“Of course, it matters. I liked him. I wanted to see him again.”
“Oh, honey, that’s not how these things work.”
“I don’t care. Sometimes they work out the way they’re supposed to. I left him my card. I wanted him to call me again. I wanted to meet up with him.” I suck in a breath. “And he lied to me, Marina. By omission, but still, that’s a lie too, right?”
“Yeah, but he didn’t make a solemn vow to you last night, Mona. He just fucked you. He made you no promises.”
My mouth tightens as I glance at the picture I found on a news website. A picture of his wedding day. Zane dressed in a tux with a guy in a matching suit at his side. Two beautiful orchids, the color of sunlight, fill their buttonholes. My stomach churns at the happiness on their faces.
What went wrong?
Why did Zane spend the night with me if he’s gay? Gay and married?
“He told me that he had no wife and kids, he forgot to mention that he’s in a civil union.”
“Shit. He cheated on his husband?”
“Yeah. With me.”
“Look, I know you, Monie. You can’t let this get to you. If you do, then it will be another four years before you have sex again. You enjoyed yourself, right?”
Feeling choked up and on the brink of tears, I press the heel of my hand to my left eye, keeping the right trained on a picture of Zane with his husband.
His fucking husband.
I don’t know what would feel worse.
If it was a picture of him with his wife or this.
I have nothing against gay people. My parents do, but I’m a full advocate of live and let live, because life is way too short to be miserable all the damned time. That’s why I left Georgia and made a new start for myself.
But this?
What the hell am I supposed to think?
Why would Zane do this? And why did he pick me to commit adultery with?
“How could he do that? How could he do this to me? What was I? A goddamn fag hag? Or an experiment to see if he can still get it up for women? What’s he doing chasing skirt if he’s gay?” I start to cry again and it’s only because it’s Marina that I don’t feel like a complete idiot. This woman is like my sister and I’ve never been more relieved to have her for a friend.
“No. Stop it, Mona. Don’t be dumb. Some men aren’t…” She breaks off, sucks in a breath and starts again. I can tell she’s trying to convince both herself and me. “If he’s bi, sometimes, he might need a change. He might love his husband but he just needs something a little different, that’s all. It’s a compliment. He picked you over all the other women in that club. And he was hot. H-O-T.”
“He made me a party to adultery.” My voice is high-pitched and nigh on close to panic. As I look at the man Zane legally bound himself to five years ago, a great wave of guilt gushes through me.
I helped this man’s husband cheat on him.
We broke an oath together.
That might not mean a lot to some people, but it does to me. I don’t live my life by my parents’ rules anymore, but their mores are deeply rooted in my own belief system. If Zane’s husband discovers what we did together, that will make me a home-wrecker.
A fucking home-wrecker.
Me. Mona Barranquet. The only cleaner on her boss’ lists who doesn’t steal cleaning supplies from the company.
I wish to God I’d never left my card there this morning.
What if he calls me?
What the hell will I do? What will I say to him?
“I’ve got to go, Marina. I think I’m going to be sick.”
It’s a lie. If anything, I want to fall asleep and pretend last night didn’t happen. Lying is the only way to get my well-meaning best friend off the phone, though.
“Mona.” she snaps. “Don’t you dare put your goddamned phone down. Listen to me, do not be stupid. You had sex with him, you didn’t make a commitment. If anyone’s in the wrong, it’s him.”
She might be right, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling used, jaded and degraded. What had been a perfect night, what had enlightened me to the way sex can really be, has all turned to ashes.
I’ve been burnt. Badly.
But it won’t happen again.
If Zane comes anywhere near me, he’ll regret it. No more Mrs. Nice Guy.
That’s a vow, and unlike him, I don’t break mine.
II
Crazy Little Thing Called Lust
Chapter Four
“How many times has he called?”
Marina’s questions are starting to piss me off. How many times do we have to go over this? For a woman who tried to convince me that my one night with Zane Matthews was just that, one night, she’s getting pretty insistent over the calls and messages with which he’s been bombarding me.
Why aren’t they labeling him as a psycho stalker? Urging me to call the police and to get a restraining order?.
Hell, why are they telling me everything I don’t want to hear?
I don’t need them to tell me how sincere he sounds as he pleads with me to call him. And yes, that is the correct verb. Pleads. Sex god is actually pleading with me to contact him again.
What is this? A parallel universe?
Could very well be, and I’m at its very center.
It’s been a week since I met, fucked, and was then crushed by Zane Matthews.
Oh, I don’t mean he sat on me. Two-hundred and fifty pounds of muscular man meat didn’t roll over and squish me in bed after he’d fucked me senseless. What I mean is, he crushed my…
If I’m honest, I don’t even know what he destroyed.
He didn’t break my heart, because even I’m not pathetic enough to fall in love at first sight. He didn’t crush my spirit or shatter my dreams, so what did he do?
Why do I feel so down? So damned disappointed?
Glumly, I trail my finger down the length of my perspiring glass. The heat wave hasn’t abated any, and I lift the tumbler to my forehead and roll it over my skin. It cools me down some, but a part of me is wishing that we could have held this impromptu conference at either Marina or Eddie’s pads.
