Dark Redemption Ch. 04

The sound of the car pulling out of the driveway with Peter and the kids in it confirmed I was in the house alone. I immediately burst into tears.

The tears slowed only when I realized I had an hour or so before they would be back in the house.

In a vain attempt to comfort myself I ran a hot bath with oils and scented powders. As the musky scents of sandalwood and cinnamon climbed up into my brain and wrapped themselves around me, I almost did feel better. I tried to stop my mind running in circles. A strength tickled at the periphery of my consciousness, trying to wake me up to some sort of possibility.

But it was short lived.

My mind, like my husband turned on me, making the hell I created worse than the hell I had witnessed. As I took off my clothes, I turned to see myself in the mirror. My body was not what it used to be, and I was not in the mood to be kind. I felt so low I was ready to wallow in my own self-hatred. All I wanted to do was discover reasons why the perfect man for me didn't want me any more. I looked at the extra ring of fat that I had around my belly. My inner thighs had started to sag a little. The lose skin at the top of my arms. My sagging breasts. I knew intuitively that I was doing this to myself, but I wanted it. I wanted to feed off self-loathing. In my mind, it made my husband a better man.

Plus, this way I can control fixing it all. I can somehow make this about me, instead of the reality, which was it had nothing to do with me. By making it somehow my fault that my husband didn't want me, I could avoid the truth. The truth I couldn't bare. I had been shut out of the romance in my husband's life.

Somehow I had to get myself out of that dark place.

I hopped in the bath and shook my head to knock some common sense into me. It was entirely unacceptable for me to go there. If my husband did not want me any more because I was no longer young, and my body showed the transformation baring our children had forced, then I didn't want him.

And it didn't make any sense. Peter wasn't like that.

But then I didn't think it was like him to take a lover either. And a younger lover!

I was glad to be in the hot bath. The water floating about me was sensual and soothing. My mind started to clear. With a Socratic precision I decided to go through the facts. I had not actually seen Peter sleep with this woman. But, I had seen him kiss her, and kiss her like a lover. And I had seen him nuzzle her neck. And I saw him receive advances from her. I left them before they left the pub. Who knows where they went after they had been there? No. That sort of thinking will take me from my purpose. It was very important to focus on what I actually knew and not muddle it all with different ideas about what he gets up to when I am not looking. I had to stick to what's so.

What I knew for sure was that Peter was having some sort of a relationship with a younger woman that had an intimate sexual content and that he was keeping it from me.

That was it. Nothing more, nothing less.

I started to feel angry again, and I glanced at the clock worried I was running out of time. I realized they had been gone for about forty minutes and that it would not be too long and they would be back.

I got out of the bath and let the water run out. I toweled myself off and put my silk pajamas on, all the time trying to keep it straight in my head about what I knew was so. Letting myself move into any other area while this was fresh would be destructive to my ability to remain lucid. And that felt like the most important thing in the world at the moment.

The next crucial question here was how did I feel about all of this? Did I still love my husband? Had he wiped out years of marriage in just one afternoon? Could I ever come back from this place?

I didn't know much that night, but I did know that I wouldn't be logical enough to make that decision. The desire to inflict pain on him was the strongest feeling I had at the moment. I wanted him to be hurt as I was. I wanted him to feel what it was like to love and then lose in one swift moment, just as I had to endure that day. I wanted it to hurt him deeply.

Something in me clicked over. I took comfort in that thought. It was like a smooth balm on my aching soul. I hurt so much; I had loved Peter so terribly much. And now I couldn't be sure of it anymore.

The only person who could actually take it away had stolen it from me.

And I wanted him to suffer for it. I wanted him to know what it was like to lose me. To be sure of me one minute and unexpectedly wrong about me the next.

I hung up my towel again and I snuggled back down into my bed. I was so warm and I should have felt so comfortable where I was. It was one of my favorite things to hop out of a hot bath and snuggle into a cool bed. But not tonight. Tonight I had a sickness in the pit of my stomach that wouldn't go away. And if I let it, it would spread over my whole body. There was no comfort and no escape from what I knew.

I closed my eyes, and felt the beginnings of a headache coming on. I would probably get a migraine out of this, and then I would be telling the truth.

At least one of us would.

_________________________________________________

After that first night together, when Peter had proposed to me, we were almost never apart. At my insistence I didn't move in with him right away. I was still marginally sensible and I feared drowning in him. Never before had I felt such a connection, such an intuitive, intimate way of being known. And a piece of me was afraid. It was not a fear of losing Peter; it was a fear of finding myself. He spoke to a dark place in me that I knew existed but felt I was keeping successfully under control.

Besides the immediacy and the unusualness of our connection there was no evidence for this except what was happening to me. I seemed to be opening up like a flower. Ripe fruit. Our lovemaking had stayed fairly tame. None of the commanding presence that I had experienced on the first night came up again for quite a few weeks.

We separated out one of the spare rooms and Peter decorated it in gold and maroon, with lush carpeting and patterned wallpaper. There were magnificent indoor trees and a corner green house with thriving orchids. It was the most beautiful room I had ever seen, and it was given to me with love and respect.

