Oversharing

Don’t talk about Fight Club.

OMG, the van is his! I don’t know where it came from, if he bought it or he already had it. But the timing in which it appears matters.

Two weeks ago Alphonse went to a national gathering of motorcycles out in the middle of the desert with his wife and his brother and his brother’s wife.

He was gone for a week and I found myself unexpectedly distraught during that time. A couple months ago he went on a cruise with his family and I felt the same way.

My concern is not that he won’t come back but that he’s going to have some kind of come to Jesus moment, a blast of moral clarity, a crisis of conscience. I’m afraid he’s going to come back with a renewed interest in his marriage and say, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Now, why would I think a crazy thing like that?

I blame Travis for doing that exact thing, several times. He once told me that he wouldn’t have sex with me because his anniversary was in two weeks. Two weeks! It was a trivial gesture that did not save his marriage.

Jared is at fault too. As much as I love him, I want to strangle him for being in a constant state of moral conflict that he always finds himself on the losing end of. I tell him it’s a waste of energy to beat himself up like that but he keeps doing it anyway.

It’s worth mentioning that I have never actually lost a man to moral conflict. Apparently I’m a fierce competitor or maybe moral conflict is a flaccid opponent.

Alphonse went on a family motorcycle trip and I half expected him to break up with me when he got back. Instead he came back with a van and fucked my brains out in the back seat. It was reassuring.

But then something else happened.

Yesterday we met up and, again, he arrives in the van. I had assumed the van belonged to someone else but, when he still had it, I asked if it was his and he said it was.

Things did not go as planned. He was very stressed, head somewhere else, not on his game at all. Finally we stopped trying to do anything sexual and he just laid in my arms and told me a horrifying story.

Alphonse is close to his brother and feels the need to fill him in on his extramarital dance card. Which is to say that he told his brother about me.

While on the trip, he was in his brother’s tent and Alphonse was relaying all the juicy details about our affair. I don’t know what possessed him to do that with his wife also being on the same trip. For the record, tents do not have sound proof walls. He could’ve told his brother on the phone in advance, but that is not how it went down.

Alphonse and his brother are in the tent and Al is oversharing to say the least. When they finished their conversation and exited the tent, Carrie was standing there. He has no idea how long she had been there or what she did or did not hear. He said her attitude changed after that and she did not go on that morning’s bike ride and has apparently been acting a little weird ever since.

Well, fuck.

He can’t ask her what’s wrong or what she heard so now it’s just a standoff.

From her response, I suspect that she heard a bit of something but is not exactly sure what it was. She hasn’t confronted him. She hasn’t confronted me.

It goes without saying that this was a potentially marriage-ending event. Most men would’ve been scared straight. Shocked into caution-paralysis. But not Alphonse, he doubles down and gets a van in which to fuck me properly.

And now I’m left with a question: what does it mean?

He understands the risk he’s taking, what’s at stake. He’s playing with fire every single time he leaves his shop to meet up with me. He almost burned down his whole life in one fell swoop and, instead of seeing that as a deterrent, he gets a van.

He came back from that trip feeling trapped in his marriage and deeply resentful of Carrie’s presence. He’s doubling down on exerting his free will because he can. Scorpio is a slow fuse but once it’s burning, watch out.

There’s more though.

He loves me.