They have air conditioning.
I don’t.
Maybe I wouldn’t be so testy if it wasn’t so damned hot.
Pondering the thought for a moment, inwardly I shake my head. No way in hell could I be anything but pissed, when talking about Zane. A one-night stand it might have been, but it had seemed to embrace some kind of promise. And now that’s broken, well, to my mind, there’s nothing to discuss.
With a sigh, I take a sip of water and mutter, “I don’t know, Marina. Ten? Maybe, fifteen times? I haven’t counted.”
“And how many messages did he leave?”
“Four, according to my voicemail log.”
“I think you should give him a break, Mona.”
Up until now, Eddie has been rather silent. With an absentminded look on her face, she’s been twirling a strand of black hair around and around her finger. To be honest, her silence or disinterest have been appreciated in the face of Marina’s about-turn.
Apparently, I’m the only one not rooting for team Zane.
“You think what?” I ask, incredulity seeping into my tone. I stare at her, wondering where the hell Eddie, my ordinarily man-cautious, friend has disappeared. Maybe this is a parallel universe?
“Who are you? And what have you done with Eddie?” I ask, lifting a hand in an attempt to press it to her forehead, because surely only a fever would explain such insanity escaping her mouth?
She backs away and sinks into my crappy sofa, with its broken springs and patched-up covers, then glares at me. “This is no joke,” she says and I can’t disagree with her.
“You’re damned right, it’s not.”
I definitely need a moment of time-out. With a shake of my head, I stand and head toward my kitchen. As a weird stench assails my nostrils, I pause in the doorway and hover, trying to figure out where it’s comi
ng from.
Ever since the morning after I left Zane, an odd smell has begun to permeate the apartment. I called the super, but in this rat-keep of a building, nothing ever gets done. Even though there’s an elevator, in the four years I’ve lived here, it hasn’t worked once.
So, why I was stupid enough to believe the guy would come because of a weird smell… I’m obviously not on fighting form. Zane must have fried all of my faculties.
“What’s wrong?” Marina asks with a frown.
“Nothing, there’s just a weird smell. Don’t tell me you can’t smell it. The super won’t come and it’s starting to get worse.”
“We need to get you out of this dump. The place is filled with hookers and pimps,” Eddie grumbles.
“My neighbors are very friendly, I’ll have you know.”
Nose in the air, I retreat to the kitchen, ignoring the fact that Eddie is right. I’m surrounded by pimps, pushers and prostitutes. Hardly the best people to make a Neighborhood Watch team.
With a sigh, I head over to the fridge and retrieve a plate I’d placed there earlier. Sandwiches aren’t the gourmet fare my friends are used to, but for tonight, they’ll just have to slum it. It won’t kill them.
It’s not that I have an appetite, but this is one of my mother’s dictates that I’ve never been able to rid myself of, never been able to forget. That a hostess never stops, never sits down and never relaxes until the guests are gone.
Remaining silent until I’ve arranged the platter, I return to the living room and place the plate on the coffee table. My laptop is buzzing away, pictures of Zane and his husband litter the screen and all thoughts of pervasive odors disappear, and the subject at hand rears its ugly head.
Over the last couple of days, I’ve found myself staring more and more at the images I’ve found online. Trying to reconcile the man I knew with the man I’m reading about.
And the discrepancies are unnerving.
He’s older than I first thought. I’d calculated him as being around thirty-five, but he’s nearer forty.
He wasn’t just in the Marines, a regular worker bee, or in this case soldier bee like my granddad. He’d retired in the middle of a promising and successful career at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
Even though I know I shouldn’t, even though I know I should forget him, these past seven days, after I’ve finished work and taken note of the one or two missed calls he’s left on my cell, I find myself cyber-stalking him.
I’d mockingly accused him of being a stalker and now I’ve turned into one myself. Great.
It’s amazing what you can find on the net, and as creepy as that sounds and as nonsensical as the situation is, I’m beginning to understand the man I met. I can appreciate his confusion when he laughed, why he always looked shocked. Almost as though humor is a rarity in his life. I can now see behind that slight discomfort about his career, not only that it was proof he was gay, but I’d read in an online paper that his family had ostracized him since his coming out.
He wasn’t from poor stock, but rich. His father had won a Medal of Honor in the middle of the Vietnam War, something which made Zane a shoe-in for the US Naval Academy, if his family’s credentials hadn’t been enough.
Graduating at the top of his class, within fifteen years of surfing to the top of the pile, he was promoted to Lt. Colonel and bam. An insurgent’s bomb exploded at his base. Killing nearly a third of his six hundred-strong battalion as well as leaving Zane on the brink of permanent disability and with his life in tatters. Not that you’d notice he was in any way disabled, he didn’t favor one leg over the other. I’d have noticed when I was checking out his ass in the reception at his hotel.
That I need to get a life is a given. I could probably tell my friends his entire biography in explicit detail, were they to ask.
My eyes flicker away from the pictures that I loaded for the pair of them to see and toward the coffee table, where I set down the platter of snacks.
