The Luxury of Being Second: A Mistress in Liverpool on Choice and Silence

I don’t know if I chose this life or if it chose me. What I know is that I own it. I am twenty-seven years old, I work as a freelance audio producer, and I live alone in a rented flat in Liverpool. I am also a mistress. That word sits in my mouth like a stone I have polished smooth: heavy, warm, mine. I don’t say it to shock anyone. I say it because precision is the only luxury I can afford.

Last week, the Liverpool Echo ran a piece about a local primary school whose pupils performed “My Hero” for the Foo Fighters ahead of their Anfield show. The photographs showed children in blazers, mouths open in song, faces lit with the purest form of admiration. I read the article on my phone while waiting for a message. It made me think about the heroes we never name, the ones we keep folded inside our ribs like a secret second heart. That is what I am: the keeper of an unnamed hero, the one who sees the man behind the title he wears for everyone else.

The Geometry of Anticipation

The most powerful part of an affair is not the meeting. It is the waiting. I have become an expert in the architecture of anticipation. The hours between a text and a reply are not empty; they are filled with the voltage of possibility. When his name appears on my screen, I don’t answer immediately. I let the notification sit there, the little grey bubble glowing like a caught breath. In that pause, I am entirely free. I am choosing to open the door, not begging for it to be unlocked.

This is what people misunderstand about being the other woman. They see deprivation. I see a garden of thresholds. I have a dying basil plant on my windowsill that I keep forgetting to water, its leaves curl like small green hands reaching for something I will not give. My neighbour Nina, who breeds rare orchids in her spare room, once told me that some flowers need complete darkness to bloom. She was talking about her Dendrobium, but I thought of the way I curl into the silence between our calls, how that darkness is the only place where I can truly hear my own pulse.

The Signal

We don’t use any particular words to signal a meeting. It’s a rhythm we’ve developed, a code that lives in the cadence of the sentence, not the content. A certain dryness in the morning message means he has space. A late-night ellipsis means he is thinking of me. I never ask. Asking would break the elegance of our arrangement. I wait, and I read the invisible ink.

When we do meet, it is never in the same place twice. Liverpool gives us a city of rooms, hotels with brass numbers, rented flats above bakeries, the back seat of his car parked near the Mersey where the fog eats the headlights. I don’t love the city any less because of this. I love it more. Every street corner becomes a potential map of a memory I haven’t yet made. The Albert Dock at sunset, the cathedral bells at odd hours, these things are not romantic in themselves. They become romantic because of the shape we leave in them, like a watermark on a page nobody else will see.

The Aftermath

The morning after is my favourite part. That is the erotic blank that everyone else ignores. I wake in my own flat, alone, the sheets twisted. The coffee I brew tastes sharper. The air in the kitchen smells of last night’s rain and something else, a perfume I wore, or his, or the mixture of both. I don’t wash it off immediately. I walk through my day carrying the scent of him on my collar, a secret badge not meant for public view.

I think of the children singing “My Hero” and I wonder if they understand that heroism is not about being seen. It’s about being the person someone chooses when there is no audience. I am not his public victory. I am the quiet corner he returns to when the noise of his life becomes too loud. I don’t feel diminished by that. I feel chosen in a way that no public declaration could match.

The Silence We Keep

Liverpool is a small city in many ways. You can’t walk through town without knowing someone, without hearing a familiar accent or seeing a face from a former life. But our secret makes the city vast. The fact that no one knows, not my colleagues at the podcast studio where I edit, not Nina with her orchids, not the barista who knows my regular order, turns every encounter into a private constellation. We are the only two stars that connect the dots.

I am not waiting for him to leave his life. I am not hoping for a grand reveal. That would ruin the architecture we have built. A mistress is not a placeholder. She is a choice made again and again, in the gaps, in the silence, in the moments when one person could turn away and doesn’t. That is the power I hold. I am not a hidden alternative to his main story. I am a separate novel, one he reads in the margins of his own.

The Freedom in the Frame

There is a reason I keep the dying basil plant. It reminds me that not everything has to be thriving to be worth keeping. I have a playlist I listen to on the days I don’t hear from him, songs that are sad in a minor key, songs that feel like a room with the lights off. I don’t feel sorry for myself. I feel the shape of the absence like a familiar weight, a stone I have polished smooth.

I am a mistress in Liverpool. I am twenty-seven. I produce audio for a living, which means my work is about voices, timing, the space between words. It is the same skill I bring to this life. I know when to speak and when to let the silence do the work. I know that the most powerful thing I can say is nothing at all.

When I read that news article about the school children, I thought about the song they sang. “My Hero” is about wanting to be the one someone looks up to. But I think real heroism is quieter. It is the choice to be someone’s refuge, not their monument. I am his refuge. And that, to me, is the greatest luxury a woman can own.