Tainted Love (Sweetest Taboo #2) (5 page)

Of course I never knew then how far that would go, or how much my entire life would change because of that one fateful moment when Isabel
zapped
me for eternity. It certainly never occurred to me that that innocent first glance, that first contact with Isabel, would someday find me divorced and stumbling after her.

I’d met my wife when I was twenty-two years old, while I was working in my first real adult job. I was working at a small company that sold advertising space, just being productive and earning an income while I waited for my teaching certification to be finalized and issued.

Danielle sat next to me in the office and became one of the coworkers I spent time with on coffee breaks, during lunch and at after-work happy hours. When we started dating, there was no romance nor attraction. See, we were dating for a specific purpose, not because we were in love, or really cared for each other for that matter. It all started with an industry Christmas party that I was required to attend. For some reason, it was expected that all salesmen arrive with either a date or a wife, and they made this clear on the party invitation. I’d been absolutely floored. Who ever heard of a party where you were required to bring a date? In spite of my reluctance to show up with a
required
date, I had taken the requirement as a sign, though. I marched right up to the desk of the girl I had harbored a crush on for several months now and was resolved to finally ask her out. I hadn’t had the guts to actually talk to her before this moment, but I felt that this was the perfect chance.

Unfortunately, she turned me down. She already had a boyfriend, and on top of that, she couldn’t even have gone with me as a friend – she was going to be out of town for a cousin’s wedding that weekend. I always wondered if she didn’t go to the party because of the wedding or the boyfriend. Maybe she just didn’t like me, but whatever it was, it was a moot point. She said no. So I asked Danielle instead, though I didn’t really want to take her as my date. I didn’t necessarily feel attracted to her, but I didn’t have many options and I was running out of time. I was desperate because if I didn’t have a date, I couldn’t go, and I wanted to make a good impression on my boss at this party. There was an opening in a department that offered a higher salary and more responsibility, and I needed the additional income if I was going to move into an apartment larger than the shoebox I currently lived in.

To make a long story short, I wasn’t attracted to Danielle in any way. We got along fairly well, though, and kept dating even after the Christmas party. She was much more attracted to me than I was to her, but I didn’t have anything else on the horizon, so I…well, settled, I suppose. We even moved in together after a couple of months, with the justification that we could move into a larger apartment if we pooled our resources. I never meant for it to become permanent. We never really had a loving or romantic relationship. In fact, we were more like good friends or roommates.

One day I came home after hanging out with some college friends, to find that Danielle had packed up and moved out without telling me. When I got in touch with her, she told me that our relationship was going nowhere, and that if we weren’t going to get married someday, then she no longer wanted to be in a relationship with me. I was young, inexperienced, naive, and taken by surprise. I guess I shouldn’t have been, given the fact that I had been in a relationship with her for some time, but I was, and I wasn’t thinking clearly. I got worried about being responsible for the entire monthly rent, which I couldn’t afford without her contribution and even worried about being alone while all of my friends had fiancés or were getting married, and I suddenly lost my clarity on the situation.

Before I walked home, I’d had a few beers with my friend, as well as a few lines of coke, which is something that was used quite recreationally in the 80s, and I was feeling carefree. When Danielle told me she would leave me unless we got married, I was high enough that I thought I could see an easy fix. I was confused, hurt, and feeling rejected, and I wanted those feelings to go away. So I blurted out that if marriage was what she wanted, then that’s what we should do. Like it wasn’t a big deal at all – just a business deal that we needed to finalize.

I should have never uttered those words, and I know that now. In fact, it didn’t take me long to realize that she’d laid a trap for me, and it had worked perfectly. She was expecting me to be weak, and I had been. I took the bait, hook, line, and sinker, and walked right into her waiting arms. I still don’t know why she wanted to marry me so badly – we certainly weren’t a good match – but I never asked. Sometimes women put more stock in marriage than they should, I suppose, and she was no different. From there, plans were made, people were invited, and the wedding plans moved forward. I watched it all in dazed astonishment, wondering why I ever proposed in the first place, and how I could extract myself from the situation, never thinking once to say I just didn’t want to go through with it and had a change of mind. The thing is, I never wanted to get married; not necessarily because I was against the institution of marriage, but simply because I’d never had my bell rung, so to speak. I didn’t even know what it felt like to be in love with someone.

