when it came to their love life. It was almost as if we were cursed because we had been fated to fall in love with somebody who could not love us back.

Why hadn’t we fallen in love with a single person? Because life didn’t work that way. You can’t plan love. It just happens. You don’t choose who you fall for. You just fall, and it remains to be seen if it’s going to be a good thing or a bad thing. For me, it was a bad thing. I fell, and I had no one there to catch me and pick me back up again.

I could have just left it. I could have changed personal trainers or even changed gyms, meaning I never had to see him again. But I didn’t because I needed to see him. I craved him. He was the only thing in my life that made me feel alive. So I carried on the sessions, and I carried on loving him even though it was cutting me up inside that he was going home to his wife every night while I was going home alone.

That was when I had an idea, and it was the idea that would change both mine and his life forever.

I decided to follow him home one evening. That was how I found out where he lived. That was how I saw his wife.

And that was where I had the idea to do something about her.

I can’t remember the exact moment the idea came to me, but when it did, I had felt an exhilarating rush because I knew that if it worked then it was going to potentially make everything that I wanted come true.

I went back online and posted an advert asking for an attractive and athletic woman who was willing to do one minute’s work for me in exchange for £200. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I got quite a few replies, and after asking a few of the women to send me their photos, I selected one and told her to meet me near Devon’s house. When she did, I was pleased to see that the woman had been honest in her description of herself and was both attractive and athletic, which was important because I needed her to look like somebody Devon would be interested in. Because she had been honest with me, I was then honest with her. I showed her the £200 and told her what she needed to do to get it.

She had to go and knock on Devon’s door and tell his wife that she had slept with him.

The woman had been a little surprised to hear what I wanted her to do, but I had made sure to flash the money again and reminded her that it could be hers if she did what I asked. So the woman agreed. She was to knock on the door, tell the woman who answered it that Devon had been her personal trainer and that they had slept together and that she was telling the wife because she felt guilty about it. Then all she had to do was walk away and she would get the money.

The woman did exactly what I asked of her, and I was happy to give her the money.

Then all I had to do was see what the fallout from her words would be.

It was a few days later, during my weekly gym session with Devon, when I noticed that he was a little quieter and less enthusiastic than normal. I had asked him if everything was okay, and he had tried to let me know that it was, but he had done a bad job of it, and that’s when he asked me for my advice. He told me that he had been arguing with his wife, and she was accusing him of something that he didn’t do. Did I have any suggestions as to how to make things better? I said that I did. I told him to be a man and