Chapter 12

We met for brunch on Sunday at noon. We were both early, in case you're wondering. However, at this first meeting I insisted that we were not going to get back together immediately, if at all. I told her that we were going to start over and date for at least two weeks before we made any decision to start over again. I don't know why I chose two weeks. I was just an arbitrary number that popped into my head.

Quite frankly, I was still leery of her. I didn't know if I could ever trust her again. In fact, during the first week I found myself looking at her sometimes and wondering if I had ever truly known this woman. Those feelings disappeared after a while.

We saw each other every day. Usually it was just for dinner, but once we went to a movie. After a few dates outside the home, I allowed her to come to the house so we could include the children. She wanted to prepare meals but I wouldn't let her. We ate take-out and the children usually made the choices. Jill and Jack were always glad to see Colleen and constantly asked her when she would be well enough to come back home to sleep. Her response was always, "Soon, I hope."

Lots of tears were shed during the renewal period, and a lot of soul-searching confessions were made. So much so that I felt we had probably purged enough dregs from our souls to fill the whole of wherever dregs go.

Colleen cried and apologized several times for the way she had humiliated me that Saturday night. She explained that Bill had convinced her that I wasn't being truthful with her about how things were going at Audiomart. He had painted a bleak picture of my future there and had convinced her that I was actually failing at my job. One thing he cited as evidence was my diminishing sales. He also lied and told her that Chris was not very happy with me. By the time he finished, she was scared, angry and convinced that I had been lying to her all along. He also made her believe that things were only going to get worse.

I asked Colleen if Bill had ever encouraged her leave me. She said he hadn't. He had only tried to convince her that having sex with him would be a good thing to prove her sense of self-worth and independence. She confessed that she couldn't talk about their conversations at the party because she was too ashamed to admit that they had already talked about sex. Well, actually, Bill had talked about sex. It came about when he brought up the subject of his sexual prowess and suggested he was very good in bed. She thought he was too egotistical when he told her that she would enjoy what he had to offer. She also confessed that when he met her at our house that afternoon, he had compared her beauty to that of Julia Roberts, and he told her that he could tell by the way she carried her body that she could please him in bed. It was then that what he was saying had begun to fit a pattern she didn't like. Then, when we talked that Wednesday night, all that I told her began to make sense, even though it took a bit longer for her to accept that his intentions toward her were almost purely sexual. She foolishly thought he valued her as more than just a sexual being. How wrong she was.

I asked her, "Did that excite you when he compared you with Julia?"

She said that it made her feel good to be thought of like that. "However," she added, "only a blind person would not realize that it was just another of his attempts to flatter me. I may have been a fool, but I certainly hadn't gone blind yet."