Until Isabel, that is.

Once we were married, Danielle and I started our own advertising business, which we shared with another partner. When I graduated, though, I started teaching, while she continued with the business. That meant she was constantly on the road, on sales trips for our company. We didn’t even live together at the time. When I landed my first teaching job, it was in a town a couple hours from where we had lived before and she didn’t want to move. So we lived and worked several hours away from each other Monday through Friday, and saw each other only on weekends. She worked long hours with Matthew, our business partner, who I didn’t really know that well. She’d met him several years earlier and brought him into the business when we started up. They always got along quite well, and I sometimes wondered how close they really were.

Certainly closer than what would be socially acceptable to a husband.

I remember the day when Danielle told me she had to go to a conference for a week with Matthew. I didn’t think much of it, because I had other things going on at the time – it was finals week, and I was busy giving assignments and grading papers and exams. I wasn’t sure whether there was anything going on between Danielle and Matthew, and I don’t know if it would have even bothered me if there had been a clandestine affair between the two of them. Deep down, I think I was hoping that there was something going on, which would give me an easy out of the marriage. I was young, and too weak and insecure to seek a divorce out for myself. I also didn’t want to be the bad guy – she’d chosen me, and I couldn’t bear for anyone to think I rejected her shortly after getting married. I’ve always followed the past of least resistance, so I self-imposed a situation – a marriage – that I did not want. So I turned a blind eye, even when she told me she was pregnant a month or so after she returned from the conference.

We hadn’t slept together in months, and I was certain that the baby wasn’t mine. She should have known that I would figure this out. But I didn’t say anything about it, and neither did she.

Danielle and I were rarely intimate. I know husbands and wives were supposed to be, but they were also supposed to be in love, and we weren’t either of those things. I felt indifferent about the baby possibly – or certainly – about it being Matthew’s, but I kept my mouth shut anyway. It was a can of worms I didn’t want to open. I didn’t know how to speak my mind, how to ask a simple question, without seeming like a bad person. I mean, how do you ask your wife if she cheated on you and got pregnant while doing so? Incredible as it may seem, I thought at that time that I should just trust my wife and believe in her, and I would have expected her to do the same. Like I said, I was naïve. I didn’t know the first thing about healthy, loving relationships, having never been in one.

When our daughter was born, everything became very obvious. Matthew was far too attentive, and even insisted on being involved during the pregnancy. When Brandy was born, Matthew was in the delivery room with us. Still, I didn’t say a thing to Danielle. Emotionally, I turned completely off. I knew Danielle was having an affair with Matthew, and that Brandy was his daughter. I also figured that neither of them realized I knew about their affair, or about Brandy’s paternity; they must have thought I was the stupidest person in the world, truly an imbecile of monumental proportions. I’m not sure what’s more disturbing, my lack of reaction or Danielle and Matthew having a baby right under my nose? Sadly, I didn’t really care. The fact was that I didn’t love Danielle and I didn’t want to be married to her, plain and simple.

So while I was still married, I started to live my own life. I focused on my teaching and started making friends I didn’t tell Danielle about. I threw myself into mentoring my students. I became the best teacher I could be, and didn’t think about my wife any more than I had to. Danielle was still working out of town, and took our daughter with her for the first few years of Brandy’s life. That was fine with me, too; I didn’t have the time or inclination to take care of an infant, though, I loved my daughter with all of my heart, regardless if I was convinced she was not biologically mine. When Danielle asked me if I thought it was okay for Matthew to take Brandy for the weekend, I almost laughed out loud. How could she ask things like that without knowing that she was letting the cat out of the bag? Why would any man want to take a twelve-month-old infant for the weekend, unless that child was his? I shrugged though, building up my walls, and told her that it was fine with me.

