Junction X Erastes (best motivational books of all time TXT) 📖

He looked at me hard, then, and I really thought he’d guessed. “Oh,” he said. My stomach churned, waiting for him to say what I was certain he’d just realised. But he didn’t meet my eyes, and he didn’t say it, didn’t bring down the axe. “Don’t be naïve; everything comes down to that if you don’t get out beforehand. If you haven’t thought long and hard about that choice, then you’d better start.”

I clutched my glass. “Seems you know a lot about it.”

“I’ve dated more than you. It’s the same thing, same rules. Three in a relationship is all very well until someone finds out. Then it’s time to choose which way to jump.” He rubbed his hand through his hair, and again he looked really worried about me; it was a startling change. “I don’t know why we never talked about this stuff before. But if you aren’t prepared for everything to blow up, old boy—then you shouldn’t have got in.”

But I can’t, I wanted to say. It’s impossible. You don’t understand. But from that night, I was fairly sure he did.

We didn’t stay long; it was as if we both suddenly knew that the Club was not the right place. We sat in his car on the seafront for an hour, smoking his cigarettes and talking about infidelity. It was a surprise to me that he’d never once cheated on Claire since their marriage, and that he found that ironic.

+ + +

I hadn’t been thinking at all about any sort of future. Why should I have? There wasn’t any future for Alex and me; that’s what I had been thinking, if I thought at all. But as I drove home (Phil had kissed me in a gentle way, his hand against my cheek), I looked ahead and saw nothing to look forward to. It was either bliss and terror, or it was going back to how things were before. Phil was right; there was no doubt of that. No one has an affair that lasts forever—not without a break somewhere. And someone was going to be hurt badly—not including myself. I had been naïve, blind—and stupid, and I knew it.

I pulled the car over, hitting the kerb as I stopped and I beat my hands against the steering wheel in—I don’t know what. Frustration at the position I’d got myself into, I suppose. I’d painted myself into a corner. When I’d allowed myself to think of it at all, I’d thought that Alex would get tired of it after a week or so, in the same way he changed his mind about the latest bands, dumping his skiffle and crooners for the new craze, the Beatles who seemed to have made the world go mad.

I had been prepared to take what he gave me, and I had been prepared to accept that he’d get bored. As the relationship lengthened and deepened, I had found myself hoping for another week—just one more—where Alex was still as pleased to have me as his lover as he had been before.

That night was the first time I accepted that Alex was deeply in love with me. I hadn’t wanted to believe it, for he’d never said it. He hadn’t needed to. He’d spelled it out for me in sparklers.

Chapter 20

Phil was right about all of it. I had been terrified that Valerie would smell a rat from the very moment I had begun to care for Alex, so I didn’t notice when she really did start to suspect. Interesting that Phil seemed to spot the signs quicker than I.

As spring sped past, she began to question me, and who can blame her? It was subtle at first; she hid it in clever camouflage hinting she was concerned for my own efforts. Who were these clients I stayed at work late for? I hadn’t reported any extra bonuses, so was it worth schmoozing them quite as hard? I looked tired and we were comfortable, so was it worth working these extra hours?

I lied. I lied through my teeth, but I could tell that I was losing ground. With each lie, I slipped a little further away from her, and her eyes grew cold.

All that spring, Alex and I ignored the autumn to come and what that would mean for us, but one night in May, not long after the conversation with Phil that I couldn’t get out of my head, Alex attacked me from the other vantage point.

“Tell me about your friend Phil.”

I stopped, disturbed in my pleasure. Cold and all-too-familiar fingers touched my spine.

“What?” I pulled myself up the bed and sat next to him.

“You never talk about him. Not even in general conversation. If I mention him, you change the subject.”

“Alex—”

“It’s all right,” he said, rolling over to face me and propping himself up on an elbow. “I suppose it just took me a while to work it out. I’m just curious. I talked to some people on New Year’s, you see, and they said you were close.” He was smiling. I wasn’t. “How close?”

“We’ve been friends for years. We work together. Alex…stop it.”

“I don’t mind,” he said, shuffling closer, his hand on my waist. I remember how vulnerable I felt—and that he could flay every secret from me with those eyes. “You did tell me. That there’d been someone else.”

“Don’t.”

He reassured me again, and that astounded me at the time. He was asking me to tell him things that I’d never shared—I have to be honest, if I couldn’t share them with him, who else could I share them with?—and he was trying to calm me down. It was as if he was saying that it was all right to be how we were. How I was. I don’t know where he got that maturity from, how he learned things I never had when I was his age. He never told me. I never asked.

How prudish he must have thought me, but he