Shame (Secrets and Lies Book 2)

by Ainsley Booth

  Not with the P.O. Box. Nobody needs to know my husband is still pining for me, that’s weird. Not to me, it’s secretly starting to feel very sweet to me in a dangerous way, but it would be weird to anyone outside our relationship.

  Instead, I download a couple of apps, and try my hand at internet flirting with strangers.

  It’s not fun at all.

  The first date is a non-event, a complete disaster of nothingness. I show up, I order a drink at the bar, and I people watch. No sign of the guy who I emailed back and forth with a bit. Nobody who looks anything like his picture. He finally arrives ten minutes after the hour, and it’s awkward and painful.

  I give him twenty minutes, then my phone rings. It’s actually an alarm I set, but he can’t see my screen and doesn’t know that. I turn off the alarm, pretend to answer a call, and get the hell out of there.

  On my way home, I pick up a bottle of expensive red wine and a takeout order of lobster mac and cheese. While it heats in my oven, I have a shower and wash off the failure of my first date in eighteen years, and think about all the reasons why I can’t just send Luke a picture of me in pigtails and see what happens.

  At nine o’clock, I send a mean text message to Luke. Mean, because I purposefully leave a lot of doubt as to how my evening is going.

  It feels good.

  Grace: Had my first date tonight.

  It takes him a few minutes to reply.

  Luke: Okay.

  Jackass. This was his idea. I don’t care if he doesn’t like it. Actually, I care a great deal. I don’t want him to like it.

  I put my phone on do not disturb mode and flip to Tumblr. I’m having sex tonight, even if it’s just by myself. I’m going to have a lot of sex tonight.

  Red wine and lobster fuelled sex, so it’s probably going to be weird.

  The second date is five days later. This one smells good. A little spicy and warm. He smells like a stranger. He smells exciting. And when he touches me on the arm, guiding me from the bar to our table, it feels good. It feels a little wrong, too, but mostly it feels good.

  This is a secret pleasure that's just for me. From the first inhale of his peppery cologne, I knew this date would only be one night, but it might be a very good night.

  And so I shake off every fear I can’t quite name, and revel in how good it feels to have big rough hands touch me. He’s handsy, this guy. Likes to touch my fingers across the table, bump his leg against mine.

  After dinner, we take a walk, and before I get in the cab, he kisses me good night in a way that makes my thighs shake.

  When I get home, I text Luke again.

  Grace: Second date.

  Luke: Same guy?

  Grace: No.

  Luke: Good.

  It isn’t until I’m getting ready for the third date that I realize my variation of Luke’s plan doesn’t actually work. This guy’s name is Javi, and he’s a military pilot. He’s not in the city that often, doesn’t live here, but he’s looking for a hook-up.

  And I am not.

  I’m pretending that I am, but that’s a lie I’m telling myself, because as fun as these dates are, they don’t hold a candle to what Luke and I did on his couch.

  Fuck.

  If I’m going to try dating, I actually need to have sex with one of these guys, and Javi seems like a good enough option.

  And then, at the last second, he cancels. Work, he says.

  Sure, I bet.

  And so I quietly shelve the dating plan. I don’t tell Luke about it. He doesn’t ask. And another week rolls by. The days are warmer now, we’re well into spring, and the whole city is starting to bloom.

  I still feel like I’m covered in a layer of permafrost, but I’m not tempted to try the dating apps again.

  And then one night, my phone vibrates. Three messages, sent back to back.

  Javi: Hey, sorry for the radio silence, but I was away for work and spotty reception.

  Javi: Legit spotty. I was in Resolute Bay.

  Javi: But I’m back in Toronto for the weekend, and I’m interested in meeting up for a coffee sometime. Any time, really.

  I grin like an idiot.

  Grace: Where are you right now? I’m downtown.

  Javi: I can be there in thirty minutes.

  Javi is nice. And hot. And after two cups of coffee, I’m not tired at all.

  “Do you want to take a walk?”

  “Sure.”

  He stands first, coming around to pull out my chair for me.

  I like the way he smells. I like the way his fingers brush ever so gently against my back, then fall away again.

  “So you were way up north,” I ask as we step outside. We talked about everything except his work while we drank coffee.

  “Yep.”

  And maybe we won’t talk about it now, either.

  That’s fine. I’m not looking for his life story.

  “How long are you in the city now?”

  “Just the weekend. Then I’m going to Trenton for a while.”

  “Cool.”

  “Nice to have someone to hang out with a bit before I go, though.” Clear boundaries. He’s not looking for a relationship.

  That’s fine.

  I’m only looking for one night. “I’m kind of busy with work, and some personal stuff,” I say. “But I’m giving myself tonight to just be…free.”

  “Free is good.”

  “Free is very good.” I wink at him. “Do you want to go back to your place?”

  “My place is a hotel room at the Marriott. Does that work?”

  It’s perfect. “Sure. Let me just text a friend and tell them where I’m going.”

  I hesitate for a second before I tap the message out. I know it’s probably across the line.

  Grace: Another date tonight. Might be out all night. I’m at the Marriott.

