by Heidi Betts
“You’re late,” Ronnie said from her spot in the armchair to Grace’s left. “Is everything all right?”
A stab of guilt speared her at the concern in her friend’s voice. She knew Ronnie was worried about her. If their situations had been reversed and she’d been the one to witness Ronnie taking a baseball bat to Dylan’s car and tearing apart his apartment, then crawling into her own bed to rail and wail for a day and a half, she’d have been concerned, too.
Frankly, Grace was lucky her friends hadn’t called the men in white coats. Not that a few hours in a strait-jacket and room with padded walls wouldn’t have done her some good.
“Everything’s fine,” she reassured them. “Work has just been a little hectic lately, and my producer stopped me on my way out to argue about some upcoming show topics.” The men-are-evil-and-must-be-shot segments, which she still maintained were timely and necessary to the fate of womankind.
Reaching into her bag, Grace removed a giant wad of thin, delicate white yarn already knit into several complicated pieces. Parts of what was supposed to have been her wedding dress. She’d been so excited about making it herself, instilling that love and excitement into every stitch.
On several occasions, Jenna and Ronnie had both offered to help, seeing how complicated the pattern was and fearing Grace wouldn’t be able to complete it in time by herself. But Grace had declined. She’d wanted to do it all herself, to wear her own creation down the aisle.
Now, though, the idea brought her only pain and heartbreak.
Removing the miniscule needles from the piece she’d been working on last, she crossed her legs, sat back, and began tugging the end of the yarn to unravel the whole horrible mess.
“What are you doing?” Jenna shrieked, nearly jumping out of her chair when she spotted Grace’s actions.
“I’m pulling apart my wedding dress,” Grace answered, without emotion and without lifting her head. “And when I’m finished, I’m going to burn it, along with everything that asshole ever gave me, everything he left at my place, and every picture of him I can find.”
While most of the women in the group didn’t know about Zack’s recent infidelity or the demise of their relationship, they caught on quickly-and wisely kept their mouths shut. Only Melanie, a young mother of two small children and one of their closer friends who often joined them for drinks at The Penalty Box after meetings, had the nerve to ask what in God’s name was going on.
Ronnie attempted to fill her in as politely and with as few of the more gruesome details as possible. Grace wasn’t nearly as discerning. She recapped the story in a voice sharp enough to cut glass and with a generous sprinkling of four-letter words… most of them used to describe the cheating Zack-Ass bastard.
By the time she finished, a pile of curly white thread lay at her feet, the physical embodiment of a metaphor for the unraveled mess her life and engagement had recently become.
Rather than feeling distressed over undoing all the hard work she’d put into the dress-and Lord, it had been hard work; tiny needles, whisper-thin yarn, and teeny, extremely complicated stitches-she found the harsh, repetitious yank-and-pull, yank-and-pull to be cathartic. She even managed to match her motions to the chorus of “Before He Cheats,” which she was humming beneath her breath while the others chatted around her.
She hadn’t been at it twenty minutes when she noticed the change. The air around her grew suddenly brittle, and there was a distinct shift to the sounds of the store that usually surrounded them.
And then there were the footsteps. Heavy, booted footsteps moving at a fast clip.
Grace’s stomach tightened and a lump of something she preferred not to identify by name formed in her chest. She sat up straighter, steeling herself for what was to come as a dark shadow fell over her and the hot breath of doom blew on her neck.
“You.”
That one syllable was spoken so low and with so much venom, she was surprised she didn’t die of odium poisoning right there on the spot. As it was, her skin did tingle and her pulse did kick up a beat.
Slowly and very carefully, she set aside what she was doing and turned in her chair to smile pleasantly up at a red-faced Zachary Hoolihan. He towered over her, chest heaving. He looked angry enough to spit nails, and she was frankly surprised steam didn’t pour out of his ears.
Dylan stood on his left, just behind Ronnie’s chair, looking distinctly uncomfortable. Gage stood on his right, looking… well, like Gage. Sort of big, intimidating, and expressionless. Between them, Zack put her in mind of Yosemite Sam, hopping around and blustering like a crazy person.
