Sophia sighed. “Who told you, Angela?” Angela was her ex-mother-in-law, Tony’s mother. Angela and Lupe were old-time friends, dating back to when they still lived in Mexico. They shared everything and tended to sit together, brewing with worries about their children and feeding off of each other until they were ready to have conniptions.
“Yes! She called me this morning about the divorce proceedings and my heart just broke. I just couldn’t believe the news. She was crying! We both shed tears. Our babies were meant to be together. You have been destined since the start. Why would you do this, Sophia?”
Of course her mother had to make it seem like Sophia’s fault. “I told you, Mama, this has to happen. Tony and I don’t love each other anymore.”
“Ai, mija! You don’t just divorce someone because you don’t love him anymore! He had money. He had friends. What are you going to do without him?”
“Ma, I told you already how I got that job with the Times. I am making my own money now. I will be fine.”
“Why would you go get a job when you have a man who will provide for you?” her mother scolded her. “He is a lawyer! A corporate lawyer! Tony makes good money and he gave you a good life. I would have killed to have a life like yours when I was your age. Look at your house! Your father and I had to work so hard for a one-bedroom apartment and you had a mansion without even trying! You are making a very bad mistake.”
“He slept with other women, Mama. I found out everything. You should have seen the kinds of women he was messing around with! Party girls. And Strippers!” Just thinking about the pictures she had seen on his phone made her feel sick to her stomach. Even worse was how he had lied and told her she was crazy for her accusations. Then it had turned out that she had been right all along! A woman’s intuition never lies.
“Men are like that, mija, you know that. They like their fun. As long as they come home to you in the end, that is all that matters. I remember when your father had an affair with my cousin, Bianca….”
Sophia rolled her eyes. This was the millionth she had heard this story. How her mother had forgiven her father was beyond her. Had Tony touched one of her cousins, she would have been devastated! Then she would have cut his balls off! Somehow, though, her mother had accepted it and continued to live with him until his untimely death at the factory where he worked. They didn’t even fight about it. Her mother was the perfect dutiful Mexican housewife, staying at home if she could, working outside of the home only when she had to in order to make ends meet, spending most of her time in the kitchen while telenovelas played on the TV, and letting her husband get away with murder. Sophia just could not do that, even though she had tried for nearly seven years.
Sophia snapped back to reality. Her mother was still going on and on. “I hit him over the head with a frying pan! I said I would leave him! And did he stop seeing her? No! He started seeing her even more. You tell a man no and he does it anyway. He just lies about it. That is just how men are. You can’t control them so you have to do what you can to make them happy. Make them want to come home. You must cook them the most delicious meal and prove that you are better than that other puta.”
“Well, not all men are like that. I don’t have to tolerate it,” Sophia replied crisply. “And I’m not going to cook special meals for him to get him to respect me. He should have respected me anyway, but he ran around behind my back and so he clearly didn’t love me. Do you know how much money he was spending on this one whore? She lived at his penthouse and he bought her nicer jewelry than he bought me. Mama, I can’t have a man around like that, someone I can’t trust. I can’t sleep next to him wondering who he is sneaking off to talk to on the phone.” She was tired of having to explain this to her mother, who never seemed to get it. They came from different worlds. Literally.
Her mother then resorted to invoking God’s name, in Spanish. “You are being such a fool! You will never find a better man. He was your soul mate. You two were destined for each other from the time when you were babies. Do you remember how you used to play together? You used to run around naked in the yard with the sprinklers on!”
Sophia cringed at that weird memory. Their families apparently saw nothing wrong with letting two children of the opposite sex see each other naked. The differences between men and women were never a mystery to her, and the religion-heavy sex education classes she had taken in high school seemed pointless to her because she held that knowledge almost intuitively.
“Always together, always crushing on each other. I even have the notes you two used to pass when you were little, little. You were soul mates from the start,” her mother went on.
“Maybe not,” Sophia replied.
Still, the thought always weighed heavily on her heart. When her mother started reminding her of the past, when she and Tony grew up together having tender crushes on one another, it hurt. She would even start to doubt herself as she thought of how things used to be and how loved Tony used to make her feel. What the hell had happened? How did things turn out this way? Could her mother possibly be right? Tony had been her crush since she was young and she had always known that they would get married. How their marriage had failed was a mystery to her, since she had always imagined it turning out perfectly, especially when she really started to fall for him as a teenager.
She had thought she and Tony shared an everlasting love that seemed incapable of unraveling. But apparently that love had only been real to her, and Tony had only considered her a housewife. Maybe Tony had only married her because he felt obligated to, due to pressure from both families. Really, he wanted to be a single man, running around at gentleman’s clubs and hiring escorts in the city.
“What do you mean, maybe not?” Her mother tsked. “I watched you two from the time you were little. I told Angela when she gave birth to him, ‘You just watch. He will marry Sophia.’ You were just a tiny thing, only four months older than him. You treated him like a baby brother.”
“Maybe we should have stayed like that, brother and sister, not married. We weren’t a good couple, Mom. You didn’t see a lot of what went on. The fighting and the way he would talk to me. He got nasty. And he was always lying. I knew something was wrong, but he just never tell me the truth. He kept a lock on his phone and we would fight and fight and fight….”
