Ubong - The Run Series

I don’t know how it happened, but the signs were all there. Muffled chuckles and giggles. Her phone glowing in the dark. A new spring to her step. She had started to take time with her clothes and make up again. She was dieting and running just as much.

Something, or someone, was putting color in her life again.

Apparently, they had met at a work event. Something super random, given that he wasn’t in her circle - work or otherwise - but his international flight had been cancelled and rather than go back home, he had taken the decision to stay nearer the airport, at the inn her office was using for the Christmas party.

She wasn’t very social so she had wandered to the pool where she had bumped into him. The connection was instant. They talked late into the night and even though they didn’t exchange numbers, she never wanted that night to end. It had been a while she’d had such cerebral conversations around women, empowerment, poetry and music with another man. She knew this had the potential to be a treasured friendship.

A couple of days later when he started liking everything she posted on her social media accounts, she also began to ‘look him up’. She scoured all his accounts. Looked at all his pictures. He had a pretty wife and lovely kids. He was evidently into his family. And funny. And good looking. In that tall, dark and unassuming confident manner.

She didn’t mean to, but slowly and soon, the potential friendship she wanted wavered, and she began wonder, and dream, and see signs where there were none. Where she wanted there to be. She wanted that night back. She wanted more.

The tide changed when she posted that it was her 40th birthday and he surprised her by bringing a cake to her office. She could hardly control her excitement. And the rush she felt when he hugged her and his lips brushed against her cheek. She held on to him much longer than she had meant to, and like telepathy, he could tell instantly when he looked deep into her eyes. She wanted him. Badly. And led her away….

He had taken her away from work to a hotel nearby, and wordlessly, he had peeled away all her inhibitions and fidelity, and taken her. Gently at first, and deliberately twice more. Because she had asked him to.

That day, after going back to her office, she, it was, who called him and made plans for the next day. And since then, all through the pandemic and as the contagion eased, they had met once a day every other week in different parts of the city to live out her desires.

He wasn’t using her. No.

She wanted this just as much. Even more. But she would never have the guts to say it and she was thankful for the providence that brought them together. It had been years she had been touched at home.

Years.

And even though she told herself it was just sex, she had started to catch feelings.

The feelings were intense.

And being the poet she was, she started to document them. She had a folder she saved all his messages. And her responses.

A journal of their 15 month affair.

The steamy texts.

The even steamier poems.

She shared her deepest secrets with him.

Of being in a loveless marriage.

Of having not been held in so long.

Of not remembering what it felt like to be made love to. So passionately and so wildly.

She even had a sub-folder she created to save things he’d written and pictures she copied from his social media.

I couldn’t even be upset as I read them all.

I should have seen it coming. 

I had ignored her for too long.

He will make everything right in His own time.

For now, let me go for a run to clear my head…