All week, she’d been imagining how she would act the next time she ran into Zack. And she’d known she would. Cleveland might have been a nice, big city, but it wasn’t that big, and she’d expected he would make a point of tracking her down eventually to confront her about the damage she’d done to his car and apartment.
Payback, as they said, was a bitch.
“Are you addressing moi?” she asked in a voice so sweet, it nearly blew out her pancreas. Because damned if she’d let him think he’d gotten to her-aside from the recent acts of wanton destruction, that was.
“Damn right, I’m addressing you, Little Miss Smart-Ass,” Zack snapped. “You wrecked my apartment, stole my dog, and killed my car.”
“Excuse me?” Her eyes went wide in practiced innocence.
“You. Killed. My. Car.” He enunciated each word, spitting them through gritted teeth before resting both hands on the back of her chair and leaning in until they were nearly nose to nose. “You destroyed my Hummer.”
“Your Hummer?” she asked in a voice she was pretty sure Shirley Temple had used in every one of her adorable little movies. “Did something happen to that big red beast?”
Zack stood back once again, but a vein had begun to throb at his temple and she thought he might be at serious risk of popping an embolism.
Good. It would serve him right, the jerk.
“You know goddamn well something happened to it. You happened to it. You broke into the parking garage at my apartment complex and destroyed my fucking Hummer! Then you broke into my apartment and went apeshit in there, too.”
Grace placed one long index finger against her cheek, wishing now that she’d made a point of stopping at the salon before tonight’s meeting. A beautifully manicured nail would have been just the thing to show Zack that she was doing fine without him. That she didn’t care how many silicone-boobed puck bunnies he boffed.
Batting her lashes and pulling her mouth into a sympathetic pucker, she used her best Betty Boop impression to say, “But I thought you said your Hummer was indestructible.”
If possible, Zack’s face mottled an even darker shade of red. His eyes were so wide, they were practically solid white with only pinpricks of blue at the pupils, and he looked ready to explode.
“Arrest her!” he burst out instead, pointing a shaking finger at her while nudging Gage in the ribs with his elbow.
Gage raised a brow, startled by his sudden demand. He glanced from Zack to Grace and back again. “What?”
“You heard me,” Zack continued at a volume she suspected could be heard not only throughout the entire craft store, but at the other end of the strip mall where it was located. “Arrest her. Slap the cuffs on her, read her her rights, and drag her down to the pokey. I want her locked up for breaking and entering, theft because she took Bruiser, destruction of property, and just plain being a bitch.” His tone lowered at the last and he delivered the insult as though it were supposed to be a great, painful stab to her heart.
Grace nearly snorted. After walking in on him five minutes after he’d Zamboni-ed some random tramp, being called a nasty name didn’t make a dent.
Rising gracefully to her feet, she faced him full on, only the imitation-leather armchair separating them.
“I may be a bitch,” she told him, her voice turning frosty for the first time since he’d walked into the store and started tossing a
round accusations, “but I’m a faithful bitch. You, on the other hand, are a lying, cheating bastard, who doesn’t deserve a nice vehicle, doesn’t deserve a nice apartment, and most certainly doesn’t deserve a sweet little dog like Bruiser.”
If Zack noticed her positive reference to the Saint Bernard when in the past she’d mostly complained about how big, stinky, and in the way he was, he didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, he latched on to the rest of her diatribe.
A muscle in Zack’s jaw jumped as he ground his teeth. Leaning forward until they were nearly nose to nose, he said, “For your information, I didn’t lie and I didn’t cheat. Something I’d have explained to you if you’d stop being pissed off for five minutes and answered your goddamn phone!”
“Oh,” she replied tartly, “I suppose that bimbo was in your bed because she started choking on a salad shrimp during a promotional banquet and you decided to take her up to your hotel room to give her the Heimlich, right? And somehow during all the chaos, everybody’s clothes just fell off.”
