by Dorse Green
Tate realized that there was no way he was going to get Lynn's full attention, so he asked her, as calmly as possible, why she had to say something about the two of them to someone knowing him to be Angela’s sister's boyfriend? Then it was as if everything went quiet. An unexpected reaction of pure rage came from Lynn that the only response that Tate could get out was to hang up the phone. He went back to his night expecting a text, or a call shortly after, but his phone stayed silent. Days went by and it eventually became weeks. Still, there was no sign of Lynn. Assuming he was in the clear of what could have been a very bad decision was a major relief.
Months later, while standing at the bar ordering drinks and being acquainted by the presence of a soft touch, Tate was stunned by the reappearance of Lynn as if nothing had ever happened and everything had been forgotten. He showed no remorse as if she did not exist and continued on with the orders of his drinks. Lynn stood at a distance with hopes that their presence would gravitate, but nonetheless, she was highly mistaken. It appeared that Tate could never be satisfied with just one girl. Why company himself with other girls when he has everything he could ever ask for was a question he had for himself after every encounter.
At the age of 24, Tate was blessed with a newly born baby girl, a 10-month-old baby girl and the mother of his children that adored him faithfully.
She questioned his behavior given the many good things he had going on, yet it seemed like it wasn’t enough for him. Questioning Tate's actions in the past lead to pain and regret. His response to questioning his actions was something of pure ugliness. He felt if he was being questioned, the one doing so already knew the answer to the question. So why not tell you what you did not want to hear.
Overtime, after interacting with other girls, Tate started noticing things out of the ordinary – things happening that led him to believe that Angela was doing things subtly to make him aware of his actions. Giving his time to other girls led to unexpected occurrences. Hiding pictures of a girl that Tate placed in the backpack that he carried with him to work every night.
Arriving to work and viewing the photos, he found something very disturbing. The photos were slightly torn down the center and circles from a marker were in the girl's face. Unable to contain his anger because of what he was seeing, he picked up the phone and made a phone call to Angela. His voice tone was harsh. “Why are you going through my backpack?”
The Hunt For Tate Begins
So, yes, that was me living my life up there. I accompanied myself with girls like it was no man’s business, I did not feel a thing for them. Angela lived with me, as you have read, but I still had little respect for her when it came to cheating. Instead of me taking a more apologetic way of talking to her after discovering that I no longer had full privacy with my photos, I went all mad at her. I still don’t know if that was a good idea. Nevertheless, as I shouted at her after discovering that someone knows about my photos in the backpack, I was in the dark about the things that were to come. I am sure you are reading and calling me all sorts of names for not being able to anticipate what then befell me in the coming months of my life.
But who could have anticipated such a thing? I mean, it’s one thing to hide things from your girl, and it’s another thing to suspect that someone is about to start stalking you.
Going back to the day I saw that my lovely photos had been tampered with, Angela was confused as she responded to me over the phone. According to her, she knew nothing about them and who would have tampered with them. In fact, she went on and blamed our daughter for that. But how could a one-year-old know how to circle the face of a girl in a photo? That, for me, was utter nonsense! I just couldn’t understand how our daughter could have managed to do that. More so, the fact that the photos were tampered with and then placed back in the bag made me suspect Angela more while disregarding her reasoning that it could have been our daughter’s fault that I now had marked photos in my bag.
“By the way, why do you have photos of another girl in your bag?” Angela’s question just came from out of the blue and caught me unaware. “Damn, she’s so good!” I said in my heart while the rage was still going on. I bet she could feel myself breathing over the phone. But as usual, I was never going to satisfy her with panic or another half-baked response. My voice had to show her that I am still the man in her life.
“So why wouldn’t she just talk to me rather than going over my stuff and putting weird marks on them?” I was assuming that she already knew what was in my bag, but instead of talking to me first, she decided to take matters into her own hands. However, I think about these things and now understand her reasoning. I mean, I was never the type of a person that my girl would sit down and sort of ‘talk’ to me about my issues. That would have just made things worse. So, if she was scared of talking to me about my issues, I really understand her for doing that.
This kind of attitude helped me get past many tricky situations with my girls. It was gold for me. At first, it’s something I would do on purpose, not meaning it to hurt anyone, but just some slick move I would use to get myself in the ‘safe zone’, but as time passed, I discovered that I started doing it out of rage. And the rage was because I felt that I was always right and therefore deserved to be treated as a saint. See the irony! I was never a saint in all my dealings with my girls. I know, this contributed so much to what I ended up suffering, but still, no one deserves the kind of stuff I went through as someone tried their best to send a message, or rather get their revenge on my past mistakes.
Nevertheless, I was mad at Angela for my photos, but that was just the beginning of the whole story.
