In a Moon Smile

by Coner, Sherri

  A knock at the door brought Chesney back to the moment, dripping on the Berber, she blinked at the front door. Was Jack here? She would not answer the door. Forget it. But then Chesney heard Becca’s muffled voice. Trying to smile, she gestured for her best friend to walk right in to her latest man crisis.

  “Why aren’t you answering your cell?” Becca demanded. “I’ve been worried to death about you, Chez.”

  “Sorry,” Chesney said glumly. “I turned my phone off when I went to the book signing. Guess I forgot to turn it back on.”

  “Get some clothes on and tell me what happened,” Becca said in a softer voice. “I’ll meet you on the sofa.”

  Becca made her way into the small galley kitchen, opened the fridge and helped herself to a diet soda from the second shelf of the fridge and a grape Popsicle from the freezer. She had been addicted since college to the icy treats and counted on Chesney to keep a supply at all times.

  When Chesney reappeared, her wet hair was swept up in a clip and a faded college T-shirt and boxers had replaced the towel. Watching her long-time friend dab at her eyes, Becca thoughtfully bit a chunk from the Popsicle. Her tall, skinny body, folded in a chair reminded Chesney of a praying mantis. Becca combed her long, skinny fingers through her thick, dark tresses, a dead giveaway that she was anxious. Chesney wiped her nose again, tottering once again on the edge of that proverbial cliff of bad luck, bad decisions and bad karma, made her want to curl up in the fetal position.

  “Honestly Chez, I told you from the beginning that Jack Mobley was an arrogant ass,” Bec said. “I begged you not to date him. Remember? In the very beginning, I tried to remind you that you wanted to date a nice guy for once. And Jack did not and still does not fit into that category.”

  Awesome, Becca. This is a great time for you to start in with several thousand I-told-you-so moments. Really love your timing.

  Chesney only nodded since she wanted Becca to shut the hell up. But she also nodded because Becca was right. She nodded because she could not find her own voice. She was too humiliated to say a single word. She could not imagine how she could navigate her way through the world after this shameful little drama.

  “At the book signing, one of my readers asked about my wedding plans,” Chesney said in a near whisper. “Becca, how can I survive this? People will eventually find out how incredibly stupid I am.”

  She hated the whiney edge wrapped around that question. Her best friend stared for a long moment. “Right now we aren’t worrying about your readers,” Becca said. “Right now, we are worrying only about what happened five hours before you went to the book signing. So tell me that story. Then we will figure out what to do about damage control with the public.”

  Chesney straightened her back, hoping some kind of bravery would swirl into her chest if she stomped slumping against the cushions. She needed strength to relive the heartbreak. She took in a deep breath, hoping not to drown in the pain and quickly reminded Becca that Jack had been away on business for the weekend. That she had happily stopped at the grocery to buy ingredients to whip up beef Burgundy, Jack’s favorite. Chesney also grabbed a bottle of wine and a fresh cheesecake.

  On the way across town, she ducked into a dirty girl kind of store and purchased one pair of edible, cherry-flavored panties. Then she smiled all the way across town and all the way up the elevator. Her plan was to shove the groceries into the fridge, attend the book signing and return to prepare and serve all of his favorite treats the moment Jack returned from his business trip. Humming You are the Wind Beneath my Wings, Chesney carefully balanced the grocery bags on her hip and unlocked her guy’s apartment door. Soon after entering the apartment, however, she discovered that her future husband was not out of town, he had actually spent the weekend between Belinda Carlton’s legs.

  Stunned, Chesney had walked smack-dab into a sexual gymnastics event. Jack was naked on the floor, handcuffed to the coffee table. His assistant, Belinda Carlton, in the throes of passion, was bouncing up and down on top of him. Her firm ass made a loud smack sound each time her skin met his.

  Becca leaned toward her friend, chewing now on the Popsicle stick. Her eyes were wide and filled with tears. “What did you do, Chez? When you saw that, what did you do?”

  “At first, my brain wouldn’t function,” Chesney dropped her eyes. “I stood there, puzzled. I couldn’t immediately identify who was riding Jack like he was a bronco. All I could see was her spray tanned ass in the air, which, by the way, might be firm but is also as big as a barn door. And it was the color of orange glaze.”

  “Yeah,” Bec nodded. “Cheap ass, spray tan shit.”

  Those first comments in Jack’s apartment were like those in a bad movie. “Oh Chesney, I didn’t expect you,” Jack said as Belinda and her mambo boobs jumped up and disappeared down the hall. Jack struggled to set himself free from the handcuffs. And he panted a lot, obviously exerted. More exerted than he had ever been when he had sex with his fiancé. It never occurred to Chesney to strip Jack naked and cuff him to the furniture. She studied him, wordless for a moment.