  Luke: Understood. Be safe.

  I shove my phone into my purse and take Javi’s hand.

  25

  Grace

  I text Luke the next morning and he doesn’t reply, so I go downstairs.

  He answers the door, eventually, looking hungover in the worst way. He's barely got a grasp on a glass of water. He doesn’t say anything, just steps back, letting me in, and my heart sinks.

  How do I explain what I’m thinking? How I feel? I grab the glass from his and take a desperate gulp—

  "That's not water," Luke says as I gasp and choke against the unexpected burning tingle.

  "What the fuck are you drinking?"

  "Tequila."

  I blink at him through watery eyes. "At nine in the morning?"

  "I didn't realize it had gotten that late."

  I look at him again, more carefully this time.

  He's not hungover. He's drunk. There’s no way I can try to have a calm, rational conversation with someone who is blitzed out of his mind. "Why didn't you say something?"

  Shrugging, he sways to the couch. “Hardly seemed like there was time before you just stole my drink.”

  “You can’t drink a water glass full of tequila at nine in the morning. Or any time.” I set the glass down in his kitchenette and join him on the couch.

  He gives me a sad look. “You were on dates.”

  I take a deep breath. “Which you told me to go on.”

  “And I meant that. But it was hard to picture.”

  “Welcome to my world.”

  “Yeah.” He closes his eyes.

  “I shouldn’t have told you I was going on them.”

  Another shrug. “I deserve it.”

  “I’m done with all of that.”

  He freezes. Then, slowly, he blinks his eyes open and looks at me. “Why?”

  “Because I know what I want now.”

  “I’m too drunk for this conversation, aren’t I?”

  “Probably.” I shift closer. “Or maybe you’re just drunk enough to tell me the truth about the Daddy thing.”

  He groans. “Oh, fuck.”

  “Did
you ever do the Daddy/baby girl—”

  “Never.” He says it fast and sure, like the question sobered him up.

  “I need you to take that quiz,” I whisper. “Because it’s not that simple for me. I took a whole class about being Little and I’m not really that, exactly.”

  “I’m definitely too drunk to know what that means, but there are classes?”

  I nod. “There are.”

  “I have a lot to learn, don’t I?”

  “Yep.”

  He catches my hand and pulls it to his mouth. He kisses my knuckles, then gives me a sad look. “How are you sleeping?”

  “I’m not.” I bite my lower lip. “Do you remember what I said when we were fooling around? I need to masturbate like that to fall asleep.”

  His mouth falls open. I wonder if he’ll remember that when he sobers up.

  He moves his hand to my face and strokes my cheek. “I wish we had done a lot of things differently.”

  “Me too.” Then I jump all the way in. “We still can.”

  He crushes his mouth against mine, claiming me, and I free fall into his embrace. He makes a noise, sweet and agonizing at the same time, and hoists me up. Drunk, but still strong.

  I need more. I claw at his shirt, desperate for the feel of his skin under my fingers.

  He changes the angle of the kiss, deepening it.

  For years, everything felt hard, like the world wasn’t turning properly on its axis. This isn’t hard. I hate that and love it at the same time, but I’m done fighting it.

  “I wrote you another note,” he groans as I move my mouth down his neck.

  “I’m done being offered to strangers on the street.”

  “Isnotthat,” he mumbles. Then he gently shoves me off him and grabs a notepad at the end of the couch. On it are a bunch of lines, half-formed thoughts, and then three sentences are underlined.

  Trust

  Doubt

  Faith

  Evidence

  I know you will always have a reason to doubt me.

  I can’t erase that.

  But I want to give you more reasons to let me love you anyway.

  He drops the notepad and grabs my hands. “I know I’m drunk. I really didn’t like the idea of you going to a hotel, and what my brain did with that information. But doing things different, yeah. I like that plan. Tell me what you want. Maybe I want it, too? I do want it. I want everything Grace wants.”

  The list rolls off my tongue with ease. I know it inside and out by now. “I want to cook dinner with my partner almost every night. Side by side in the kitchen, sharing a bottle of wine. Half drunk on it by the time we eat, and the things that we eat…I want pasta, without a care in the world for whether it bloats me. I want all the fucking bread. I want fancy salad and a big ass porterhouse for two. I want to make those decisions together, with someone who is as into food as I am, because he isn’t hung up on what he looks like. I want—”

  “Let me give that one a try. The food. And I want to share a bottle of wine with you.”

  “You don’t like wine.”

  “That was the old me. Obviously I can drink tequila, which tastes like a cactus fell into a vat of vodka, so let me give wine a chance.”

  “Maybe no booze at all would be smarter,” I whisper. But when have I ever been smart? “I went on a bit of a rant about the food, but that’s just the start of the list.”

  “Let me make dinner with you tonight,” he says, his voice urgent. “And you give me the rest of the list as we cook together.”

  26

  Luke

  She leaves me to sleep off the tequila, and when I wake up in the early afternoon, there’s a text message from her.

  Fear grips my chest as I click into it, fully expecting her to have cancelled our plans. Instead, she’s given me an instruction.

  Grace: I want to try making cacio e pepe. Can you go shopping?