I went through a lot of pain because I was in the habit of quickly getting fed-up with a relationship. If there is one thing I have observed in life, when women commit, they do so with all their love and they want something fruitful – even something they can rely on going into the future. But for me, I was always in it for very short periods of time. What makes matters worse is the kind of charm I would use to get them over the top. They would, therefore, fully fall for me because of all the nice things I promise them on the first day. But a couple of sexual encounters later all that promised passion would be slowly waning. I hate to even think about that, but it happened and here I am!
Sometimes I would sit down and ask myself, how does one show full attraction when meeting someone for the first time and then days later, get absolutely no interest from that person? I couldn’t understand for the life of me how someone could lose interest in me days later with no warning of exit, so I picked up the phone and started dialing numbers of those I had affairs with in search of an explanation. Contacting these girls as if they were personal projects needing to ease my mind. Nevertheless, I still needed answers and I had the nerve to pick up the phone to call one of my exes because I wanted to find ‘closure’. Absurd as it sounds, I needed to do that because it had gotten to the point where it was starting to eat me up. Eventually, I became more certain that something extreme was definitely taking place. It wasn’t just something I was doing out of utter mischief, there had to be something wrong in this whole equation.
As I continued to make these calls, when they did, I would pause, take a deep breath as if I just lost focus and suddenly forgot why I was making these calls in the first place. But the truth is that I feared that the answer I may receive would be adverse. You know, for someone as arrogant as I am, I am always scared of getting a response that wouldn’t suit my agenda. I always want to have things my way even if I am not the one in charge. So as I called them, I still expected to get the kind of responses I wanted. I was so scared of getting something contrary to that, but it was very much possible.
It was unusual to be calling girls and ask if anyone had called them and asked about me. So, as I asked the girls if anyone had called and asked about me, the response was the same, “No.” It became like an old record playing in my ears as I moved from one girl that picked up my phone call to the next. On that day, I
realized I had done something seriously wrong. Or, I could have reminded someone how bad I was to them, and they started cooking up a plan to get their revenge against me. It was after making these calls that the stalking started to intensify. At first, I could not describe it as stalking because I had nothing like that in mind, so I thought they were just pranks pursued by someone who knows me. So I waited for the day they would reveal themselves to me and we both laughed about it, but it never came. So I decided to write about it.
Nevertheless, I found strength to ignore all these ‘pranks’ and decided to live my life in full. I went away from home, and I felt like I was free to do whatever I wanted. Freedom was something I really loved. It is the reason why I used to be arrogant and not want any girl to tell me what to do – because I always wanted to be free. So here, while away from home, I had every reason to explore my freedom and use it anyhow I wanted. There was no eye staring in my direction, and that meant enormous freedom to do whatever I wanted while ignoring those calls and so forth.
I grew to become a ‘social maniac’ if there’s anything like that. Socializing with numerous girls came natural for me, especially given such an environment of huge temptation. I had no worries of having to explain my current relationships because the distance made me untouchable, so I thought. But you know, the world is big enough to hide your shenanigans until someone who knows you, spots you in a compromising position. It happened to me and I had no idea when it did. That’s when I discovered that it really is a small world we live in.
I was surprised to receive a phone call from Angela about a phone call she received concerning some of my nightly interactions with another girl. According to Angela, these interactions felt threatening as her informant had described it to her. For her to ask me like that, she must have been told how bad the situation looked because like I said, I wasn’t the easy type to approach, especially where accusations were involved. So she must have been so sure of what she wanted to ask me before making that phone call. So, by just getting that kind of a call from her, I discovered that I was in for some real explaining to do.
I was shocked and could not hide it from my face. It really sold me off as a clear sign of guilt decorated all of it. I discovered that I had to change the narrative quickly. I was frustrated that how could I let someone spot me in another city? I had thought that it was impossible for something like that to happen, but it ended up happening and now I had some explaining to do. At this moment, I could only play back some of the nights when I was away in my head to try and see if I, indeed, had come across a familiar face. If I could remember, that person was going to be in for some rude awakening for snooping their nose in my business.
As I did that, I needed something to keep Angela distracted, so I kept on questioning her about the person who brought this to her attention. I kept on telling her that I had no idea who that person was. I wanted to explain myself out of this even though I knew that the situation with her having no proof or evidence of my entanglements with another woman meant that there could be no conviction. So with all the noises I was making, it was just for keeping my ego intact – that I don’t allow her to think that she was right by entertaining accusations brought in by a third party.
After a few days, I found myself looking down at an unexpected caller wondering why someone would be calling me using a private caller ID. I was hesitant to answer as I softly said hello. There was silence from the caller on the other end. I repeated myself, “Hello.” Again, silence from the caller on the other end. Assuming I was called by mistake, I ended the call and went on with what I was doing. But moments later, my phone began to ring once again. Glancing down at it as the screen said, incoming private caller, I did not hesitate to say hello. And once again, I was greeted with silence from the other end of the line. What followed there were questions in my mind as I was momentarily taken from what I was doing.
