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She straightened, refocusing on me. “How are you?” she asked.
She didn’t ask it in the way people did when all they wanted was a generic answer that would make them seem nice for asking, not wanting to do any emotional legwork.
No, Gwen asked liked she really wanted to know. Like she needed me to answer honestly. Like I was safe to do that.
I don’t know why I answered with the truth. Lying had become so easy. Maybe that was why; maybe I was scared of what would happen if I kept lying to my closest friends. My family.
“I’ve been sleeping with Kace.”
Gwen blinked, her face perfectly blank, cocktail pausing halfway to her mouth. “What?”
It was too late now. I took a huge gulp of my own drink before pressing on. “For a couple of months now. It’s just sex.”
Just sex that invaded my every waking moment. That stained my body like a sunburn that wouldn’t go away. Sex that had made me come to want him in my bed every damn night. That made me let him stay longer and longer those nights.
“Good sex, by that dreamy look on your face,” Gwen pointed out. “I knew there was something different about you. I thought you were just trying a new moisturizer that was really working for you.”
I raised my brow at her. “Come on.”
“No, it’s true. You’re like glowing or something.”
I stared at her. “I’m not fucking pregnant if that’s what you’re trying to imply.
She laughed. “No, I’m not trying to imply that at all. Plus, for me, pregnancy didn’t give me any kind of glow apart from the thin sheen of sweet on my face from all the energy I expended throwing up the first three months.”
I winced at the memory. Like Gwen, my early days of pregnancy were miserable. Morning sickness that lasted all day. Heartburn. Headaches. It was only toward the end of the second trimester that I resembled a human again.
“Apparently, good sex can create a whole other glow that even the most expensive of skincare products cannot replicate,” Gwen said, sipping her drink.
I didn’t respond to her because I couldn’t exactly dispute it. She was right. Everyone had noticed something different about me. Lily’s teacher. Olive. Lacey at the coffee shop.
It didn’t make sense, and it certainly didn’t make me feel better about what I was doing. I was lying to everything, screwing another man while my children slept, and hating myself for it. Yet it was somehow making my hair shinier and my skin brighter.
“I haven’t spent much time with Kace, but Cade seems to like him. Likes that he’s got a really good, new, legit income stream. Plus, he’s hot as balls.”
“Who’s hot as balls?” Cade asked, walking onto the patio with a jug of cosmos. I had to bite my lip in order not to giggle at the big, bad, menacing biker carrying a pitcher of cocktails he’d made for his wife.
Gwen smiled sweetly at the man in question as he set the pitcher down. “No one important. You’re the hottest one out of the entire lot. No competition.”
Cade’s stare was hard and the littlest bit scary, even though I knew how much he adored Gwen and the fact that he’d cut his own hands off before harm came to her or any woman.
The corner of Cade’s mouth twitched in what was widely known as his version of a smile. “Uh huh,” he murmured, leaning his head down to kiss his wife’s lips. The kiss was quick, casual but intimate. Showing the heat that had never fizzled between them.
“Okay, go now, hubby. We’ve got girl stuff to talk about,” Gwen ordered, a slight blush to her cheeks.
I drained my drink if only to salve some of the burn that I felt watching my friend and her husband like that. The jealousy I felt that I didn’t have that. That my version of that was gone. My chest reopened up into one gaping, festering wound as it did every now and then.
“Now he’s gone you need to tell me more,” Gwen demanded, smiling, unaware of what I was feeling. Which was exactly what I wanted. There was nothing I needed less than for my friends to know I was a massive, fucked up mess.
“I just told you,” I said as she poured me another drink, one that was sorely needed.
“How did it happen?” Gwen asked.
“How does anything happen?” I shrugged. “You’re right, he’s hot as balls. He doesn’t know me. It’s nice, you know? Having someone who doesn’t know to pity me too much.”
Gwen’s face fell, and she reached across the table to grasp my hand. “Honey, we do not pity you.”
I smiled sadly at her. Of course they did. They hadn’t know they were doing it. And if they had known how to stop it, they would.
