Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [86]
And that’s of course where I was being less than honest with Alex. For the most part we didn’t talk about Tony when we were together, preferring to pretend he didn’t exist, but if Alex happened to mention him it was in the context of what he thought was a loveless and rapidly disintegrating marriage. I didn’t dare tell him that my husband was trying to come back to me. It was a hard enough thought for me to deal with - the very thing I’d dreamed of for years was finally happening and now I wasn’t sure I wanted it at all. I knew that if I was going to make a proper commitment to saving my marriage I would have to end my love affair, and that was not something I wanted to contemplate at this time.
***
There’s probably not much more to say about this period - well nothing that wouldn’t require a parental warning at least - except to explain how this memoir came to be. It was actually Alex’s idea.
‘I was thinking,’ I said one night, as we lay together in his bed, ‘about when we were at Melbourne airport after the launch and you got all shitty about Dr Howard making a pass at me. That was because of your ex going off with the married man wasn’t it?’
‘No - not at all. I was just jealous.’
‘Jealous of what?’
‘That you and the good doctor had so obviously hit it off.’
‘What, even then? That was way back in April.’
‘Oh yeah, completely smitten.’
‘I honestly had no idea. You are a mysterious one.’
‘Oh, you’re not going to start banging on about this man of mystery stuff again. It’s getting annoying. I’m not in the least mysterious. What you see is what you get.’
‘That’s not strictly true. What about Amanda?’
‘I’m just being professional there.’
‘Anyway, take it from me, you seemed mysterious and I’m not the only one who thought so.’
‘You and Melanie,’ he said, shaking his head like an exasperated parent.
‘At one stage I used to like to pretend you were an alien. You appeared from nowhere and seemed so perfect and nice and no-one really knew anything about you and…’
‘No, no…wind the conversation back a bit. Did you just say you imagined I was an alien?’
‘Not seriously…’
‘Oh my God, I’ve fallen in love with a madwoman!’
‘Don’t say that. I’m not mad, just a bit odd. I don’t know…I think I have a slightly skewed view of the world and maybe a more vivid imagination than most.’
‘I’d say that’d be a fair assessment,’ he said, laughing. ‘Lucky for you I find oddness very sexy in a woman.’ To prove his point he snuggled into me extra close to kiss me.
I assumed he’d forgotten all about our conversation until later that night, when he woke me up trying to extricate his arm from under my sleeping form. I stretched, still half-asleep, and blinked my eyes open to catch him sitting on the side of the bed.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked in that annoying female fashion, when the answer was fairly obvious.
He glanced over his shoulder and looking at me in an X-Files sort of way said, ‘Ah well since you are on to me I thought I’d better move my spaceship out of the garage.’
‘Oh shut up,’ I said, reaching out to give him a punch on the arm for his troubles.
‘Oww, you’ve got a hard punch for a girl.’
‘Yep, years of weight training, baby, so you better watch yourself.’
On his return I said, ‘You were planning that