Now that Ben was prepared to hurl that image at me in anger, in threat, I realized I had given away my privacy as though it were any other belonging that someone might borrow and return. But there is no going back once your body, your hidden self, your sense of personal space has whooshed off to somebody else’s phone, somebody else’s memory card.
“You wouldn’t…” My legs began to tremble beneath the sticky table, jerking like a puppet’s on strings. “If you love me…” I whispered.
“I do love you,” he said briskly. “But you’re mine. He’s always taking what’s mine.”
My heart went cold to hear the phrase Dan and I had chosen to be engraved inside our wedding rings come out of his mouth. Ben made it sound far more sinister than I had ever realized it might.
I remembered then, dimly, the story of some girl they’d both liked at the nearby girls’ school. Ben had gotten so wasted at the Christmas disco she’d come to that he passed out and woke up to find that Dan had been the one to claim a snog at the end of the night. Was I revenge for that?
As I stood up, I thought I might vomit. I had never felt so unsafe. Not in the way of physical harm but as though I had drunk bleach, some brew that would turn me inside outside, burn my secrets to the surface, rip through the identity I had created for myself and, yes, for Dan too. Everything was at stake; I was being flayed alive in that bar, only nobody else could see. The people at the other tables around me simply went on eating their bruschetta and drinking their wine.
I staggered out of there as if he had poisoned me.
—
Ben stepped it up a notch after that. I made plans every weekend, pleaded important wedding stuff, to ensure that I wouldn’t end up in his company again, but Dan would still invite him round for dinner, or he’d stop by on the pretense of needing to collect something he’d left at our flat. I couldn’t bear the way he appraised me from head to toe, like some medical specimen, while Dan wasn’t looking.
“Hello, beautiful,” he’d say if Dan was out of the room. Or he’d find a reason to follow me when I left a room, then push himself close and whisper in my ear.
Ben acted as if the affair he’d threatened to tell Dan about was still going on.
He sent me the first photo over email while I was at work, and I leaped back from my desk so fast I sent my chair clattering to the floor. I closed the window on my screen, righted the chair before anyone could come to help, then locked myself in a toilet cubicle to look at the message on my phone.
Me, on a bed. A bed surrounded by the brushed steel fixtures and fittings that denote five-star accommodations. I was asleep and naked in a funny pink half-light that I eventually realized was dawn. The sun rises in Bangkok, another woman makes an error of judgment with a man she barely knows.
“I have more,” the accompanying message said. “And they are worse. Do you want Dan to see them? Do you want the world to?”
I went home from work early that day and lay on my and Dan’s bed—squashy, soft, and comforting, unlike the clinical starched and pressed sheets on the one in the picture—until Dan arrived home. I resolved to tell him everything and beg his forgiveness. When I heard the front door open, I rushed along the corridor in my pajamas, frenzied for the relief that the truth would bring—and found he’d brought Ben with him.
“Thought I’d make a curry,” my fiancé said, kissing me on the cheek and hanging his coat up on a hook in our hallway, crowded as always with his bike and my shoes.
“A nice hot one please,” Ben said, mocking me with his eyes, and using the squeeze of the space as an excuse to press against me as he walked past. “Just like in Bangkok.”
I told them I was ill and lay in our back bedroom with the lights off as they cooked together, ate, and drank wine, reminiscing about their school days. Their laughs erupted only a few yards away as silent tears soaked into my pillow. Even after Ben went home, the jolt I had felt at seeing him on my doorstep—inside my home—left me too sick and scared, too intimidated, to tell Dan the truth.
Ben began emailing every day, pleas and then threats. He said I was running out of time to see sense, that soon he would have no choice but to put the photos online. Dan was his friend, after all; he couldn’t let him marry a woman like me.
It was Ben who began to turn up outside my office, not Dan. Lurking in a side street until I appeared, like some sneaky after-dark animal—the sort that goes through your bins while you sleep and leaves your own rubbish strewn around your garden, making a display of the things you thought you’d discarded for everybody to see.
He’d scoop me up by the crook of my arm and steer me into pubs or bars down quiet side streets, where he’d lay siege to my confidence and assault my defenses over drinks I either could hardly force down or drank far too much of to try to drown him out. When that tack didn’t work, Ben launched a lunchtime campaign to bring me round to him and to being with him, showing up outside my favorite sandwich shop near the office. I loathed him more every time I saw him.
I began to change my routes to and from my workplace, and arrived home exhausted