Taking a seat at Eddie’s side, because Marina is slouched in my one and only armchair, I watch as Marina reaches forward for a sandwich, eventually deciding to say: “You think I should give him another chance, when not only is he gay, but he’s married too? People who are cheats tend to be liars and you think that somebody like that is good for me, Eddie?”
“I admit the circumstances aren’t ideal.” At my snort, she harrumphs. Honest to God, harrumphs. Her mouth tautening and pursing with her irritation, as she tells me, “All these years I’ve never seen you affected by anyone as strongly as him. For the first time in our friendship, you actually asked someone for a drink. I’ve never seen you do that and I’ve known you what? Ten years? Surely there’s a reasonable explanation for why he acted the way he did?”
“The man’s married, Eddie. There’s nothing reasonable about that. There’s no explaining it away, no way to make it acceptable.”
“You don’t know that he’s married. Some pictures and old articles on the guy when he got out of the Marines, do not make the biography one hundred percent authentic. They could be getting divorced or on the verge of separation, you don’t know. Married does not mean happy. And that, you do know.”
Swallowing back my anger, I glare at her. “Dan was a bastard, he treated me like crap and I let him, but at no point did I cheat on him.”
“I’m not saying you did, but was there, or was there not, a period of time when you separated? Officially, you were still married to the louse, but you were a free agent. Maybe that’s where Zane’s at now.”
“I might have been free, but I was still tied to Dan until the papers came through. I wouldn’t have slept with anyone else until it was all official.”
“I hate to say it, honey,” Marina butts in. “But you’re a little Puritan. No one in their right mind stays faithful to a guy they’re divorcing, especially if he’s a louse. You’re unique and you can’t hold everyone to your own principles.”
“Marina’s right,” Eddie tells me. “If he did cheat, then that’s never okay. But until you know all the facts, don’t block this guy out of your life. You could regret it forever. Just hear him out. After all, if the situation wasn’t as bad as it seemed, why does he keep on calling? If he’s what you think he is, then he could just go back to another club and pick up another girl and fuck her instead. But he’s gone to the trouble of contacting you, and doing so repeatedly. Why? Because you’re special. And it’s about time that somebody realized that, Monie.
“I’m sick of you being passed over as though you’re a wallflower, when you’re anything but. Tell her, Marina, maybe she’ll listen to you.”
Snorting, Marina reaches for another sandwich. “She’ll believe what she wants to, you know what she’s like.”
“Hey. I am here, you know.”
“Yeah. And you’re unique, honey. Look, Mona, you’re the only woman I know who could calmly prepare a platter of snacks for a discussion about your love life. You live to your own rules and that’s why we love you, but those rules can be a little constricting at times. Maybe to you and with your background especially, it doesn’t seem that way. Not everybody can be like you.
“Eddie’s right. There could be a simple explanation behind it all. There’s no harm in talking to the guy.”
“You were the one telling me that it was just a one-night-stand. What’s changed your tune?” I bite out, frustrated at being cornered by my two friends. I’d expected support, but for myself and not for Zane.
She shrugs and swallows down some of her diet soda. “He called you.”
“And that makes a difference?”
“Of course, it does. Honey, this is New York. Not Backwater, Georgia. For God’s sake, the man could go out and choose any woman he wants, just like Eddie says. Instead, he’s calling you?
“I can imagine, with the right circumstances, you’re hot stuff in bed—you uptight, anal retentives have a tendency of being firecrackers, but guys don’t need to chase nowadays. Not if all they’re after is se
x. Plenty of women are good in bed, and looking the way he does, there will be chicks throwing their panties at him all over the city.” She takes another sip of her drink. “This matter needs investigation and if you let it drop, if you don’t contact him then I’m with Eddie. You could regret it for the rest of your life.”
Forgetting my role as hostess, I slink back into the red chintz sofa, shoulders hunched and stare down at my knees. I don’t like what they’re saying. In fact, I hate what they’re telling me.
I’m my own woman, I make my own decisions but I’ve grown used to listening to these two for advice. I can’t take this set, because I don’t agree.
Lifting my arm, I settle my elbow on the armrest and support my head with my hand. For a few moments, nobody talks. As I remain quiet, Marina and Eddie start to chat but their voices are drones that I’m tuning out.
If he was separated then, as prolific an author as he is, it would be somewhere on the net.
Do they think I’m stupid?
After experiencing upset, then anger and then a desire to maim him, I sought the pathetic option of looking to clear Zane’s name in my own mind.
I’ve checked article after article, websites to blogs, nothing. Nada.
Not even an inkling that all is not right with Zane and his partner. And what do they say? There’s no smoke without fire.
My eyes wander to the pictures on my laptop screen. The smiles are blinding and it isn’t thanks to regular visits to the dental hygienist.
Zane, standing there in a tux, looking more like Heathcliff than ever, still has the power to make my heart flutter. Those happy grins mock me. For once the brooding darkness about him has dissipated somewhat, which in itself tells me he’s content. Satisfied with his life and not feeling one regret for the dissension in his family that the civil partnership must have caused.
Sinfully Theirs: Naughty Nookie Part I Page 6