That, in my mind, was the end of any husband/wife relationship. Matthew became more involved, keeping our daughter for weekends at least once a month, driving the three hours for birthday parties, and just stopping by to visit occasionally. As Brandy got older, I started to notice facial characteristics, behaviors, and other things that reminded me of Matthew. I got tired of ignoring it, and was about to confront Danielle on the issue, when she dropped another bombshell. She was pregnant. Again. And again, I knew that the child wasn’t mine.

In spite of the deception, I wasn’t prepared to bail on the marriage. I was not the type of guy who took parenting lightly, and so all I could do was direct my energy into being the best dad I could be to both of my girls, after all, none of this was their fault. For whatever reason, Danielle never asked for a divorce – though she was having an affair with another man – so I played my role as husband, father, family man, at least for the benefit of the girls who knew me as their father. I decided not to ask questions and to raise Brandy and my second daughter, Michaela, the best I possibly could. I gave all my time and love to them, and tried to be the best father and role model there could ever be.

All the while, Danielle and I were drifting further apart, physically and emotionally. My kids became the most important thing in my life, and I thought of them as my only family, and Danielle as no more than their mother. Matthew disappeared after he attended Brandy’s 5
^th
birthday party, leaving the company in Danielle’s hands and refusing to take Brandy’s phone calls. I asked Danielle off and on over the next few years if she ever heard from Matthew, or why he suddenly disappeared, but she always claimed that she didn’t know the reasons behind Matthew’s decisions to leave town. I didn’t believe her, of course. I believed that she’d realized I knew what was going on, and had asked him to stop coming around. She was still traveling for work, and there was still plenty of opportunity for her to see him when she was away from home. At that point, of course, she had me well and truly roped in. Those weren’t my little girls by blood, but I loved them as if they were, and I would never have done anything to hurt them. I wasn’t going to push them out of my life by confronting Danielle about her relationship with Matthew, so I never questioned her and went on as if we were still the respectful husband and wife pair that everything believed us to be.

That didn’t make her my wife, though. As far as I was concerned, she was a stranger occasionally living under my roof with my daughters. I didn’t care for her, and I avoided her when I could.

I’d still never been in love. At that point, I didn’t even know if being in love was a possibility or if it was just some sort of romantic ideal shoved down our throats by Hollywood films and weepy ballads.

That all changed when I first saw Isabel.

I glanced up from the breakfast table, wondering if Isabel had finished her conversation, and saw that she was still on the phone in the courtyard. Whatever the conversation was, it didn’t look like it was going well. Her face was dark with frustration, her mouth closed tightly the way it was when she was angry or frustrated. I felt sorry for whomever she was talking to. They weren’t giving her good news, and it looked like they were going to pay the price.

I was just glad it wasn’t me. I wanted her to be nothing but happy for the rest of her life, and I was prepared to do anything to make that happen, provided she continued to want me in her life.

***

I saw Isabel several more times that week – passing her in the hall, or on her way through the garden at the front of the campus. She never gave me a second glance, though I had to work hard to keep from staring at her. Every time I saw her, I got that same feeling – the feeling that I’d known her in a different life, or had something important to say to her. I couldn’t decide what it was, but I knew it was something special. I was drawn to her more than I’d ever been drawn to anyone.

Then in February it was the start of the swim season. I was really looking forward to the new season, not so much because of the competition, or because of the kids, but because it nearly doubled my salary and kept me out of the house for a few additional hours a day. It wasn’t just that, though, because I liked working with the kids just as much. I’d swam myself in high school, and had a pretty good understanding of what it took to be successful in the pool. Beyond that, it gave me another chance to work with the kids outside of school, and to get to know their parents. This was another place to connect with some of the more troublesome students and give them guidance, and some of my favorite students had joined the team just because I was the head coach. This was nothing new; the team had always featured students who were particularly active in my classes. I was also looking forward to seeing some of the returning swimmers – a couple of them were pretty good, and they were all nice kids.