“I saw it, Sophia. I saw it all over your face. But I thought you would know how to win him back, with your womanly charms.”
“Marriages don’t work the same way anymore, Ma. Things are different now. Now the woman and the man have to both make an effort. The woman should not have to fix everything. I tried to fix things. He still wanted to run around and cheat left and right. I couldn’t change him, and it wasn’t my responsibility anyway. The woman should not have to do everything in a damn marriage. Tony should have done his part too. We took vows to each other and he’s the one who broke them.”
Her mother tsked again. “And that is why this country is falling apart! All these young people, leaving each other and never staying together. What happened to the sanctity of marriage? Men and women are supposed to be together, to support each other, to hold each other up. They have no business being apart.”
“Women are surprisingly capable of being on their own now,” Sophia responded crisply. “We get jobs now. We get educations. We don’t need men.”
“Ai! That’s what they say. But that is a lie you all believe now. People are not complete alone. They must find their other half and join in a holy union and only them are they whole.”
Sophia sighed. There was the Catholic rhetoric, something she could never argue with. In fact, part of her believed it too. She had been raised to think that way. It had certainly been hard to leave when she had been raised to believe that she was not a whole person without a man by her side.
But somehow she had convinced herself that it was possible. She mentioned seeing other single women at NYU had helped cement her conviction, and then immediately winced, recognizing her mistake.
“It was that
school, wasn’t it? That school filled your head with nonsense. I knew it was a bad idea. No woman has any business going to school when she has a husband to take care of her. Why did you go? All it did was give you ideas and poison your marriage.”
“School was the best thing I ever did for myself and I’m proud that I graduated! I’m sorry you can’t be proud too.” Sophia’s eyes filled with tears. She hated how her mother had treated her education like some silly thing, not a tremendous achievement. Most parents were proud when their kids were first generation college graduates, but no one in her family had been proud of her. They did not seem to realize what she had actually accomplished, not just for herself, but for Hispanic women, for minorities, for the health of America.
Her mother was silent for a moment. Realizing that she could not win that fight, she decided to switch subjects. “Ai, I heard you took his penthouse and that’s where you are living now. Didn’t I raise you to never take vengeance? Being vengeful is not God’s way. You heal from within and you fix marriages. You don’t go breaking up homes and breaking hearts.”
Now Sophia wanted to cry more than ever. A tear even spilled out and rolled down her cheek. But she refused to let her mother send her mind in that direction. She wanted to remain proud of herself and firm in her ways. So she took a deep breath to steady her emotions.
“That penthouse is mine now. The pre-nup we signed had an infidelity clause and he’s the one who violated it. So I was entitled to half of everything. But all I asked for was the penthouse so I could be near work and get away from the memories we had in our house. I wanted to start fresh and this place let me do it. That’s all I asked of Tony in the settlement, Mom. That’s hardly vindictive, Mother. Besides, he’s fine without it. He has that house in Long Island and another apartment here. He won’t miss the penthouse. His girlfriend might, but I don’t.”
“He loved that penthouse! And you have no business being there alone. Ai, what if someone breaks in? You are in the middle of the city! All that pollution and noise. Mi Dios, do you know how dangerous it is to be by yourself as a woman?”
Sophia sighed deeply as the taxi reached her building. Traffic had been really heavy, only prolonging her uncomfortable conversation with her mother. “I am safe, and I can take care of myself. Anyway, I am at work now, Mama. I have to go.”
“You wait one moment! You are staying in the city all by yourself, with no man to support you. How can I sleep at night, knowing that you are there by yourself?”
“I’ve already met some great neighbors,” Sophia offered as weak reassurance.
“Neighbors? And what are they going to be able to do for you if someone breaks in?”
“I keep the door locked and there’s an alarm system. Mom, I’m at work. I’m getting out of the cab. I have to go.”
“Mom, I will never go back to Tony. I would rather be homeless than go back to him. That is the last thing I will ever do. You need to understand that.”
Lupe kept arguing fervently until Sophia yelled, “I have to go! You are making me late!” She hung up after a quick I love you.
Now in a really awful mood, she shouldered her way into the building and through security. She knew that she should not have taken that call. But her sense of daughterly duty outweighed her sense of self-preservation. Though she was glad to be free of her mother’s strictness, she missed her mother. The Nuevas were a tightknit family, even since her mother’s remarriage. Carlos had adopted her as his own and she considered him a father. She could never turn her back on her parents, but sometimes she really hated their meddling. Specifically, her mother’s meddling. Her mother had a knack for misunderstanding her totally and making everything extremely dramatic.
When she entered the office, she had to make a concentrated effort to put on a smile and pretend to be in a great mood. It was Week Two at the job and she was starting to find her groove. She got along with most of her co-workers; there were some high-strung or grumpy ones that she knew to generally avoid, and then there were some that appeared to be great friends in the workplace. Sophia kept her image both professional and friendly, never encroaching on any boundaries. It was all new to her since she was new to the workplace altogether, but she felt that she was nailing it. The frequent thumbs-up she got from the editor in the office adjacent to hers gave her some hope that she was doing great.