  Grace: And how’s your head?

  Fingers shaking, I type back an affirmative response.

  Luke: Shopping, yep. And the head will survive, but no more tequila for a while.

  Then I google whatever the fuck cacio e pepe is, find out it’s some glorified Mac and cheese, and tell myself it’s literally, truly the least I can fucking do.

  I remain an absolute bastard, though, because it’s not until I’ve read three recipes on it that I’m even remotely interested in this. It sounds like a coma-inducing carb nightmare.

  I couldn’t be more wrong.

  Grace’s cheeks are pink from the steam, and she nudges my elbow. “Hurry, Luke,” she says, her voice light with laughter. “You need to add the cheese now, and I’ll stir.”

  I jostle around her, my arms long enough to bracket her as I grate the block of parmesan with the new rasp I bought just in case the one we’ve never used in our kitchen isn’t sharp enough.

  The pasta smells amazing. Peppery and salty, it’s coming together into a dish that I guess I’ve seen her order in restaurants, but never really thought about.

  We’ve made something here, together, and it’s kind of fucking amazing.

  “All right, I think that’s good,” she says, wiggling with joy. “Let me grab two bowls, and—”

  She twists in the bracket of my arms and I turn us around, intending to point her in the direction of the cupboard where we keep the bowls, but she winds up clinging to me instead of spinning away.

  She’s pressed against me. She can feel I’m hard for her. Her breath comes shallow, sweet and panting, which only makes me throb more.

  “Luke…”

  “I’m enjoying making dinner together,” I say, my voice low and rough. “Just ignore the rest of it.”

  “I’m not ready.”

  “I know.” But that means she might be soon.

  Time to learn how to cook a porterhouse for two. My wife wants variety? She wants a partner to bump into in the kitchen, until her cheeks are pink and my cock is aching for more than a scant brush against her body?

  Fucking hell, I can be that guy.

  I am that guy.

  And I’m as surprised as she is.

  We plate up our pasta, and she watches me with a funny look on her face as I light a candle for the table.

  “A bit on the nose?”

  She shakes her head. “I like it.”

  Good.

  A plan is coming together, and after dinner, when she excuses herself to use the washroom, I have time to really sit in this space that she made for us and think about what my next step is.

  If we're going to do this, it has to be completely new. It has to start in a completely different way.

  I have to be a new and different man. For too long, I bought into the lie that you can’t change a person. I just accepted that I was turning into my father as I got older. But the truth is, that was changing a person. I went from being a young man who was worthy of Grace to a middle-aged asshole she rightfully kicked to the curb.

  I want to be the guy she fell in love with again. Without the baggage he was silently carrying. I want to be who she wanted to grow old with once upon a time. I want to be what she thought I could be. And to do that, I'm going to have to go back, strip myself of everything that I have learned over the last ten years, and undo all of the mistakes that I have made.

  The poor choices I have made.

  I need to get myself back to that pivotal moment when I stopped listening to my wife and I need to start listening, again.

  I need to show her that I will do it as fast as I can. But also, because I'm serious about it, because I want this to be real and lasting and forever, that it won’t happen overnight.

  And I can show her that incremental work. I can be honest about my progress.

  What about setbacks? My first reaction is denial. There won’t be any setbacks, my grandiosity wants to claim, but that’s not true.

  And then there’s the kink stuff, which fucking hell is so hot, but intense. She wants some sort of daddy figure, strong, and un
wavering. How does that go hand in hand with a humble man who admits that he's failed miserably at keeping her safe?

  The acid churn is back. And I don't like it. But what I like even less is that echo, that visceral body memory of how I ran from the challenge in the past.

  I can't run from it now, I have to sit here and feel disgusted with myself and look at that shame and think, you're not going to get the better of me today. I'm going to stare at you, until you get smaller and turns into nothing.

  “What are you thinking about?” She slides onto the couch beside me and curls up in the circle of my arms.

  “You. And me. Mostly me, and how I want to be this perfect man.”

  “That’s how you were raised.”

  “Pretty sure my nannies…” I trail off, not meaning to argue. “Right. The Preston way.”

  “It’s not real, but that’s part of the brainwashing, right? You were taught to always live a lie.”

  “I sure managed to excel at that.” I roll my shoulders.

  “Are you tense?” She climbs into my lap, an unconventional way to give a neck rub, but I’m not complaining. I spread my thighs wide to balance us and she strokes her hands up and down the side of my neck. “Tell me more.”

  “I want to be a better man for you. Unravel myself to the point where I went wrong, and fix it from there. Be the guy you wanted to grow old with. Remake myself in the original vision, but with less baggage. That’s it in a nutshell, basically.”

  “That’s all good stuff.” She gives me a level look. “Can I ask about the affair? No shouting, no getting mad. I just… wanna know some things.”

  I nod. “Yes.”

  “Before we are intimate again,” she laughs lightly. “That’s so serious. Before we get carried away like we did last time, I really would like to negotiate some of the kinky elements specifically. I have a pretty complicated list of limits around the Little stuff, and some of them are common things in porn, so…”