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You are on board a plane back to the city. It is a bright, sunny mid-morning. The peanuts taste like dry timber. The in-flight magazines are unreadable and you are so awake - that breakfast coffee was a bad idea.
Carol is also awake. She is seated by the window pretending to admire the clouds beneath, but really, she is avoiding the discussion. The post-mortem of the short vacation that you just had. It is the hour of reckoning.
Will she just let it go or keep talking to the boyfriend in Germany? Will the ‘affair’ you just had dramatically change her life? Bad enough, you are stuck with her to know the outcome. There were days when women used to feel some sense of guilt when they cheated.
But lately you are encountering a whole new species of women who cheat and walk away without any guilt.
You see them in your office. Married women make passes at you. Girls with boyfriends, in stable relationship, no less, keep throwing themselves at you. You have now learnt the art of warding off the attention. If anything, it has made you very skeptical about relationships.
You have slept with a number and you wonder if Karma will come to bite you. You are not getting any younger. There is always a bad boy lurking somewhere; younger, stronger and probably loaded.
As a man, you often ponder about these things, but you soon consign them to a corner of your mind and forget. But what about the woman. Carol seems to be gnawed by certain thoughts. You decide to go first.
“Are you OK?”
“Yes, I am fine,” she says. It is curt and non-engaging.
“Maybe we should another one. I am thinking of Valentine’s Day, it falls on a Sunday, terrible day, but still...”
Silence. She completely ignores it and goes back to her thoughts. Neither talks for the rest of the journey. At the airport, you take a taxi and as soon as you turn on your phone, Cindy has been looking for you.
You read the ‘I tried calling message” from her and before you can digest it, she calls. You look at it long enough, the ringtone is loud but you are not aware, until Carol asks you, almost instinctively?
“Who is calling?”
“Cindy.” You tell.
You look at each other, guilt, remorse, betrayal, and a host of other emotions run through your eyes. “Just ignore it,” she snarls. There is a certain cold resentment to her voice. A certain painstaking finality. It is like she has had it with Cindy. She sulks and slumps in the back seat. A minute later, Cindy texts.
“Hey, dear, wassup! You have been ignoring my messages. And Carol hasn’t picked my call. Hope, you guys are OK...May come by sometime in the week, if you are OK with it.”
Women with clues and mind games! It is like she has sensed a sudden change of plans, and she wants to find out. That, “..been ignoring me” and “Carol hasn’t picked my call” say so much about her fear. Much as Carol wants to run away from this, the answer to it, has to come from the two of you. You pass her the phone. She shrugs.
“We have to answer her really quick,” you suggest. Another shrug.
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