The Other Man

I come home with him every night.

I have my perfume in my bag. Permanently. A 40ml bottle of J’adore. I have my hand cream, a sanitizer, baby wipes, a liner and my lip gloss. All of this alongside my MacBook and hair brush.

It is 6:30pm.

I leave you a text, a picture of the boardroom, my colleagues blurred in the background, and I walk out of the office. “Meetings are dragging longer than I expected babe, can’t wait to be done and back home with you.” I get into the elevator and switch on my DND.

By 9pm I am heading back home to you. Tired eyes. Glossy lips, carefully reapplied in a way that hides the passionate kisses. My wig is back on my head and tidy, not a single strand out of place, nothing to signal the passionate frenzy I had just left behind.

I have become careful in all the wrong ways.

A tiny bit of guilt hits me as I join the express, and my thoughts travel back to how it started.

It was his last day at the office. Everyone said their farewells. I noticed how he stared at me when I said mine, the way he always had, only more intense this time, clouded by something that looked like regret. Later, against my own judgement, I asked him why he looked like that, even though he was leaving for the dream job everyone wanted.

Forty-five minutes. That’s all it took to reawaken my body.

His eyes pierced something in me. He came so close I could taste his cologne, and then, quietly, like it was the simplest thing, he said it.

I want you, Rayo. I always have. Before your engagement. After your wedding. Even after you had your baby.

By the weekend I was in his bed. A company trip, I told you. But it was a whole weekend of the unbearable aliveness of wanting and being wanted back. I wasn’t thinking of anyone but myself. The real confession isn’t that I was there, it’s that I was fully there. Nothing held me back. No part of me was elsewhere. I gave myself completely to someone who had no right to all of me.

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And it was good. I won’t even lie to myself about that.

Then I drove home.

I crumbled in the car. Wept badly, shook with fear the entire way, terrified of walking through our door, of your smile, your warmth, of lying in bed beside you pretending to be tired. The city looked the same and that startled me. I was half expecting it to look different. Rema blasting in the car, windows up, my own face a stranger in the rearview mirror. I practised being ordinary. Rehearsed acting fine. I learned to carry a whole secret life in my chest cavity and still call you to ask if Abigail had already made dinner before she left for the day.

Regardless, I continued.

The thrill always took me back to him even though I claimed every-time was the last time. The guilt of the drive home lessened. But there is nothing I can do about the guilt that ambushes me when you smile at me and kiss my forehead. I smile back. You cannot tell the difference.

The worst part isn’t the lying. I have made a strange peace with the lying. It isn’t even the wanting — wanting I can explain, wanting has logic, wanting I can trace back to something broken and call it a reason.

No. The worst part is how normal my hands look.

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These same hands that were just pulling him closer … and now they are lifting a fork at the dinner table, lacing fingers with yours, listening to you talk about your latest fragrance, a hobby that belonged to the both of us, a language we spoke fluently to each other. I look at my hands sometimes like they belong to someone else. They don’t. That’s the problem. They are completely, damningly mine.

You know my sleeping face better than I know it myself.

Every line of it. The small sound I make when something in a dream unsettles me. The way you reach for me in the dark, unconscious, unthinking — not even awake enough to need me, just your body keeping inventory of what it loves.

Still here. Still here. Still here.

And I am. That is what breaks me open some nights, that I am still here, that I keep choosing to be here. It should feel like loyalty. It doesn’t. It feels like the most sophisticated cruelty I have ever committed. Staying. Letting you keep counting on a version of me that dissolved some months ago in someone else’s sheets.

He makes me laugh differently.

He makes me feel things I only felt in the first three months with you, that specific electricity, that terrible lightness, the sensation of being desired so completely it reorganizes something in your chest. I noticed it once in a mirror while doing my skincare after another sinful night. My own face, unfamiliar. Younger somehow. Reckless in a way I had forgotten I could be.

It scared me.

I went back anyway. Of course I went back. I had been homesick for myself for so long that when I finally felt it, I did not care what it was costing.

But the bill found me.

It found me at 2am when you roll toward me and whisper my name, not asking for anything, just saying it. The way people say the names of things they are grateful for. It finds me in the morning when you make my coffee exactly the way I like it and hand it over without a word, and something in me registers. You have memorised me. and beneath the numbness a crack opens so fast and so clean it takes my breath.

You have memorised me.

You have built a whole careful knowledge of me. My moods, my silences, what I need before I know I need it and I have been somewhere else spending myself on someone who does not even know my coffee order.

I pull you in for a light kiss and then I drink my coffee.

I say thank you like a person who deserves to be known this well.

The grief is mine first. It only becomes yours the day you find out. The grief is for the trust I am spending like it is infinite, for the person you think you are lying beside, for the bittersweet relief that you haven’t noticed yet that I am different now.

That is the cruelest mercy, that you haven’t noticed yet.

And then one night, you turn to me in the dark and you ask, the way people ask questions they think they already know the answer to —

“Are you happy?”

And then I remember it all. Forty-five minutes in a corridor. A weekend I called a work trip. His voice, quiet and certain, “I want you, Rayo, I always have.” The specific electricity of being wanted that way, the terrible lightness of it, the way it made me feel like a window thrown open after years of—

I look at you. Your face, patient. Warm. So completely sure of me.

I open my mouth. I close it.

“Yes,” I say. “I’m happy.”

I turn towards the ceiling.

Outside, the city keeps going. Beside me, you exhale, satisfied, settled and pull me closer. Your body keeping inventory of what it loves.

Still here. Still here. Still here.

And God help me. I almost told you.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I exhale slowly into the dark. Relieved. Intact. Still yours, in all the ways that let me sleep at night.