Take a Chance on Me

Image credit: Photo by tealchic on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

When my husband and I were first falling in love (ages and ages ago), I was dating someone else. I did to my ex-boyfriend what my husband would one day do to me: betrayed him in the worst way.

Mark and I were friends, who would flirt shamelessly, until one windy night, we kissed. We promised it would never happen again. Things weren't great with my boyfriend right then, but I loved him and wanted to work things out and Mark knew that. Still, I couldn't stop thinking about Mark and the way his presence in a room went through me like electricity. So, one snowy night, not long after that windy one, I sent my boyfriend home and begged Mark to meet me. We spent the night together and (again) promised it wouldn't happen again.

Then a few weeks later, we found ourselves alone together again, and I kissed him. He stopped kissing me and got up. I thought he was going to leave me. I thought he was done with my craziness. I thought he was done being hurt by someone who couldn't stay away from him, but wouldn't leave her boyfriend for him either. I had done it. I had blown it. He didn't say a word, didn't ask me what I wanted, didn't discuss the situation, didn't know for certain what my mixed signals meant. But he took off his shirt and threw it on my floor. And I knew as the shirt slipped off that he wasn't leaving; he was staying. And he was taking the chance that I wouldn't ask him to go.

That image stayed with me through the years, like a worn photo I kept pressed to my heart. It took on different meanings, that chance he'd taken in staying. Sometimes it seemed like a sign of irresistible love and passion and sometimes a sign of our mutual illness and craziness. But in the years since learning of my husband's sex addiction, it more often seemed to be the latter.

After all, so many of the old symbols had become tainted. He had a lover whose July 4th birthday he marked with a special overseas phone call. He had used the same words to compliment me that he used to woo a woman he paid for adult video chats. He had given a stripper a rose that lay wilting on a bar in shame while she danced. And in my pain, I banned from my home some of the formerly loving symbols that misuse had transformed into the trigger of the gun pointed at my heart. No more fireworks. No more pet names. Absolutely no more flowers. Through the years, I've worked to reclaim those things for myself. I managed to take back the fireworks, but was never quite successful with the flowers. Although lately, I was feeling I was so almost there: conflicted, but wavering, where a breath might push me over.

Maybe Mark saw that, the way he saw through my conflict all those years ago when he threw his shirt on my floor. This weekend Mark went to his usual SAA meeting and picked up lunch for us on the way home as always, but to my surprise, he walked through the door this time with more than lunch; he carried a dozen roses in full bloom: red and pink and yellow. And I felt like I was watching him again, taking off his shirt, leaving himself open and vulnerable and showing that he was staying at the same time. When I asked him why he had gone against the five year ban on flowers, he said, "Every week, when I drive home from my meeting, I pass the same little flower stand, and every week I want to bring some home to you. This week, I thought I'd take a chance."

"I'm so glad you did," I said.