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“Owen, I’m not sure you’re doing yourself any favors by telling me the details. Do you know how stupid you sound? How could you not see that she wanted in your pants!”
“I just didn’t. I was drunk. And yes, I was very, very stupid.”
I shake my head in disbelief.
Two bottles of California Cabernet and a deluxe fruit and cheese platter later, he was definitely drunk and the mood had been set.
So, I was little surprised myself when he said, “Her soft kiss took me by surprise and I didn’t react. Dazed and drunk as I was, I simply let it happen. Part of me wondered if I was dreaming. It was as though only a part of me was there, and I had no control or real consciousness.”
Cassandra pulls back, and her blue eyes look into his. Whatever she was looking for, weakness I suppose, she must have found.
This time, when she kisses him, he responds. It’s a slow, sweet contact at first. Partly hesitant. He opens his mouth when he feels her tongue begin to probe. It was then, at the first real taste of another woman that the heat in his core began to rise to the point of no return. Where there is nothing to do, but to put out the fire with the person who ignited it in the first place.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knows that what he’s doing is going to change his life. Even as he pulls down the black straps of her shirt and bra over her shoulders, there is a voice in his head that is screaming for him to stop!
But it becomes background noise when she bites his neck and purrs into his ear. And when she takes off his shirt and pulls on the zipper of his pants, he can’t think of anything but her mouth on him.
She lifts off him, and pulls him up with her, leading them to the bed. There, she removes the remaining bits of clothes. With a gentle push, they’re both on the bed, and then she’s hovering over him, and just like that, he’s inside her.
Cassandra’s face comes into view, and for the first time since they came into the room he focuses and realizes what he’s doing. Bile rises to his throat and he rolls over, tossing the girl onto the bed as he jumps off and dresses as quickly as he can.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she demands.
“I’m married!” he tells her.
She laughs sarcastically. “You don’t say?” Suddenly, she doesn’t seem so sweet or so young. Now she seems calculating. She’s someone who’s been around the block more than a few times and she knows how to twist a man until he’s so confused he doesn’t know which way is right.
Owen throws her an annoyed glance. “I love her. This was a mistake. I was too drunk.”
She sits up, completely unabashed at her nakedness. “Pfft. I bet you say that to all the girls.”
“I think you should leave,” he tells her, barely able to keep eye contact.
She looks him up and down and laughs at his shame. “Are you serious? I thought we hit it off.”
“We did. This isn’t your fault. I should never have brought you here,” he says, acknowledging the fact that she shouldn’t have been in his room in the first place.
She stands and begins to dress. “Whatever.”
Walking to her big brown bag, she pulls out a small stack of sticky notes and writes something on one of them, then stands in front of him. “Here, when you come back to town, call me. Maybe we can finish what we started. I won’t tell your wife, pinky swear.” She sticks the yellow thing on his chest and goes to kiss him, but thinks the better of it when he winces. “See you later?”
“I’m sorry, Cassandra.”
“She was only in my room five minutes. That was all, I swear it. I won’t lie and say that I didn’t sleep with her. But I want you to understand that it was only a matter of seconds before I ended it. It was the biggest mistake of my life. Those five minutes have nearly cost me everything.”
“Why didn’t you tell me the moment you came home?” I ask him. “Why try to hide it?”
He looks at his lap, saying nothing until Dr. Riker prompts him to. “Go on Owen. Speak with honesty.”
“Shame. Guilt. Fear that I’d lose you. I thought about it. All the way home, on the plane, in the car, I went over every possible way that I could bring this up. How I could keep you from leaving me. I had already hurt you, even before you knew it, and I felt like the worst piece of shit for it. I couldn’t face it. The coward in me took over.”
“You fucked me when you got home. Instead of telling me, you fucked me,” I spat, remembering how awful it felt to know he’d been with that woman only a day before, not knowing if she’d had a disease.
“I wanted to brand you. Maybe it was to brand myself.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore, Owen. It’s all…” I started to say, then I replayed something he’d said at the park months and months ago, when we’d been at a company picnic and we’d run into Mike and his girlfriend. Her name had been Cassandra.
While I had imagined the woman to be an exotic beauty, at some point I’d subconsciously changed the image to the young redhead from that day. Owen had sworn to me then that it wasn’t her. That it was a coincidence that their names were the same. But just now, he said Cassandra had shown interest in working as a receptionist at the Chicago office.
