No One Tells You Why Work Affairs Are Dangerous (Part 2)
Work liaisons are a constant temptation when you are in an unhappy marriage and you have an office spouse.
I watched Jessica leave longingly.
I wanted more time in her beat-up Toyota before heading into my “real” life. My nightly ritual of bathing the kids, helping with dinner, and watching boring-ass TV shows with Sarah, my wife.
Backstory
Six years prior, Sarah and I’d met at work when she was transferred to Chicago to work out of the Naperville office of my former company, where I was the Operations Manager. Sarah, who I would later determine was a professional-grade narcissist sent directly by Satan, was nothing like Jessica. Sarah was gorgeous and already very successful in her career. She was also a supermom capable of multitasking at levels that were mind-blowing.
For five years (2 dating, 2 married), we’d managed a very dynamic and passionate (also tumultuous) relationship complete with sex in each other’s offices at work, sex on lunch breaks at the park; blowjobs in colleague’s basements when we attended their parties and sex repeatedly on the sixth floor of our office building which seemed to always been delayed in its remodel. We had amazing physical and intellectual chemistry but were two different people with completely different tastes in movies, books, and music.
We also argued constantly, and our dynamic ran very hot and cold.
I’d had my eye on her for months, but she worked on the opposite side of the 4th floor from my office in a completely different department. We’d only occasionally see each other in the break room or during company town hall meetings. She was also nine years younger than me and in a relationship with her live-in boyfriend.
One Friday night out at a bar to celebrate one of the company VP’s birthdays, we sat next to each other at the bar. After four hours of shots, laughs, and witty conversation, she invited me back to her house. After a crazy night of really good, really well-synced, drunken sex, we began dating.
Two years later, we were married and quickly began procreating. For a long time, I thought I’d really lucked out in finding this amazing woman who was intelligent, high energy, gorgeous, successful, and super sex partner in crime who just wanted to make babies with me, but eventually, the narrative began to shift.
As per the standard narcissist cycle, shortly after we got married, the love-bombing ceased and was replaced with the devaluation stage. This was before I knew of narcissism as anything more than a person who was extra self-absorbed — I didn’t know about narcissist personality disorders (NPD), and each phase of the recurring cycle achieved her desired outcome — my confidence, sense of self-worth, and sanity all began to wane over the numerous cycles I endured during the course of our marriage.
Shortly after she became pregnant with our son, Jack, she decided our marriage was broken beyond repair and that she needed to move back home to St Louis. Two months later, she’d moved with our son in her belly.
Problems
The world no longer felt real to me. The narcissist knows exactly what they are doing, and eventually, the very things they once claimed to adore about you become the very core of their reasons for leaving you in the dust, which creates enough cognitive dissonance to make a person — in this case, ME — feel completely insane.
Shortly after Jack was born, when I was at a point where I’d do anything to keep my family together and to get Sarah back, she slid the dial from the ‘discard’ setting to the ‘re-engaging’ setting.
Long story short, she got me to move to St Louis.
We had another child, my daughter Rachel, and the cycles kept recurring. My self-esteem was sinking despite my career going well because each time I thought I knew what was going on, she’d change the dial and fuck my head completely up again.
When Rachel was about a year old and Jack was three, I was starting to wise up to something being amiss in my relationship with Sarah. Had I known what NPD was, I imagine it could have helped me regain sanity quicker, but that never happened.
But once I met Jessica, something in me shifted.
About a month after Jessica started working at my company, she called me after work while I was driving home. It was the first time she’d ever called me since we exchanged numbers the night she drove me home when my car wouldn’t start.
“Hey — want to hear some crazy shit?!” she asked after I picked up her call.
“Sure — hit me,” I said as I pulled onto the highway.
“Well, apparently, there’s a nasty rumor circulating about us at work.”
“About us?” I asked with a mixture of slight disbelief, slight concern, and slight excitement.
“Yes. It turns out you and I have been fucking in the parking garage after work!” she said with a giggle.
I could feel a big smile forming on my face. She was full of shit and was making it up — this was a major signal. “Is that so? How scandalous!” I exclaimed with feigned shock and disbelief.
“I mean, it could be worse, I suppose. I can think of worse things than fucking you in the parking garage…” She’d lowered her voice on the last sentence so that it was almost inaudible.
“Did you just say — -” I began to ask before she cut me off and said,
“Whoops, that’s my Mom, gotta run! Talk to you soon!” she said quickly before hanging up on me.
Jessica and I never did anything or even spoke of the vibe we’d maintained since that first handshake until a year later.
Jessica was super intelligent and super ambitious. Within a year, she’d gone from invoice auditor to lead invoice auditor to me recruiting her to work in Operations, and not because I wanted to feel her sweet lips on mine, kissing me while my cock sat nestled inside her magical silky friction — her wet delight— I honestly wanted her skillset and drive on my team because I knew she was that good.
And to this point, there’s no active power dynamic that I feel was unethical — there was nobody better for the role I had in mind for Jessica in the entire company — she was special, and I was not actively sustaining active hunger for her sex. I’d managed to mitigate the effects of her allure for that full year. Jessica deserved the new job role, and it was going to be hers whether we were ever to sleep together or not.
Shortly after her promotion and transfer to my team, we had a weeklong business trip to upstate New York — all by car, and my efforts to put out the fire of my lust and desire for her would begin to fail.
Find out in the next installment.
Here’s Part One for those who missed it:
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