“I didn’t take her to my room,” Zack insisted, eyes narrowed in growing frustration. “I didn’t even know she was there.”
“Yeah, and there’s this great piece of swampland in Florida I’m thinking of buying for a summer getaway.” She snorted. “I may have been dumb enough to date you for three years, but I’m not a complete idiot. You’re lucky your Hummer wasn’t set on fire, too.”
“So you admit you did those things. I told you,” he said, elbowing Gage again. “See, she confessed. Arrest her.”
“I didn’t confess to anything,” she replied softly. “I was simply making a statement. If someone else feels the same way about you as I do and decided to mete out a bit of karmic justice… well, I say, Yay, them. And screw you, Zack.”
Balling his hands into fists, he jabbed them on his hips and ground out, “Dammit, I didn’t cheat on you, Grace. You’d know that if you’d answer one of my phone calls and give me five fucking minutes to explain.”
“You don’t need to explain. I’ve got eyes to see and a brain that’s fully capable of adding two plus two to get four. And you can spend your five fucking minutes fucking someone else from now on.”
With that, she used her foot to rearrange some of the yarn on the floor that had gotten moved around and took her seat once again, returning to the job of unraveling as though none of the men hovering behind her even existed.
She heard grumbling, but couldn’t quite make out what Zack was saying beneath his breath. Obviously, some of the wind had been taken out of his sails-something that should have pleased her, but didn’t.
If she’d been home alone, she probably would have been curled up in bed by now with… Rex? King? Tonto?… and another pint of Ben and Jerry’s. As it was, she was hanging on to her composure by a thread thinner than the yarn she was even now pulling loose from her wedding gown pattern.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t anger that threatened to bubble over, but sorrow, and she hoped to hell Zack left before she burst into tears and let him know how much he’d hurt her.
Thankfully, he did, but not without a bit of prompting from his friends.
“Come on,” Dylan said. “Let’s get out of here. You’ll feel better after a couple of beers.”
“I’ll feel better after she’s behind bars,” Zack quipped, and she could imagine a sneer twisting his lips. Ironically, his tone didn’t seem to carry the same vehemence of only minutes before.
Even knowing he couldn’t see the gesture, Grace raised a brow and calmly said, “And I’ll feel better after you break out in genital herpes and your cock falls off.”
Purl 14
“You hope he breaks out in genital herpes and his cock falls off?”
Ronnie repeated the line for what had to be the six-thousandth time, followed by her six-thousandth chortle of laughter. This one just happened to be limoncello-induced.
Jenna was sipping at her own bright yellow drink, but even though Grace’s parting remark to Zack had been amusing, she hadn’t gotten quite as big a kick out of it as Ronnie apparently had.
After Zack had stormed out of the craft store with Gage and Dylan in tow, the ladies had continued on with their meeting. It had been a bit beyond them to pretend nothing had happened, but Grace had staunchly refused to comment on Zack’s accusations, remarking only on his infidelities and some of the less insane ways she’d handled it.
Not that taking scissors to a man’s hockey scrap-book and abducting his two-hundred-pound canine sounded particularly sane to anyone listening.
The women had all agreed, however, that she’d had every right to toss his clothes into the street-which had then led to a discussion about the classic scene in Waiting to Exhale when Angela Bassett’s character had stuffed everything her cheating husband owned into his car, doused it with lighter fluid, and set it afire.
Jenna cringed at the reminder, afraid it might be giving Grace fresh ideas. As it was, Grace took a tiny notepad out of her purse and jotted down the titles of every wronged-woman film the others in the group could recommend. Waiting to Exhale, Fatal Attraction, Double Jeopardy, and Chicago topped the list, but there were so many, Jenna thought she might have to confiscate Grace’s video rental card before she got the chance to do any more “research” into the fine art of making a man’s life a living Hell.
