Dance With Me Through This Rain

These days I call my wife every morning despite our separation. She's been diagnosed with ALS. I've talked about it a little in prior posts. She's dying an excruciatingly horrible death very slowly. She's terrified. This morning she was sobbing about the depth of her tragedy and then all of a sudden stopped. She blurted, "I probably shouldn't tell you this." Oh come on, I said, what?

She told me about the college senior daughter of friends of ours who had been an intern in my office three years ago. College Senior is a very smart, ambitious, lovely young woman who I had just the other week had lunch with and talked with about getting a job in the legal field so she could get practical experience before going to law school.

During her internship College Senior had become BFFs with a former employee of mine. Former Employee, a seemingly cool woman, and I had also become extraordinarily good friends. I told Former Employee almost all my secrets. Suffice it to say, Former Employee knew all about my kink.

Former Employee moved back home last year and College Senior interned with Former Employee's new office and lived with Former Employee last summer. "She was like my big sister", College Senior told me over lunch.

Anyway, enough backstory. Wife says this morning that Former Employee (let's just call her Asshole) apparently told College Senior about my bdsm proclivities. My wife knew this because College Senior was so freaked out that before meeting me for lunch to get my take on the job market, she had confided in an adult friend of ours, one of my wife's BFFs, and mother of one of College Senior's best friends, that College Senior was weirded out to be having lunch with a pervert.

Suffice it to say I was enraged at Asshole Former Employee and sent her a text to that effect. I probably shouldn't have. Asshole Former Employee denied telling College Senior I'm a perv and then blamed College Senior and I for creating drama in her already stressed out life.

Is that just breathtaking or what?

Asshole Former Employee tells 20 year old College Senior a secret and confidence I trusted Asshole Former Employee with, lies point blank about it, and then blames College Senior and I for complicating her life. I suppose I have one less so-called friend to worry about.

I often wonder what I might do if my blog was discovered by my wife. Or discovered by the New York Post. Or I somehow got publicly outted. I like to think I'd just own it and say it's something I love, am proud of and is private. I hope I'd say get a life and move on. But telling a 20 year old kid who didn't ask to be burdened with the private confidence and doesn't have the life experience to process it just seemed the height of deeply flawed judgement.

People who aren't us don't understand us. Liberal, consenting, sophisticated adults don't understand us. Why would you out a friend to a kid? I suppose it's a reminder that so much of the world views our thing as such a dirty little secret that we truly do have to be constantly vigilant about who we confide in.

"Cause we all have a darker side
A place we keep where no one else will find"