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Meg – Fuel from a Past Hurt
It’s the same mess all over again, just with a different betrayal. Why didn’t I see it coming? As I hide away in my bedroom, I can’t help but think of my ex and how sneaky he ended up being.
He and I started out as best friends in high school. It wasn’t long until I was wearing his letterman’s jacket during our junior year. Like Drew, I thought he was damn near perfect in every way. He never forgot the important things. He knew how much it meant to me that he remembered my birthday and decorated my locker with ribbons and bows.
He could see how much the anniversary of my parents’ deaths still hurt, so he made sure the whole day was filled with fun distractions like going to the beach, playing in the arcade, and spending hours in the library finding new books to read.
When he said he wanted to marry me one day, I had no reason to doubt him. We loved each other more than we could put into words. Everything was perfect.
Until the business trips began.
He didn’t go to college after we graduated but, instead, worked as a project manager for a small construction company his father helped run. He was great at his job, like he was with anything he set his mind to. It was one of my favorite qualities about him. He was so good, in fact, that the higher-ups started bringing him on out-of-town work trips for potential new contracts.
The distance was hard at first, but we adjusted like any couple would. We spent hours talking on the phone at night and sending emails during the day when we had the chance. As much as I wanted him home with me, I wasn’t going to stand in the way of him building a career.
But it was when the work trips started changing that my antenna should have gone up. Sadly, I only caught on when it was too late.
Something I didn’t realize about my ex was how manipulative he could be. It started with little lies here and there that he could explain away. It made it that much easier for him to keep the wool over my eyes.
In the beginning, we would sit down with our calendars so I would know when he was in town and when he was away. That once-a-month date started to fall by the wayside, which made it easy for him to insist that he told me about an upcoming work trip weeks ago. “Yeah, I told you I was going to be in Orlando next weekend,” he’d insist, as he packed his suitcase. “I told you last week. You must have forgotten.”
As much as I swore up and down that I would have remembered news like that, I went along with his story. I was picking up more hours at the inn and setting up the pet program, so it made sense that I could have gotten the days mixed up.
But suddenly, weekend work trips began extending into the week when they hadn’t before. “I’m sorry, babe, there was a mix-up with the contracts, and now I have to stay an extra day or two to help get everything straight,” he’d say. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”
After a month like that, I started getting this sinking feeling in my stomach, screaming at me that something was wrong. I knew he wasn’t telling the truth, but I didn’t have a definitive way to prove it.
I worried that others would think I was being a crazy, paranoid girlfriend. That thought was almost as bad as thinking my boyfriend was cheating on me, and it was enough to keep me from confronting him about it.
When I thought my judgment was telling me something was off, who else would I confide in other than my best friend at the time?
“Come on, you know how much he works. How would he have time for a whole other relationship?” she reassured me firmly, and for a while, her reasoning assured me that nothing was wrong.
“I want to bring it up to him but I don’t want to cause a tiff, you know? It’s bugging me and I don’t want it to,” I replied.
“You don’t want to do that,” she insisted. “He’s working his butt off right now and he’s making a name for himself at the company. He doesn’t need something silly like this distracting him when he’s away, and you’re here thinking up scenarios in your head that aren’t true.”
“I…I just thought that…” I stuttered. I was taken aback by her bluntness after thinking she surely would be on my side.
“This is me giving you some tough love, okay? Wait for things to calm down a bit with his job and then bring it up. You don’t need to worry about anything,” she assured me. She topped her tough love talk with a big hug before sending me on my way. But that wasn’t the end of it.
Little did I know that she was the reason the “work trips” kept getting longer. The discovery came when I was unpacking his things after a weekend-turned-week-long trip. Just as I was getting his clothes in the washing machine, I caught an all too familiar scent of my best friend’s perfume, the same one that always gave me a headache.
He didn’t even try denying it.
“Come on, you can’t tell me you didn’t see there were problems,” he said, and rolled his eyes.
“Are you kidding me? So, it’s my fault that I didn’t catch you sooner?” I snapped, throwing his clothes at him. “Did you have to sleep with my best friend, too?”
“She understands why I’m unhappy.”
“Why didn’t you think to tell me, your girlfriend? If you were so unhappy, why didn’t you tell me?” I yelled, remembering how much I held in so it wouldn’t affect his work.
“You would have overthought it like you always do. She was just easier to talk to and things just…happened,” he said, like it was a simple mistake.
“If you wanted to be with someone else, why couldn’t you have just said so instead of leading me on?” As soon as I asked, tears were streaming down my face, blurring my vision of our future together.
“I did everything I could for you. Don’t I deserve the honesty of a proper breakup rather than feeling like I’m losing my mind thinking you’re cheating on me and then telling myself I’m just paranoid? What did I do that was so wrong?”