Immediately, most of Peter's clients took me on as their accountant. I was terribly busy all the time, and organized another accountant to come in to help me a few days a week. Peter had a paralegal and we arranged for them both to come in on the same day, so that the days when they were not there we were both alone. I was making more money than I had ever made in my life before, with my own practice. The work was challenging, but I was up to it, and soon developed a reputation as an excellent accountant.

Word spread fast that Peter had taken me on. At first it was gossip but Peter taught me how to handle that. It didn't take me long to realize why he lived such a reclusive lifestyle. It wasn't that he was in the public eye; it was just that he was very heavily sought after in his own profession. Not just by clients. Law firms and other professional institutions trolled him constantly. As well as professionals, women and men who wanted him to be their lover pursued him. I had no idea that a life like that existed. But it soon came my way, when I came out of my home one day to find a person I did not know going through my letterbox. I was appalled and threatened to call the police, but Peter taught me how to understand these things, and manage them so that they didn't interfere with our life.

Peter taught me, as we went along, how to handle all of it. Life for him was like being a non-famous celebrity. I soon found that if I got anything at work wrong there was someone somewhere to come down on me in an industry journal or an e-mail circulation. Peter taught me how to make sure that errors didn't happen anymore, and how to account for the way people would be. We worked on our intuition, and he taught me how to trust it, how to feel it, and how to let things flow through me. This helped me make excellent judgments in my work, but it also helped me work out whom I could trust.

Then, one Friday, I hadn't seen Peter for the first few hours of the morning. It was not like him to not be at the office, although he had no clients that day in the morning. I stopped by at the cottage, but it was characteristically pristine and the bed looked like he hadn't slept in it, which was how Peter left his bed every morning. I called his mobile but it was off. It was hard to know what was going on.

He turned up at work at about eleven in the morning, and came directly to my office. I was alone, and he came over to me behind my desk, and leaned down to where I sat and kissed me hard on the mouth.

"Do you love me?" He asked?

"Yes darling. Of course. More than anything." I was puzzled about where he had been all morning, but I wanted to hear what he had to say before I asked him what was going on.

"I have a surprise for you tonight. It will be the beginning of an important part of our new life together. But I want to know that you trust me and that you will go through this with me, so that I can take you to the place I want to take you."

I was puzzled; this strange crawling feeling started up in the pit of my stomach. I looked up from my chair into his beautiful eyes. Fear mingled with anxiety spread through me, but I was wet between my legs. Something in him was waking that part of me up again. I think it was what he was asking of me, but it was hard to be sure. He wanted to go to that place inside of me, but I needed to trust him. Did I trust him? I had no idea what he was going to. What if it was something I feared? Did I trust him?

"Yes Peter. I trust you. You can take me anywhere that you want."

The look in his eye at that moment surprised me greatly. I expected pride, or triumph, or even a cheeky wicked grin, but he looked at me with such overwhelming love that tears sprang into my eyes. He knelt before me, and buried his face into my lap. Into my lap he mumbled, "I won't let you down. I promise you, I won't let you down."

He stayed there for another minute then stood up in front of me. The look in his eye had gone and it was replaced with the cheeky one I had expected.

"Anna, I will come and get you at five this afternoon, and I want us to have a drink together at the cottage. Friday night you sleep with me, so I expect you have your belongings with you. At four I want you to get them from the boot of your car and take them to the cottage so that there is no reason for you to be distracted from five. Do you understand everything that I have told you?"

"Yes Peter." I replied which was not exactly the truth because there were things I still didn't understand. However, in terms of the instruction, it was clear enough.

He smiled at me warmly, then turned around and left the room.

I looked down at my work, but it was swimming in front of me. I was terribly excited, but it was sort of appalling. Filled with all kinds of questions and I was wondering how in earth I was going to be able to get successfully all the way through to 4pm without completely falling apart.

What did Peter have planned for me?

I walked to the kitchenette to get coffee. Peter was in his office with the door shut, because he had a client with him. I walked past our secretary and smiled vaguely at her. In the kitchen, I poured myself a coffee from the percolator and added milk methodically. Putting the coffee down on the bench, I smoothed my skirt. "Two can play this game." I thought. "The idea is that I am not going to be able to concentrate. I'm supposed to fall apart with anticipation. Well, I won't. I will prove to him that I am just as disciplined and creative as him, and I will use my time wisely to get my work done."

I picked up my coffee and headed back to my little office, walking taller and straighter than I had before. In my office, the Chalmers file was glaring at me from the desk, the figures of their annual investments floating around the page like little dancing voodoo dolls, giggling and pointing at my futile efforts of control. My vagina was aching. With each throb I remembered that at five this afternoon something terribly exciting was going to happen to me, and I had no idea what it was. Then I would banish the thought and look down again at the figures, which seemed to know more about what was going on than I did.

I knew better than to run to the bathroom for some light relief. That would never work. I looked over at my yawning laptop and decided it would be suicide to get on to the net. I would end up looking at something I was not supposed to and lose almost all the day. I should really go for a walk, I could hardly charge a client for this state of mind, but just the thought of the look on his face as he heard me sneak out the door was enough to keep me where I sat. No! I was going to beat this... somehow.

Giving my head a good shake, I took a deep breath, glanced at the clock on the wall that screamed mid day, and got to the work in front of me.