know it wouldn’t have worked with Miguel, but I still feel like crap.
“Oh my God.” My sister’s eyes light up. “You fell in love with him, didn’t you?”
I don’t answer as I watch my luggage go by me. I push past two fortysomething women standing together, excusing myself as I do, to grab the suitcase before it gets too far.
The moment I turn around, I notice that my sister’s eyes are narrowed. There’s genuine concern on her face.
“Did he hurt you?” she asks when I return to her side. “He was seeing someone else? Oh, no. Don’t tell me he was married!”
“He wasn’t married. He didn’t hurt me.” I extract the suitcase’s handle. “Can we go now?”
“You don’t want to talk about it.” Annelise states the obvious.
“Which way?” I ask.
“This way.” Annelise starts for the doors off to the left, but slows so I can catch up to her. “Hey, I know what it’s like to not want to talk about something. When it hurts too much to even think about it. But just know that whenever you do want to talk, I’m here.” She rubs my back. “Okay?”
I can’t believe myself. Just the act of Annelise giving me support has me almost ready to burst into tears. I hold them in check—barely.
Which is why I know I’m nowhere near ready to tell her about Reed, how he showed up in Costa Rica and told me he still loved me, and how I stupidly fell for the line like a moron. If I get into the story here, I think I’ll have a meltdown.
So I change the subject, asking, “How’s Dominic?”
“Amazing,” Annelise responds right away, her face lighting up like a neon sign.
“In other words, the sex is good.” I manage an actual smile.
“Good?” Annelise pauses before she heads out the automatic doors and whispers, “Sam, the sex is…out of this world!”
“Wow.”
“Total romance cliché, I know. But, Sam, it’s the absolute truth. I had no clue sex could be this amazing.”
“So I take it you’re not missing Charles,” I joke as we start out the door toward the parking lot.
“Charles. Ugh.” Annelise makes a face of pure disgust. “I hope he rots in jail for embezzling money from the Wishes Come True Foundation. Never in a million years would I think the man I married could be such a heartless son of a bitch. To steal money that goes toward helping terminally ill children…”
“What’s happening with that?” I ask. I’ve only been away for two weeks, but it seems like much longer. A lifetime, in many ways.
“I heard Charles was begging for a plea bargain. Claimed the embezzlement wasn’t his idea.”
I snort at that.
“Exactly. He can keep dreaming, because with the evidence they have against him, he’ll be lucky if the sentence is lenient.”
“The evidence you found in Costa Rica,” I say proudly. It was Annelise’s bright idea to search her husband’s tropical condo when she learned it existed. Honestly, I never thought my sister had it in her to become a modern Agatha Christie. With Charles, she accepted substandard treatment. She became a wimp under him, if you ask me. Always wondering what she could do to please him, how she could spice up their love life to keep him happy when he suddenly didn’t want sex from her. It was no surprise to me that he’d been screwing someone else for quite some time.
“And it was so much fun,” Annelise admits.
“Wasn’t it, though? And when Charles showed up at the condo…”
“I know! I thought it was over, right then and there.” Annelise pauses as she chuckles. “I can’t believe that was my life, not some HBO movie.”
“Did you talk to a lawyer yet, see if you can get any money from the house?” I ask. “After how you helped break the case, the last thing you deserve is to get screwed over in this.”
Annelise nods as we approach her Volvo. “I have. Claudia set me up with one of her uncles, and he’s really great. He seems optimistic, but I don’t want to hold my breath.”
“Claudia’s the spoiled rich one, right?”
Annelise frowns as she meets my gaze. “Spoiled?”
“Yeah. She doesn’t work, her parents pay for everything.”
“So?”
“So I’d say that’s pretty spoiled.”
“Well she’s not,” Annelise says in defense of her friend. “Claudia does a lot of charitable work, as many rich people do. That was what she was going to do when she married Adam—devote her life to charitable causes. But then he screwed her over and the wedding was off.”
Annelise opens the trunk for me, and I hoist my suitcase into it. Suddenly I smile. The two of us here like this, doing things that sisters normally do on a day-to-day basis—it’s nice.
Even having a bit of a disagreement, as sisters often do, is welcome. Because it means we’re communicating.
I should point out that my sister and I haven’t been exactly close. She’s older than I am, and for most of our adult lives she’s looked down on the choices I’ve made. Like the decision to be an exotic dancer. But in the last couple months, our relationship has gone through a marked change. We’re talking. Communicating again without judging each other.
In short, we’ve become friends.
We probably have a long way to go, but I’m hopeful about the future. At least when it comes to my sister, that’s one relationship that’s working out.
Two
Annelise
The moment my eyes open, I do what has become part of my morning routine over the past couple of weeks. I glance to my right, see my lover’s naked body and smile.
My how times can change.
If you’d told me six months ago that today I’d be getting sex regularly and that my best friends and sister would be the ones now going without, I would have laughed in your face. No, I would have cried. That’s how pathetically miserable my sex life was with my husband.
I had a husband who, after we’d been together for ten years, stopped touching me. Completely. Didn’t want to make out, much less have sex. He started treating me like I was his grandmother in terms of the sexual contact between us, and I, like a fool, began blaming myself for his lack of sexual interest in me.
They say hindsight’s twenty-twenty, and it’s so easy for me now to see exactly how much of a lying ass Charles was. To think I bought his I’m-so-stressed-I’m-impotent line. At the heart of the matter, really, was my religious convictions and deeply held belief in till death do us part. Being raised by a religious fanatic mother, I’ve lived much of my life being concerned that if I do the wrong thing, I’ll burn in hell for eternity.
To my credit I can say I remained committed to Charles until I learned he was cheating on me and cheating the kids of the Wishes Come True Foundation, where he was a member of the board. I took my vows seriously when I married him, even though he didn’t deserve my love. And I feel no guilt about moving on with someone else while I wait for my divorce, enjoying sex for the first time in nearly a year and a half.
Life is good now.
No, I think, glancing at Dominic again. It’s great.
In many ways it seems like much more than two weeks have gone by since I dove headfirst