Violeta Noir

I didn't meet your husband in a park.

That's simply where we met in person.

I met him in a chat room.

And before I knew his voice,
his eyes,
his marriage,
or much of anything else about him,

I knew what his dick looked like.

Not because he had sent it privately to me.

He was sharing pictures of himself freely in the room.

That was the environment.

And apparently,
that was his introduction.

Somewhere among all of that,
he asked about me.

Opeya answered.

I would later learn considerably more about her.

Then we started talking.

And talking.

And talking.

By the time we met in the park,
the strange thing wasn't
that I already knew
what was inside his pants.

It was that I wanted to know
what was inside his head.

He asked if I had anyone.

I told him no one lived at home.

That was true.

My husband had already left the house to deal with his alcoholism, and I didn't see any reason to explain my marriage to a man I had only just met.

So I didn't.

Truth and completeness are not always the same thing.

I would learn that lesson repeatedly with your husband.

That day, though,
we were sitting in a park.

Talking.

Constantly talking.

About nothing.

About everything.

Aliens.

Time.

God.

Conspiracies.

Childhood.

Sex.

Pain.

The strange things people believe when no one is around to correct them.

There was always another thought waiting behind the last one.

He wasn't particularly shy about his history either.

I already knew about Opeya.

The friend he told me he had traded sex with for drugs.

He told me about the stripper he had dated too.

He boasted about that one.

I already knew her.

Jacksonville can be a very small city.

None of it particularly bothered me.

I wasn't looking for purity.

I wasn't conducting a background investigation.

I was listening to an interesting man tell interesting stories about himself.

And he had plenty.

We had matching trucks.

Mine was silver.

His was black.

Years later,
my husband would still be driving mine.

Your husband would total his
less than half a mile from my house,
on his way to see me.

But that hadn't happened yet.

That day,
both trucks were still intact.

At some point,
he stood behind the open door of my truck
in Christmas boxers
and decided I needed a preview
of what was underneath them.

So he showed me.

I remember the boxers.

There was something wonderfully absurd
about the presentation.

We had been talking about galaxies.

God.

Conspiracies.

Childhood.

Drugs.

A stripper.

And now, apparently,

his dick.

It all seemed to belong
to the same conversation.

Strangely,
I didn't mind.

I had been living inside something so emotionally quiet that curiosity itself felt erotic.

He had a pulse.

That was enough to make me look.

And I wanted him.

That was becoming inconveniently obvious.

I also wanted to know him.

Those two desires would spend years
getting in each other's way.

Eventually,
I kissed him.

Then he told me about you.

His wife.

And almost immediately,
he began explaining
why he didn't want to be your husband.

He told me he was unhappy.

He told me he didn't want to be married.

He told me he had been tricked
into marrying you.

I didn't know you.

I barely knew him.

I certainly didn't know
what had happened between the two of you
before I arrived.

I only knew
what the man standing beside me
chose to tell me.

And he chose to tell me that.

I don't remember feeling betrayed.

We had kissed.

That was all.

By then,
he'd already told me enough about himself
that married felt less like a revelation
than another fact being added
to an increasingly interesting file.

I wasn't interviewing him for a position.

I wasn't looking for another husband.

I already had one.

Even if mine wasn't living at home.

So his marriage didn't disappoint me.

It defined the role.

He couldn't be my boyfriend.

He couldn't be my partner.

He certainly couldn't be my husband.

Whatever happened next
would have to exist somewhere else.

Within the hour,
your husband was begging me
to let him taste me.

I said no.

Not yet.

I wanted to know him first.

I remember being almost irritated
by my own restraint.

I cursed my ancestors.

Why couldn't I just have sex?

Why did I always have to want to know things?

Why did there have to be a mind
attached to the body?

But there was.

And unfortunately,

I liked that too.

So I kept talking to him.

And the park became ours for a while.

We would meet for lunch
and somehow lunch would become hours.

Sometimes your husband
missed the rest of his workday.

Sometimes we ate.

Sometimes we talked
until there was no sensible reason
either of us should still be sitting there.

Sometimes desire followed us
beneath the trees.

Sometimes he tasted me there.

Mostly,

we enjoyed each other.

That was the dangerous part.

Sex would have been easier to explain.

People understand lust.

Bodies want things.

They touch.

They finish.

They go home.

But we didn't seem very interested
in going home.

There was always another conversation.

Another joke.

Another question.

Another ridiculous possibility
neither of us believed enough to defend
but found interesting enough to explore.

Time behaved differently around him.

An hour disappeared.

Then another.

Then apparently the workday.

I didn't ask him to stay.

He stayed.

I didn't ask him to miss work.

He missed it.

I didn't need to pull him away
from his life.

He walked away from pieces of it himself
and sat beside me.

That distinction would become important later.

According to your husband,
you knew I existed
almost as quickly as I knew about you.

Days.

Weeks at the latest.

He showed you my picture.

Then he told me what you said.

How am I supposed to compete with her?

I remember that.

Not because it wounded me.

Not because it flattered me
very much either.

I remember it because
I thought the premise was strange.

Compete for what?

I already had a husband.

You already had yours.

I wasn't asking him to choose me.

I wasn't asking you to release him.

I wasn't planning a future.

I wasn't dismantling yours.

I was a married woman
eating lunch in a park
with a married man
who made me laugh.

Sometimes it really was that simple.

And sometimes,
beneath those trees,
it wasn't.

But even then,
when desire took over for a while,
eventually we came back
to the same thing.

Talking.

Laughing.

Enjoying each other.

I think that's what made
the park matter.

It wasn't simply
where an affair began.

It was where I remembered
what it felt like
to enjoy another person
without having to manufacture the enjoyment.

I didn't have to coax conversation out of him.

I didn't have to create the atmosphere.

I didn't have to convince myself
I was having a good time.

I was.

Completely.

And apparently,
so was he.

He kept coming back.

So did I.

For a while,
that was enough.

I didn't need to know
where any of it was going.

I didn't think it was going anywhere.

He was married.

I was married.

We had lives waiting
somewhere beyond the trees.

I thought we understood that.

There was no stage yet.

No fourth wall.

No audience.

I wasn't studying him.

I wasn't rearranging pieces of truth
to see what he would do with them.

I wasn't crying on cue.

I wasn't staying for the plot.

I was simply enjoying myself.

There was just a park.

Two lunches getting cold.

Two matching trucks.

A married man.

A married woman.

And an afternoon
neither of us seemed particularly
interested in ending.

He had a pulse.

I could feel mine again.

For then,

that was enough.