Part One is here
It had been good for a year, maybe eighteen months, actually, before she spotted it. Just the slightest trace of lipstick hiding on his shirt, where they tucked into his trousers. He wasn’t even kissing them. She didn’t say anything the first time, didn’t know what to say. But when it happened again, she resolved to solve it, and find some way to keep their love alive, because it was love now. She had fallen. Her day began and ended with him, and everything she was, he kept safe.
A week later, he said he was going out with the boys, for beers after work. He was smart in so many ways, but considering he had never done this, in the year or so they had been together, it was a particularly clumsy excuse. It was a lazy excuse and that was the first time she felt the anger.
She arrived at his work, a little before five, and sat in her car, parked opposite the industrial park. Just like clockwork, bang on five, he came walking out pushing his bike, his trousers held in at the ankles with those daft little things you weren’t allowed to wear until you were at least seventy. She had brought him some lycra shorts, what everyone who rode was wearing nowadays, but he’d insisted that only show-offs and desperate wannabes wore lycra to cycle to work.
Now he pushed the bike, and swung his leg over, pedalling hard as he joined the traffic. She pulled away and fell in behind him. He wasn’t going home.
A mile or so down the road, and deep in a housing estate, he pulled up and she stopped, parking then ducking down to peer over the steering wheel. He approached a house, pulling off his cycling helmet and smoothing his hair, and knocked on the door. It was opened by a nervous looking woman, young and undeniably pretty, with long dark hair, and they talked quietly for a moment. Then the woman smiled, and opened the door wider. David stepped through the door and into another woman’s house.
Her hands was gripping the steering wheel, the knuckles white, and she banged her forehead gently against it, each thump accompanied by a word.
“fucking, asshole, fucking, fucker, how, could, he.”
She got this far, through gritted teeth, then the tears came and she curled up on the seat, trying to wrap herself up. Perhaps if she was small, it wouldn’t hurt so much. She lay like that for a few minutes, until the tears began to slow, then she abruptly sat up, punching the steering wheel so her hand hurt. Screw this. He would answer, they would both answer.
