Total pages in book: 165
Estimated words: 159976 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 800(@200wpm)___ 640(@250wpm)___ 533(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 159976 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 800(@200wpm)___ 640(@250wpm)___ 533(@300wpm)
I need her. I need her skin on mine like I need food. More than I need food.
I love Clay Collins.
A text rolls in, and I click it, seeing it’s from her.
As long as I look like yours.
I hover my fingers over the screen, nothing I want to say good enough. I just want to haul my ass over there and press my mouth to hers in front of this whole fucking hallway.
I can’t breathe.
Clay, I’m dying, I type. You’re killing me. Please stop.
A text rolls in a moment later. Can you?
I PULL UP in front of Mimi’s house, parking right behind my mother’s Rover. I check my phone before I get out of the car.
Liv never texted me back.
It was a rhetorical question anyway. I don’t believe for one second that she wants me to stop. She’s capable of walking away when she wants. She’s proven it.
I want to give her everything she deserves, and I will. Prom is coming. Almost at the end of the school year. After the debutante ball. Near graduation.
I’ll face everything, then. I guess I just thought this would be easier. I thought it was just sex. I didn’t expect...to never want to walk away.
I type out a text. Send me a pic.
I wait, a cool breeze sweeping through the trees as the sun starts to set. I’d stayed at school, knowing Liv had rehearsal today and then had to babysit her nephew, and did my homework in the library, killing time before my weekly meeting with Mimi.
Her reply rolls in, and I click on the image she sends.
A bowl of penne pasta with white sauce, artichokes, and chicken.
I roll my eyes. Of your face, please?
A few seconds later, I see her beautiful lips, a faint blush red, puckered to the camera next to a forkful of penne.
I smile. She must be eating dinner. That mouth is mine in ten hours, I say.
I’ll be done with my pasta by then, she assures me. Because it and me are having a total relationship without you right now.
I send her a kiss emoji with a heart and head into my grandmother’s house.
“Mimi?” I call out, setting my bag down and straightening my sweater vest and Polo underneath. “I’m heeeeere.”
No one answers, and I drift through the living room, den, and dining room, looking.
“Mom?” I say loudly.
I see movement outside, and I walk through the solarium, toward the patio outside.
“That has never been an option,” Mimi bites out.
I halt, moving to the side, behind a fern. My mom and grandmother sit at the patio table on the other side of the glass, the open door next to me allowing their voices to drift inside.
“My family is miserable,” Mom tells her.
“Then, fix it. For God’s sake, I’m not against divorce when it improves a woman’s situation,” Mimi fires back, “but leaving Jefferson Collins and letting some other woman win… How could you live with yourself? What are you teaching Clay?”
“That perhaps she should know when to walk away?”
“A divorce is failing,” Mimi says, “and you are both better than that. And don’t act like you don’t still love him.”
A divorce? I stand there, unmoving. My mother’s actually considering divorce. I thought maybe a trial separation after I graduated, but… Have they already started the process?
“And when my father cheated on you?” Mom asks her. “Do you still think you won anything?”
“Oh, honey.” Mimi picks up her glass of lemonade, the pristine blue of the pool in the yard beyond. “I knew exactly what I was getting into. And I knew exactly what I would get in return.” She takes a drink and sets the glass back down. “Some days were almost unbearable, but I’m still here and those women aren’t.”
My grandfather cheated on Mimi? I guess I’m not shocked. I didn’t know the man well. He passed when I was seven. But Mimi wears it like a badge—the fact that she was his wife.
She goes on. “You will never regret keeping your chin up and making the sacrifices it takes to maintain the life you have spent years building. She will come into your home, not because he loves her, but because he misses you and can’t be alone. Once a man becomes used to being taken care of, he can only live that way. He’ll replace you out of necessity, not desire.”
She. My father’s mistress.
“She will come into your home,” Mimi continues, “and parent your child and spend your money and drive your cars. Fix it.”
My chest rises and falls with shallow breaths. Everything’s changing.
I back away from the patio, heading back into the house and ball my fists.
I knew about the other woman. I even thought there might be more than one. Who could blame him? My mother was a bitch and made the house unbearable, trying to control everyone and everything, and we were all suffocating under the clothes and the makeup and the standards, but…