After the calls from the private number I was still me, still looking for fun. And, as the weekend was approaching, I had to go back to the usual Tate that I was. I, therefore, picked up my phone to make a call to the weekend mistress. But numerous unfruitful attempts of reaching out to her left me with more concerns as to why was there no answer? I wondered and left her alone. This time, it wasn’t me that had ignored her, so it was bothering me. I hated being treated like this. It only had to be me doing it to girls and not the other way around.
On the other hand, as weeks went by, the private caller kept on calling me and it began bothering me. Now I knew that this was not a mistake, someone was really out to send a message to me. But why would they call and not say anything? I kept on asking myself with no response. Finally, the caller decided to talk, but it was with an unpleasant emotion that came to me. She sounded like a lady, I could hear it even if she was disguising her voice with a low pitch whisper trying to make it very difficult to hear.
“Can you speak up; I can't hear you.” I said as I was eager to hear who was really calling me all these weeks. As I asked, the whisper slightly rose. “If you enjoy the company of other girls so much, why not just leave her?” This time, I could hear the words even though I could not tell the voice’s owner. “Who is this?” I could only respond as I felt a knot tying up in my stomach. I could tell that someone was really up to cause some problems, but what was scary was the fact that I did not know what they were up to. I could only make assumptions later.
Whispers became silent as the sound of a dial tone reached my ear. It left me gazing in space as I wondered what may come from this alarming phone call. Deep thoughts of whom this unknown caller could be left me uneasy. I tried to think about it most part of the day but came to no answer. Therefore, I could only point in the direction of my most recent affair. Lynn! Dreading to dial Lynn's number, I gathered enough courage to call it. And when I did, I did it because I felt threatened, hence I had to act. I reached her number, only that this time the voice from a strange lady in my phone told me that the number was no longer in service. That really left me with no doubt about who's behind the whispering voice.
After this, I could only think of the caller’s next move. So I anxiously awaited upon the day she attempted to reach out to Angela. This really had me exceptionally intimidated. But days passed with no sign from the unknown caller, and it felt like months. But her silence, even though it left me in the clear of what could have been a rude awakening, had me living on the edge. After some time, the calls started all over again. This time, they could ring my phone and then cut it off before I answered. Sometimes they would just allow me to answer and not say anything even though I could hear the breathing coming from the other side.
I was so annoyed about this and really wanted to get an opportunity to tell the caller a piece of my mind. But how was I going to do that since we did not speak? The caller seemed to have one agenda, which was only to confront me about my affairs and seeking revenge. It appeared to be the sole motive of this whispering voice.
On some days, I would be seated, clenching my jaw and worried about the calls that I had first assumed were just a prank. Afraid to answer because of who's possibly on the other end had me worried. I sometimes watched my phone ring until the ringing tone went silent. Seconds later the sound would come back once again. Answering my phone only to be alarmed by the whispering voice, “Why must you cheat on her?” The voice would ask me.
“Lynn, I know this is you! What do you want?” I sounded so desperate while seeking to put a face to the whispering voice. Still, the voice wouldn’t give up the identity of the culprit, but continue to question my behavior, leading to me hanging up once again. Arriving to work the following nights was almost like a repeated series of déjà vu for me. Answering my phone, as the whispering voice spoke of my activities in the night really became a bother.
“I hope you had a good time last night and by the way, we loved the outfit you were wearing.” The voice would sometimes brag while sending me into a complete state! It had my head rolling all day. This
was becoming real now.
As all this madness continued, I started realizing that there could be more than one person doing this. Now even more confused under the impression there is more than one suspect, frustrations of questioning myself what I could have possibly done to cause things to take such a turn for the worst, causing the unknown caller to seek revenge grew bigger. I could see that these people were now always lurking in the shadows, watching my every move with intentions of ruining my relationship with Angela. Being contacted by an unknown caller caused me to question everything and everyone around me. Consciously making unwanted decisions being controlled by the presence of a voice irked every inch of my soul.
Now I was stuck between protecting myself and putting my family first. Even so, I wouldn’t know how these people were going to hurt my family, but I knew that this couldn’t be good at all. Most would say this is an easy decision, but selfishness and stubbornness is what got me here in the first place.
But I kept on waiting for the day that the caller would contact Angela. I thought that was going to be their final move to complete whatever game they were playing. Weeks became months as the phone calls became more frequent, but yet Angela still appeared to be unaware. Desperately thinking of ways I could possibly dismiss the unknown caller, I changed my phone number. The move made sure that I was temporarily unbothered until when I arrived at work and my work phone began ringing.