“Cool. So …” He rubbed his sexy lips together and prowled toward me. “About our working relationship …”
I anticipated his hands finding my waist or maybe sliding around my neck to gently guide my head and my gaze to him.
Nope.
He clasped his hands behind his back and drew in a long breath. A really long breath. Then he held it for an impossibly long time.
After a few seconds, I realized my breathing was on pause as well.
“Business is business. Right? I mean … that’s why you allowed your friend to put on such a pathetic and cringe-worthy display at my store. Correct?”
Where was he going? I blinked a few times, biting the inside of my cheek. “I made a poor decision in the moment—fueled by anger and frustration. I tried to stop her, but it was too late.”
“Anger? Why were you angry?”
I brushed past him toward the bedroom door. “Don’t act so innocent. You stole my Santa.”
“My dad?”
I turned halfway down the hallway, Kael just feet behind me. “The costume.” My eyes narrowed.
“My sick neighbor offered me the costume. Honestly, I said no at first because I knew he was supposed to be at your shop. But then we thought it would be a win-win to have him wear it and split the day between our two businesses. Your afternoon seemed to be better than my morning.”
“You should have told me! Why would you not call or drop in quickly to tell me the plan?”
His hesitation and the ghost of something ornery or deviant that crossed his face gave away his true intention.
“You were trying to get a reaction out of me. You wanted me to be upset so you could make me eat crow when your dad came to my store after allowing me to think the worst of you. You were just asking for me to behave badly.”
He played me.
He played me, and he did it while looking like the victim and then the hero.
His mouth twisted. “I toyed with you—a tiny bit. But you crossed a serious line to the dark side.”
“Toyed with me?” I jabbed my finger into his chest, revenge constricting my pupils. “You are the sex toy, not me.”
Toy. I meant to say toy. Only toy. I was the cat. He was the crippled mouse. I was the puppeteer. He was the puppet.
No sex. Why did my mouth let my brain win?
He lit up like the town square Christmas tree. “Damn … I think I love being your sex toy. I like your face red and your hands balled at your sides. Is that wrong?”
“Yes. It’s wrong and sadistic. Not a sex toy. You’re a pet toy.” I turned and stomped to the front door, plucking my jacket off the floor while stabbing my feet into my boots.
“No. You said sex toy. I have good hearing. I heard you perfectly.” Complete delight and an arrogant tone of victory carried his words.
“You’re a guy. You heard what you wanted to hear. And all things translate to sex for you. It’s not your fault that you’re genetically wired to think about sex all day long.” I reached for the door handle.
He grabbed me, spinning my body around, my back hitting the door. The Kael Hendricks eye sparkle was back and on steroids. “You think of me as your sex toy. You’ve said it before.”
I deflated, angling my gaze to the side. “Not in the way you think.”
“I think you’re using me for sex. I think you’re using me like a human dildo. I think you get a high knowing that other women in your little town of Epperly are throwing themselves at me, but I’m only into you—in the most literal sense. I think you like the secrecy. The simplicity. The sinfulness.”
He waited.
I kept a straight face.
He waited some more.
His body towered over mine, keeping me in my spot and plastered to the door until I gave him something back—acknowledgment. Nourishment for his male ego.
“Fine.” I shrugged, giving him a fleeting glance. “It is in the way you think. Now, move so I can get to work.”
There wasn’t another step for him to take, yet he found one, sucking all the air from my personal space. “Are you sure you’re done playing with me? I think we both have a few extra minutes to spare.”
“Careful. I’d hate for my shiny new toy to lose its luster.”
“Mrs. Smith … I’m not losing my shine in your eyes anytime soon. And you fucking know it.”
I burned in his presence, and he knew it. He pounced on every opportunity to reveal my weakness—him. Kael Hendricks was my weakness. The only thing that annoyed me about him was his incessant need to wear clothes and do things that didn’t involve giving me an orgasm. That and his natural flirtatious nature that drove all the women crazy.
“By the way…” he stepped back to give me a breath or maybe exhale the one I’d been holding “…I made a marketing decision after the vomit incident. I felt it was necessary to recoup a few customers. It was before you told me that Amie planned on making things right. So I just want to make sure we’re good. That’s what I was getting ready to tell you earlier when I mentioned our working relationship. Business being business.”
I tipped my chin up and cleared my throat. “Of course … business is business.”
“Great.” Without touching me with any other part of his body, he leaned down and kissed the corner of my mouth. I felt his lips bend into a smile.
I didn’t trust that smile.
“Have a great day at work,” he whispered, giving me a faint chill along my neck and down my spine.
* * *
Slow day.
I wasn’t sure what my competitor’s marketing decision was or if it affected my slow sales day.
Until …
Grief recovery group.
“Rhonda just called. She’s running a few minutes late. We can pray and start without her. Or …” Kelly, shrugged nonchalantly. “We can real talk.”
“Real talk?” Deb asked.
“She wants to talk about the things our husbands did that we don’t miss.” Bethanne winked at Kelly. “Right?”
“We can just wait for Rhonda.” I smiled. What had I done to our little church group? Only one of us needed to go straight to Hell.
