Destiny fought to keep the expression on her face neutral, but on the inside she was freaking out. There's no way, she thought.
"A collar," Brian repeated. "The kind that you would put on a dog. Or a cat. A pet of some kind. Just thrown in with her necklaces, like it was a piece of jewelry. Now...I'm a very direct man, so I asked her about it all. Outright."
"Wh-what did she say?" Destiny stammered, nervously picking up her wine glass and taking a sip from it.
"That they were gifts she received from a bachelorette party."
That's actually halfway believable, she thought. "Did you believe her?"
Looking at Destiny with narrowed eyes, he shook his head slowly. "No."
She stared at him for a long moment.
He was the first to tear his gaze away. "I wanted to know where she was going, so one night I followed her. Of course, it turned out that her girls' night out stories were bullshit. She wasn't hanging out with her girls. She was running off to meet a man. Every single time. Later I found out that he would call her or text her, while she and I were together. And she would drop everything and go. No questions asked, she would just think up an excuse to give me and she would go to him."
Destiny could feel her blood freezing in her veins. She had questions, but not the courage to ask them.
He chuckled and shook his head. "I was an idiot. When she was going out almost every night, I should have put my foot down. Or I should have broken up with her. Something. I kept holding onto her."
"Why?" Destiny asked him. "Why would you hold onto her if she was rarely ever around?"
His eyes glistened with unshed tears. "Because I loved her," he answered simply. "I loved her and I remembered what it felt like when she loved me. And in my head, I told myself that we would get back to that. I summed up her going out to a midlife crisis she was having. Maybe she wanted to just feel young again for awhile. I don't know. Whenever she fucked up, I justified it in my mind."
Destiny lowered her gaze and stared down at her hands. "That's horrible."
"I think...I think I wanted to settle down so badly, that I made up excuses for her. For the longest time, before she and I started dating, I was living this single bachelor lifestyle. It got old. I wanted to have a real relationship with someone, and Sharon and I clicked so well. She was...funny, and beautiful, and intelligent, and... everything I wanted in a wife."
"Except for the fact that she was unfaithful," Destiny said.
He nodded and picked up his wine glass. "Yeah, there was that."
"When you followed her, where did she end up going?" Destiny asked him in a tiny voice.
"Not important."
She raised her eyes and stared at him. "Yes, it is."
"Destiny..."
"She ended up going to a place that I'm familiar with," Destiny said softly.
He polished off the last of his wine and poured more into his glass. "She was going to meet with Aubrey. Yes."
Destiny drew back with a gasp. "She was cheating on you with Aubrey?"
"He...didn't know that she and I were together," Brian explained. "She didn't want to keep her relationship with me a secret because she was afraid of people thinking that she was sleeping her way to the top. She wanted to keep her relationship with me a secret because she had her eyes on Aubrey all along. She didn't want him to know that she and I were dating. After everything was all said and done, she and I had a very in-depth talk about everything. And it turns out that Aubrey has some very...interesting hobbies."
God. He knows. He knows what Aubrey is into. Which means he probably knows the kinds of things that Aubrey and I have done. He's probably known this entire time.
"I seem to have this habit, of falling for women who fall for Aubrey," Brian said, setting his glass back down on the table. "Sharon. Bridgette. You."
Destiny's eyes widened. "You and Bridgette?"
"It wasn't anything serious. It was obvious pretty early on that Aubrey was the man she really wanted."
"How can you...how can you still work for Aubrey, after experiences like that?" she asked him. "How can you be friends with him?"
"The word 'friends' is a stretch," Brian told her. "He and I don't talk about our girl problems, or confess our deepest darkest secrets to each other or anything like that. He's just...a colleague that I admire. We enjoy hanging out once in a blue moon. Otherwise, we shave a mutual obsession with our work."
"You told him about the day you met me in the diner," she pointed out.
A smile teased his lips. "True. I mean...he and I work together, and sometimes shit just comes up, you know? And that day, I was...excited, after meeting you."
"So you find out that she's meeting up with Aubrey...then what?" Destiny asked, glossing over his sentimental statement. She didn't want to go down that road with him. Talking about the feelings he had for her would just cause more confusion to an already messy situation.
"I spoke to Aubrey about it before talking to her about it."
"What did he say?"
"He was surprised that she was seeing someone. She told him that she was single."
"So...he agreed to stop seeing her, then."
Brian stared at her for a long time. "Storytime is over for tonight. We were supposed to be talking about your feelings, not digging into the past. The past is irrelevant."
"I want to know, Brian."
"Then ask your boyfriend," he told her flatly.
"I can't, remember?" she threw back at him, her voice thick with emotion.
He stroked his jaw in contemplation. "Aubrey agreed to stop seeing her, yes."
Destiny exhaled, releasing a breath she hadn't even known she was holding.
"But..." Brian turned his eyes and stared into blank space. "But he continued to see her behind my back."
"What?"
"He continued to see her, even after he knew that she and I were together. She kept sneaking off to see him. Like a dummy, I let it happen. It was just a phase, right? She would come to her senses and realize that I was the man she should settle down with. At least, that's what I told myself. Until I couldn't take it anymore." He started on his second glass of wine. "I blew up at her one night. It got... very ugly. I threw her shit outside and kicked her out. I told her I never wanted to see her again. Then I got drunk, and I called Aubrey and called him...all sorts of shit. I went on an absolute rampage. I let him have it. The next morning, when I woke up, I was quite sure that he was going to fire me when I went into work. But he didn't. He pretended like nothing had even happened. Which...I really don't understand, even to this day. Maybe he figured that he deserved the verbal beating I gave him. I don't know."
Destiny shook her head. "Aubrey wouldn't do something like that. He wouldn't continue seeing her, knowing that she was your girlfriend."
"Are you sure about that?" Brian asked her, looking down at the liquid swirling around in his glass.
"Yes," she said emphatically.
Brian laughed dryly. "See...you think that because you got to meet the new and improved Aubrey. Before you, Aubrey was...he was a beast."