Soon enough, though, the meeting had broken up, and Grace, Ronnie, and Jenna had all agreed to head over to The Penalty Box for a drink. Even though she knew Gage would be there, waiting for her, Jenna felt the need to suggest that perhaps they go somewhere else. Because, of course, Zack would be there, too, and the way Jenna saw it, putting Grace and Zack in the same room together-even a very large room, filled with dozens of other people-was a recipe for disaster.
But Grace didn’t want to avoid the Box, she informed them haughtily. She wanted to go there, order a martini the size of Lake Erie, and have a good time, if only to prove to Zack that he couldn’t scare her away.
The Penalty Box had been their hangout for as long as Jenna could remember. Not just Zack’s and Grace’s, but the entire gang’s.
Jenna’s attention skimmed across the bar to where Gage sat with his friends. Zack was leaning on the round tabletop, wearing a deep scowl and sending the occasional scathing glance in Grace’s direction.
Ronnie’s boyfriend, Dylan, looked much more pleasant, sipping his beer and staring openly at the woman he loved. His gaze wasn’t exactly scorching, but there was a definite heat there, and Jenna thought he was probably calculating how much longer he had to hang out with the guys and let Ronnie hang out with her girlfriends before he could pluck her out of the booth and drag her home for a long and thorough ravishment.
Truth be known, Jenna was thinking something along those lines herself. Gage’s confession that he hadn’t been with any other women since their divorce-and certainly not before, thank goodness-played through her mind. Even when he’d been free, even when he would have been well within his rights to date and sleep with other women, he hadn’t.
Her heart gave a little flip at that, and at the knowledge that he was probably one of the most trustworthy men on the planet.
Gage chose that moment to look up, and their eyes met. She expected him to smile, maybe wink, but instead his expression remained stoically blank.
So much for trying to figure out how soon she could make her excuses and drag him home for some good old-fashioned slap-and-tickle.
Turning back to her drink, she used the tiny swizzle straw leaning against the side of the slanted glass to toy with the yellow liquid.
“Okay, you are entirely too quiet tonight,” Grace remarked.
Jenna raised her head and gave her friends a crooked smile.
“Sorry, I was just…”-feeling guilty-“thinking.”
Grace stole a glance over her shoulder. “About Gage the Wonder Stud?”
Heat flared into Jenna’s cheeks.
“Oh, stop!” Grace chastised lightly, wrapping an arm around
Jenna’s shoulders and giving her a sideways hug. “Just because my life is currently circling the toilet bowl doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be happy. Look at Ronnie, she’s positively giddy, and I only half want to strangle her.”
They both turned their gazes to Ronnie, who was wearing a wide smile and staring off across the room at Dylan.
“It’s sickening, isn’t it?” Grace asked in a soft aside.
Actually, Jenna thought it was kind of nice. She remembered that part of the courtship ritual and how great it was to be head-over-heels in love, to have the world and every breath revolve around another person.
“All right,” Grace said with a sigh, pulling her arm back and taking a long, strong suck of her quickly disappearing limoncello. “I can see I’m the only one having a down-with-men moment here.”
“I’m sorry,” Jenna told her, “I know you’re having a rough time right now. I don’t mean to be distracted.”
Grace shrugged a slim shoulder. “That’s okay. I’m getting kind of tired of talking about the cheating louse, anyway. It’s taking up too much of my time.”
She raised a hand to get their waitress’s attention and signaled for another round of drinks. “So tell us what’s been going on with you and Gage. And I sure as hell hope he has been a wonder stud instead of just some damn Shetland pony.”
Jenna’s face flushed with color once more. Not so much from Grace’s remark this time as the memories it invoked. Memories of exactly how wonder-studly Gage had been the past few days.
“Nothing… much has been going on.”
Grace and Ronnie exchanged a glance before sly grins slid over both their faces.
“Oh-ho,” Ronnie laughed. “That means a lot has been going on. Come on, Jenna, give us the scoop.”
Jenna covered her eyes with a hand and gave her head a little shake. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to share the details of recent events with her best friends, but since she wasn’t clear herself on exactly what was going on, she didn’t quite know what to say.
