thing. I could have stopped, I guess. I could have told him what I’d done, but I couldn’t. And for weeks after, I couldn’t look at him, I could barely say anything. But he didn’t seem to notice. He didn’t see that I was in pain. He didn’t look at me.
And then I got angry. Here I was, feeling this way, knowing that I’d done this terrible thing, and Judd didn’t care. He didn’t get jealous when Wade and I were talking – and let’s face it, we had to be fairly obvious. You can’t hide those sorts of strong feelings.
Wade calls me a couple of weeks later, asks me how I am. I told him how I was feeling and he asks me over again. And I thought: why not. I’ve already slept with Wade once and Judd didn’t notice or care, so why not again.
And being with him felt so good. He made me happy, once I learnt to ignore the guilt. I guess it was still there. I mean, sometimes I just wanted Judd to see me again, but he didn’t. The pain of that abandonment was sometimes more than I could bear.
“Why did you stay with Judd then?” Mary asks. “Why didn’t you leave him for Wade?”
“Wade told me not to. There were times when I wanted to, but Wade said that I still loved Judd and this thing with him wasn’t going to last, even though he said that he loved me.”
She laughs a little.
He saw that before I did. And he was right, I still did love Judd, but I was drifting further and further away. But we didn’t have sex all that much. There aren’t all that many opportunities available, really. But I know now that once was enough. It was wrong and it shouldn’t have happened, and it certainly shouldn’t have happened more than once. I don’t know why it did and I know at some point I’m going to have to face the reasons why.
Maybe staying with Judd was my insurance policy – if something went horribly wrong with either relationship I had an out. But there was something horribly wrong with both of them, and I suppose in the end I had neither to fall back on.
Or maybe I couldn’t leave Judd while his father was sick and dying. I couldn’t be that cruel. But when is the right time to leave someone after his father has died? A week? A month? A year? Never?
Or maybe I’d have left Wade eventually, like he said. Maybe we’d have burnt out. It was exciting and intense, sometime too much. Maybe I’d have discovered what Judd already knew – that Wade was sleeping with other women. He was telling me that he loved me, but how much of that was him telling me what I wanted to hear so that I’d keep sleeping with him?
I guess I was living two lives. In one, I’m married to Judd and I still love him, and I’m so sad that things are bad between us, and I’m feeling so guilty for being with Wade, and I feel like there’s nothing I could do to stop it or make it right. In the other life, I love Wade and we’re together and everything is good and right, and I’m feeling nothing but anger towards Judd for ignoring me and hurting me.
I got very good at lying. I was lying to Judd, I was lying to myself. I was telling myself that I could keep these two lives separate but I should have known that I couldn’t forever. I should have known that everything that I was doing was going to destroy everything that was ever good in my life. I should have known that the truth would destroy Judd – destroy our marriage and our future. I should have known. Maybe I did. Maybe I just didn’t care.
Judd and I still had sex, but I guess my heart wasn’t in it. It certainly was less frequent. I couldn’t stop because he’d definitely know something was going on. I suppose I wanted to get it over as quickly as possible. The guilt made it hard to connect to him when we did, and I’m ashamed of that, still ashamed of that. We had sex a month before he found out about Wade and me. I do remember it. It was nothing special. If I’d know that it would be the last time for nearly six months maybe I’d have made it a little more memorable. I mean, it could have been the last time, and at the time I guess maybe it wouldn’t have bothered me. I’d like to think it would have, but I just don’t know.
She sighs.
And then, on my birthday, Judd comes home and finds Wade and me together in his bed. He’s got a cake for me and he’s looking so hurt and betrayed. I know I broke his heart.
“You have to know, Judd, I only took him into our bed twice, the last time was when you found us.”
“I think that was the worst part for me,” I say. Having him in the bed that I shared with Quinn made her betrayal infinitely worse, because she stopped caring about me. It was as simple as that. “It was bad enough that you were sleeping with him, but that was our home. You should have kept that separate from us.”
“I wasn’t thinking clearly, Judd.”