After a stop at the coffeepot, she went to her office to begin working on her latest assignment. It was difficult to focus, though. She had barely decorated her office space, especially since her boss had told her that this office was temporary until she moved up in the job. The lack of pictures of her ex-husband really disturbed her, almost as much as the glaring lack of a wedding ring on her finger. Her fingers felt too light as she began typing.
Sometimes, she even felt a faint tingle of missing Tony. Then her thoughts kept turning to the Franklin brothers. She lived beside the handsome billionaire Franklin brothers! What kind of luck was that? She thought about her dirty fantasies the night before and kept blushing. She sure hoped to see them again soon. Maybe they were going to be the ushers she needed to start her new life and start finding love again?
Everyone in the office seemed to be accustomed to this. To working, to being without their spouses, to modern dating. The secretary kept babbling to everyone who would listen about her speed dating meetup that night. No one seemed to find it weird, either. But all of this was new to Sophia. It was a new world to be cracked open and explored. She had to reinvent herself to match this new, unknown lifestyle.
All she knew was that she could never weaken and go back to Tony. While her divorce made her sad, it really just was the sense of betrayal and failure that she carried as a result. Her mother didn’t help her get rid of that feeling. Really, though, she did not miss Tony. She was excited to try this new life and embark on some new adventures. Maybe with some new men.
Chapter 4
Sophia headed home after a long day at work, not helped at all by the hangover she had fought most of the day and still lingered. After finally make it home to her condo, she felt relieved pressing the elevator button for the 27th floor and watching the elevator doors start to close. To her surprise, and with deft athleticism, Adam squeezed through the closing doors. “Hey, Sophia,” Adam said.
Adam looked spiffy as usual, and smelled like he had just been the barber. Despite her head ache, Sophia couldn’t help but smile. It was nice to see Adam. She felt her cheeks warm just being near him. She once again noticed his athletic bod. Memories of her crazy drunken fantasy about him and Blake the night before made her flush even more. If he only knew what she had dreamed about and had done the night before while thinking of him and Blake!
“How are you?” she inquired. For some perverse reason she took pride in being able to maintain a sense of outward normality while thoughts of that purple vibe and the two brothers passed through her mind!
“Great, you?” He glanced at her, looked her up and down to admire her beauty, and then seemed concerned. “Are you OK? You seem a little…tense.”
“Oh, fine.” She let all of her breath out in a great burst. “Just a really long and trying day.”
“That’s no good. You are too beautiful to frown.” He grinned as she began to genuinely smile, flustered by his compliment. “Anything I can do to cheer you up?”
“Oh, no, I’m fine,” she said. “I’ll just draw a bath and pour myself some wine. I’ll make myself cheer up.” Meanwhile, the little voice in her head had other ideas. A sudden image of him aggressively taking her in the elevator at that moment flooded her mind and she had to fight to repress it. Now was not the time for dirty fantasies!
“How about we go out tonight for dinner? I can make a reservation at a great place and really cheer you up.” She agreed without thinking, and got off on their floor, numb with shock at the invite and her quick acceptance. Adam turned towards his suite and called after her, “I’ll pick you up at eight.”
In the safety of her
apartment, Sophia poured herself a generous glass of Merlot and then ran a hot bath, pouring an extra helping of bubble bath into the steaming water. Relaxing beneath the bubbles, holding the wineglass by the stem between her thumb and forefinger, it hit her that she was about to go on a date with Adam Franklin. Adam Franklin! This man was a New York celebrity. He dated New York Fashion Week models. How could she possibly impress him?
Sophia enjoyed the relaxation of her bath until the water cooled. She then spent the next hour or so putting a tremendous effort into her makeup and hair. She picked a tight red evening dress that was sure to turn more than a few heads. The doorbell rang, and with a deep breath, Sophia steeled herself and opened the door.
Adam looked extraordinary in his dark business suit and tie. He handed her a single red rose and she gasped. It had been years since she had even gotten flowers! She scrambled to find a vase. Then they went downstairs to a waiting limo.
The restaurant he had chosen was Chez Balzac, a fancy new French place in Chelsea. As they ordered their wine, he smiled at her over the top of his menu. “Feeling better?” he asked.
She nodded demurely. “I feel so much better.” She fingered her pearl necklace, one of the few pieces she had kept that Tony had given her.
“I have to say, you look stunning. You have wowed me since I first laid eyes on you. No offense, but Tony was a fool to give up a beautiful woman like you.”
Sophia blushed. “That’s the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me. Honestly, it makes me feel better. I’ve been holding it together, but my divorce has taken its toll on me.”
“Do you mind me asking what happened?”
Sophia sighed, then leaned forward. “You two were neighbors. I’m sure you have an idea. Maybe you saw his girlfriend? She was staying there with him. She was a stripper.”
Adam was a skilled businessman and obviously a good actor. He kept his composure and pretended to have no idea what she was talking about. “I mean, there are a lot of people in that building. Maybe I did see her, but….”
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