Me, of course.
Yet everyone else seemed to have a guilty conscience too. Real emotions weren’t supposed to feel so wrong. My husband drove me crazy and died. I didn’t physically wrap my hands around his neck and strangle him—even if I thought about it in that weird, uncontrollable part of my brain. Everyone had dirty, awful, shameful, unimaginable thoughts float through their heads on those rare occasions.
“It’s … freeing.” Kelly shared a sheepish grin. “I can’t fully explain it. Missing him is the part that comes naturally. It’s the part that everyone understands—everyone expects. It’s easy to miss all the good times. But it’s hard to live with the regret over the parts that weren’t great. I miss a million things about him … does that make it okay to not miss a dozen things that I literally started to hate about him? A million to twelve. That’s not terrible. Right?”
Silence settled over our group for a few minutes, letting Kelly’s words hang in the air—a familiar cloud I knew all too well.
“A tiny rock in your shoe on a ten-mile walk. It’s so freaking tiny compared to your foot. The size of a grain of salt. And the view is amazing. You love that pine scent filling the cool air. You know the soft trickle of the nearby stream is the most relaxing sound ever.”
“Blue sky.” Kelly took over, and I smiled at her. “Soft breeze. Archways and canopies of trees. A wonderland. But … you can’t enjoy any of it because the tiniest little thing is irritating you. It’s hijacked your mind. And no matter how hard you try to ignore it, you just can’t let that tiny thing go. It slowly steals your enjoyment … your happiness. And if you don’t get rid of it, you know it will ruin the hike, and you’ll regret not doing something to remedy the situation.”
“But …” Bethanne spoke up. “It’s not just you on the walk. It’s a group of people.”
&
nbsp; Pam nodded slowly as she picked up the story. “And you don’t want to disrupt the pace. You don’t want to ask them to stop for you.”
Kelly wiped a tear. “You don’t want to complain. You don’t want to be difficult.”
“So you go with the flow,” I said, not knowing when the mood of the room shifted, but it did. And everyone shared the same moment … the same thoughts without really saying much at all. “Until you can’t take it. And you say something.”
“And you realize you should have just stayed quiet because when they see the rock … it looks so tiny. And you look ridiculous for making a big deal out of nothing,” Bethanne finished the scenario.
Or you empty your other shoe filled with more tiny rocks. Then … you let them know the rocks are their fault. They leave … and never return.
Fucking tiny rock …
“My husband scratched his junk then sniffed his fingers. I don’t think he knew I saw him, but I did, and it was a total turnoff.” Bonnie wrinkled her nose—so did everyone else. “I mean … it was his junk, not mine. It wasn’t the end of the world. It was just a gross thing he did. I suppose it was no different than someone smelling their armpits to see if they have BO. Right? I suppose he just couldn’t bend his nose down that far.”
A few of us snorted suppressed laughs as Bonnie smirked.
“Rick would gag on his toothbrush … Every. Single. Time.”
“Toby had a few teeth knocked out from playing hockey, and he wore a removable denture or bridge thing in public. But at home, he took it out because it was uncomfortable. And I totally understood. You should be able to just relax at home. But … here’s the awful, embarrassing but … I hated looking at him with missing teeth. So I didn’t. He’d talk and I’d look at anything but his face. Quick glances to make eye contact, but I couldn’t look at his mouth. Terrible. Right?”
A collective head shake moved like a wave around the room. Maybe it was terrible, but we all had our “buts,” so it felt hypocritical to judge—it felt unchristian to admit it aloud.
WWJD? He would’ve looked at Toby’s gnarly smile and seen past it to his beautiful soul. But Jesus walked on water, so I always found the WWJD bar to be a bit high for the average modern-day sinner.
The “I loved my husband but” statements rolled off the tongues of all the sinners/widows that night.
“Eating with his mouth open.”
“Removing his dirty underwear and tossing them on the bed right before getting into bed.”
“Always talking politics.”
“Scoping out women—not so slyly.”
“Assuming I would cater to him like his mom—laundry, cooking, cleaning, picking up after him.”
“Butchering all the songs on the radio by singing to them without knowing the words.”
“Never walking the recyclables to the garage, just leaving them on the counter like they would grow legs and leave on their own.”
“Tea bags on the edge of our clean sink.”
“Long fingernails.”
And then … the original scratch-and-sniff comment took second place as Rhonda arrived late. And she’d heard the next comment all too clearly.
“He wanted to go down on me when it was that time of the month.”
Silence.
So much deafening silence.
Rhonda cleared her throat, clutching it at the same time, eyes like saucers. “Wh-what are we talking about, ladies?” She stressed the ladies as if to remind us that we were in fact expected to act like ladies.
Not whores.
At least, I felt like that was what Rhonda’s tone of voice insinuated. The whore part might have just been my guilty conscience. Abby letting Ryan go down on her during her period didn’t make her a whore. It made her … lucky? I was actually quite horny during my period, especially toward the end. But I didn’t have sex during it. Craig never even suggested it. And oral sex during that special time of the month? No way. But I didn’t like meat that wasn’t charred. Ryan probably liked his steak rare.