“You can’t use that as an excuse forever, you know?”
“I’m not,” she says a little sharply. “It was a bad time for me. I was confused and conflicted and I was doing something that I liked and hated at the same time. Being with him in our bed was just more of the same confusion. I was so ashamed to have you find out about us that way. So ashamed.”
I sigh. “I saw that, I suppose. It’s just that it was so humiliating and hurtful.”
“I never meant to hurt you.”
“Judd,” Mary says to me, “Quinn said you were carrying a cake. A birthday cake?”
“Yeah.”
“What was going through your mind before you walked into the bedroom?”
I try and think back to that day. Every thought, every memory, was tainted by what followed. I had been consumed by the hurt and pain that I forgot why I walked into the room in the first place.
“I don’t know,” I tell them. “I think that I’d been feeling lost myself and Quinn was the only person in my life that I was close to, and I’d been feeling so disconnected with her, you know? But I don’t think that was any conscious thought that I had. I wanted her to have a special birthday, so I got her the cake and came home early – only she was already getting her special birthday present from Wade.”
“Judd,” Grant says carefully.
“Well, that’s the honest truth. She was. She can’t deny it. He came over especially because it was her birthday.”
Quinn looks down, nods sadly.
“But you wanted to change?” Mary asks me.
“I think so. But it was too late. As it turned out, a year too late. She’d been lying to me, to my face, for a year. She’s had – and was having sex in my bed with Wade.”
Quinn is crying. I can feel hot, angry tears slide down my cheeks. We don’t touch. No amount of staring into each other’s eyes was going connect us now.
Grant leans forward, speaks quietly: “Quinn, why don’t you finish your story?”
She does. She takes a deep breath and dives in again:
All he can do is ask me how long it’s been going on for, and I tell the truth now, for the first time in a year and I hurt him all the more. And then I tell him I’m sorry but he just sits there, stunned. He’s in shock, I know it, but I just need something from him, anything. Anything that says that he’s feeling something other than numb. Something that says that I mean something to him, that our marriage means something.
Then he just gets up and tells me he’ll be back in an hour to get some things and Wade and I better not be there when he does. That’s it. Nine years married, almost twelve together and that’s all he can say.
I said more than that. I remember that clearly. I asked her if she loved him, like that mattered right at that moment when our marriage was ashes at our feet. I’m not sure which answer I preferred right then. If she said no, then it was just sex, sex that I could not give her. If she said yes, then she no longer loved me.
But it was her looking away and her silence that cut me deeper than any words. She loved him, and he gave her more than I could. The double threat. I wasn’t prepared to find my wife in bed with another man, wasn’t prepared to learn that she’d been lying to my face for a whole year. She ttold me that we were fine, told me that she loved me. But what she was really saying was that she loved someone else and was waiting for a chance to get rid of me. A chance lik
e right then. Right there.
Now, in the room with the Uptons that is becoming so unbearably hot and small, she sighs. She looks down again, her face full of regret.
I remember leaving, then coming back to the empty apartment and standing over the bed, clean sheets, perfectly made like she makes it every day. Evidence erased, like nothing had happened. Like our lives were just ruined an hour before. And I guess all evidence of me would be similarly erased, perhaps a day or two later. Like I never was there. Like I never inhabited that space, inhabited her life. Gone.
I remember vaguely thinking I should smash the bed into small pieces. But the actual thoughts, the words in my mind, are gone. I don’t remember the feelings I had, if I had any. I was numb and in shock as Quinn had correctly surmised. Only later did I cry and yell and find life without her too unbearable to consider.
And so I stayed with Wade. I was crying all the time, but he made me realise that maybe this happened so that I could be finally free, be happy. Judd just disappeared, just dropped off the face of the earth. I was desperately worried about him. I was worried he’d do something drastic, you know. And no one had seen him, not our friends, not the station. I could have rung his family, I guess, but I didn’t know how I was going to explain myself, explain what happened.
I told Allan where I was, and I suppose he told Jen. That was before I knew that they would abandon me. And,