Scandal in his arms

Before touching the door, I knew something was wrong.

The feeling started in my stomach and slowly spread. Soft laughter floated out. It was a woman's, followed by his, low and easy, the laugh he would use to get people to like him.

I opened the door.

Red stilettos were on the coat rack. They were sharp, expensive. Definitely not mine. The Achard cologne he always wore mixed with a strange perfume filled the room. A silky blue scarf was tied to the back of a chair.

The Bedroom door was open half way. I headed there.

The people in our bed were her and Liam.

The woman covered her naked body with a silk sheet. She was probably younger than me. She was more composed then me, more put together, more polished. Liam was nearly asleep against the wall, gray T-shirt still on and looking bored.

"Valerie, you're back early," he said.

There was a part of me that had spent the last three years making excuses that suddenly stopped.

"Who is she?" The naked woman asked looking pained and confused. "I think she's going to pass out."

"She's my girlfriend," Liam said, looking bored. "Don't worry. She won't do anything."

He still had the look on his face of a kid being yelled at and asked what he thinks he'll do about it this time.

"You bring them home now?" My voice was weaker than I wanted it to be.

Liam let out a long sigh, like I was the inconvenience. "You're never here, always working those little jobs. What do you expect? A man gets lonely."

For three years, I had covered for his lies, kept our lights on with double shifts that I came home too late from. I'd tell myself the coldness in his voice was stress. Every lie and every sullen voice note from Liam meant three more years of me forgiving him. This time, he brought the other woman to the bed.

"We've been together for three years. Three years of me forgiving you. And somehow I'm still the one who should apologize?"

The woman began to shift, clearly uncomfortable now. Liam merely looked amused.

"You always make everything dramatic."

The first time he caught me, he cried, and he said it meant nothing. The second time, he took me out for dinner and bought flowers. After the third time, he got drunk, and started to blame the alcohol for it. Ever since then, he stopped apologizing to me. He didn't need to. I always stayed.

Because there was nowhere else to go.

Because since Liam was my only safety line after my father's business failed and everything else disintegrated, I kept myself dependent, mistaking it for love. I could no longer tell the difference.

I approached the table by the door to place the spare key, which he gave me many years ago when I thought this apartment could one day become something secure. I could feel my hands begin to shake as I placed the key on the table and heard it gently click. He began to sit up.

"So you're leaving?"

This time, I would not give him the satisfaction of seeing me cry, so I packed in silence.

From the closet, I pulled out my small suitcase that I had been keeping hidden behind my clothes. Two pairs of jeans, a few cottons, my charger, and my docs folder which I hid on the bottom most part of my suitcase. It holds all of my most valued papers, my birth certificate and the last documents of my Dad (he's not here anymore), and all of the papers I refused to surrender to him.

My client watched in silence as I finished packing. I was planning on taking a lot more, but urgency won this time.

"You'll calm down this time too," I heard Liam say, with confidence returning to his voice. "You always do. Where are you even going to go?"

He truly believed that I would come back this time, tired as usual, defeated, accepting whatever version of him I would be able to tolerate, rather than being forced to face the world on my own.

This time though, he was wrong.

I closed my bag, and just as I grabbed the handle, the woman spoke for the first time.

"I didn't know he had a girlfriend."

I looked at her for the first time. There was an awkwardness to her, an almost guilty feeling. There was nothing to hate her for. I never hated any of the women he was with, it was always about him. He made me feel small, let him.

"It's fine." I said while acknowledging how small I felt.

Liam made a difficult to appreciate eye roll. "This is not a murder situation, can we just stop acting like it is."

When he said that, it made it easier to leave.

"She'll be back." He said right before I left. "You always come back and I'll be here."

He was right, I had nowhere else to go.

I started closing the bedroom door behind me when the dizziness started. I leaned against the wall when he tried pushing me forward.

I kept telling myself the stress caused all the exhaustion, along with the numerous late shifts. But there was an envelope that I completely ignored in my purse all day.

The results were in.

Finally being told face to face was better than dealing with a phone call to answer the question I was putting off. Now all I had to deal with was the new heartbeat in one of the pockets of my bag.

I put my hand on my stomach without any control of the situation. The fear that had been lingering in the background finally came front and center.

Suddenly, Liam cheating on me wasn't the worst thing that could happen this night.

If the test was positive, I would be stuck with him for good.

Empty street in both directions. I took my pick on direction and got moving with the luggage knocking against my shin at every step.

I lingered a little unnecessarily, the luggage pulling on my arm, and surrounded by the thick night. The hardest part was the leaving; I now needed to figure how to keep going.

Out in the night air, it was cooler than expected and I had a luggage in my hand and no plan, stand on the sidiawk with no going back upstairs; no longer an option I could bare to do in the morning.

Leaving felt almost unnatural. I was so used to making myself small that every step away from the building felt second guessed even when I made it.

A pair of people went passed me, laughing at a joke I could not hear, their voices almost seemed to belong to a completely different life. I clung to the edge of the luggage and started walking.

The luggage bit into my palm and I walked till the building was fully behind me with the street now stretched out in front of me. I was going nowhere but I had made certain that staying there would have meant I lost myself.