Abby, with her back to Rhonda, cringed. We all cringed, even if outwardly we tried to act like Mom didn’t just walk in on us talking about some bloody good sex.
“Abby was just remembering how Ryan would go down to the pharmacy during her menstrual cycle to get sanitary napkins and chocolate. What a total sweetheart, huh?” Bethanne for the save.
I wasn’t sure if Rhonda bought it, but there was no way she was going to question it and risk the actual topic going any further.
“That is sweet.” Rhonda eyed me. ME!
What did I do? Oh, right … I turned our church-based group into a confessional of all the things that drove people crazy about their significant other, instead of the gathering of gratitude and prayer that it was meant to be.
My bad.
Rhonda took a seat and cleared her throat—still eyeing me like the troublemaker. “I was sad to see your competitor using your product labels to promote his products. I know it’s smart marketing, but in such a small town, it felt like a low blow. I’m sure it was a desperate attempt to recover from the business he lost on Black Friday after Dr. Jennings blamed him for her illness that turned out to be something else. It’s all very unfortunate.” She took way too much pride in telling me that.
Of course, I had no idea what she was talking about.
“Oh …” She read my mind. “You didn’t know?”
“Know what?” I played it extra cool.
“That Kael posted your products’ ingredients next to the ingredients in his products on his shelves along with a list of things that have been shown or suspected to cause heart disease, hypertension, obesity, and cancer. It was a little jarring to see how much fat, salt, and preservatives, that I can’t even pronounce, are in your products.” She chuckled. “I’m sure that’s what gives them such a sinful taste but seeing it like that made me think twice about consuming them. Especially since my doctor just put me on cholesterol medication.”
Business is business …
Biting my lips together, I nodded slowly.
Well played.
Chapter 19
“But-uh … so anyway … yeah.” My husband used space holders in conversations. He talked in fragments, ending his incomplete thoughts with “you know …” I didn’t know—nobody knew. Everyone else nodded politely as if they did know because Craig was a nice guy. Nice guys didn’t need to speak in full sentences.
Monday morning, I knocked on the door to What Did You Expect? thirty minutes before it was supposed to open for the day. Kael grinned as he approached the entrance.
“Nice surprise,” he said after unlocking the door. “But…” he glanced over his shoulder “…one of my employees just arrived. We could probably do it quickly in the bathroom if you’re not too loud.”
“You’ve put me out of business. Happy?”
A deep line formed between his eyebrows. “What?” He retreated a step and opened the door wider to let me inside. “Can you get things set up in the kitchen for tonight’s class?” he asked his employee. “I need a minute with Mrs. Smith.”
The woman nodded and closed the door to the kitchen behind her. She could see us but hearing us would have been a little more difficult, especially since he had jolly holiday music playing fairly loudly through the speakers.
I perused up one aisle and down another while he shadowed me. The labels Rhonda mentioned were no longer on the shelves, but I’d since heard from several other sources that they were there all day the Saturday after Black Friday.
It didn’t matter.
“How did I put you out of business?”
“By coming to Epperly.” I shrugged, keeping my distance and my back to him while pretending to be interested in all the unique items on his displays.
“Does Epperly not support a free market? You have more than one bank and grocery store.”
Two.
We had two banks and two grocery stores. A third bank or a third grocery store would not have surv
ived. Well, the new one might have, but one of the other ones would have had to close its doors. Banks and grocery stores were essential businesses. Specialty food stores were not. One was enough, and outside of the holiday season, one specialty food store was too much.
“I didn’t say you did anything wrong. It’s a free market. You had every right to start up a business here. But it doesn’t change the facts.”
“Which are?”
I stopped at the end of an aisle and turned toward him, crossing my arms over my chest. “I’m closing the doors to Smith’s for good at the end of the year.”
“Because of me?”
I nodded.
“Elsie …”
“Don’t apologize. Don’t give me the business is business speech. I don’t want to hear it. I’m not even mad.”
I was a little mad. At whom? I wasn’t sure.
Myself?
Craig?
Kael?
Customers?
I felt numb. Maybe it was the anniversary of Craig’s death approaching. In so many ways, I felt just as lost and trapped as I did a year earlier. Another tiny rock in my shoe that I couldn’t ignore any longer. It made me angry, irritated, and a little reckless.
“I don’t know what to say.”
I shook my head. “There’s nothing to say. You should be proud. Victorious. You’ll do well. Everyone loves you and your store the way they loved my husband and his family’s store for so many years. And if you stick around long enough, some young asshole with a fresh idea will move into town and force you to close your doors. Think of it as the circle of life in the business world.”
“Young asshole. Is that what I am to you?”
“To Mrs. Smith, shop owner. Yes. You are. To me, Elsie … you’re my sex toy.” That felt victorious.
That look on his face. After years of watching men put women in their place—in Epperly that meant barefoot, pregnant, and rubbing a pot roast—it felt slightly gratifying to be the one doing the objectifying.
I expected the same grin as the first time he heard me call him a sex toy. No such luck.
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