  “Who knows why, Becca, but I stepped closer and looked down at Jack’s red, sweaty face. For some reason I walked right past the crime scene and put the groceries on the kitchen counter. Maybe I was in shock. I don’t know. I don’t understand what happened. I didn’t even notice when Belinda freed Jack from the coffee table.”

  When Jack appeared in the kitchen wearing a pair of boxers- the black ones with red lips printed all over them, the ones Chesney gave him for Valentine’s Day, she still hadn’t spoken a word. Belinda was MIA, which was probably a good idea. Maybe she was resting on Jack’s king-sized bed. Maybe she was in the shower, washing Jack’s sperm from her jiggly thighs. Chesney thought there might be a fairly decent possibility that she would have at least pulled Belinda’s hair had she showed her face in the kitchen. But she couldn’t be sure.

  “Our wedding invitations were mailed four days ago,” Chesney had said to Jack as if she needed to remind him that a three-karat number graced her left hand and a two thousand dollar wedding dress hung in her closet. “I thought Belinda was only your assistant at the firm,” Chesney sighed as she rearranged Coronas and stray limes to make space on the shelf for the beef tips. “Jack, I had no idea you were interested in anything but Belinda’s Power Point abilities.”

  “I’m sorry…” Jack stammered and ran his hand over the cowlicks in his shiny black hair, the cowlicks stuck straight up anyway, like devil horns.

  “We will make an emergency appointment to see Father Martin,” Chesney said as she wiped off the sticky kitchen counter and folded the wash cloth. “We really must…”

  “What?” Jack blinked. His face and chest were still flushed from his sexual escapade. His pulse was probably still racing. A few love scratches were now fading on his chest. Chesney felt like grabbing Jack by his flaccid penis. Instead she turned to look at the clock. She had been inside Jack’s apartment for less than four minutes and her life had fallen apart in that short amount of time.

  “Father Martin,” she repeated. “You know, my family priest. The guy who is marrying us next month?”

  “I’m not marrying you, Chez,” Jack said softly. He took a few steps backward and stared at the carpet, where Belinda’s leopard print thong had been flung in a frenzy.

  “What?” Her chest froze. Her breath wouldn’t come out of the bottom of her burning stomach. Chesney didn’t look at him, just continued to remove groceries from the bags, a head of lettuce, a cucumber, a tomato for the salad.

  “I don’t want to marry you, Chez,” Jack said again. “I’m sorry.”

  Why wasn’t she the person saying ‘I don’t want to marry you’? What in the hell was wrong with her? She walked in on her fiancé, doing it in a position he certainly never did with her. But instead of telling Jack that she hated his guts, instead of screaming that the wedding was definitely cancelled, Chesney was frantic to keep the plan. The damn reception hall was already pai
d for. Her family would never forgive her for such an embarrassment. They would never move past this- after all, it was the second wedding the Blake’s had paid for but never attended. And both of those weddings, by the way, were Chesney’s weddings, cancelled at the last minute.

  Damn it.

  As she watched Jack lazily straddle a bar stool, Chesney decided in that moment that his waxy, bare chest was ridiculous. There was no way a man had absolutely no chest hair, not one single stray curly hair blooming from a nipple. Nothing. Bare as a baby butt. Why did she ever think she could live with that sissy looking chest? Who in the world invented manscaping? What woman wants a man whose pubic patch is sculpted into a neat little box of designer pubic fur?

  “Chez?”

  “You shave it don’t you?” she asked as she planted one hand wearily on her hip.

  “What are you talking about?” Jack asked in a slow, I-should-be-careful-with-the-crazy-chick voice.

  “Your chest…” She eyed his hairlessness, then met his eyes. “You shave it. Don’t you?”

  Jack’s face flushed and his arms crossed defensively over the pink skin.

  “Jack, you also shave your balls,” Chesney said. “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t think this is the time for this discussion,” he said softly as his face went deep red.

  “Really?” Chesney smiled. “I step into your apartment with groceries so I can prepare your favorite dinner. I find you cuffed to the coffee table like you’re starring in a really bad porn flick. And suddenly you get embarrassed when I ask you to confirm a simple question?”

  “Alright, yes,” he nodded.

  “Yes what?” Chesney pressed.

  “Yes, I shave my chest,” Jack said.

  “And?”

  “And yes, I shave my balls,” Jack mumbled.

  “Why?”

  “Why are you asking that question right now?”

  “Why, Jack? Why does your chest look like you haven’t started puberty? Why is your ball sack velvety soft?”

  “Women…uh…women like that,” he said.

  “What women?” Chesney asked. “Did you ever bother to ask me if I found your Boy Scout looking body attractive? Are you saying you shaved for Belinda’s pleasure?”

  Jack stared at the floor before looking up at her. “I still don’t want to marry you.”

  “Here’s what I hope, Jack,” Chesney said with a sigh. “I hope Belinda develops the worst yeast infection in the world, from all the friction involved with having sex with my fiancé. The gyno calls it honeymoon cystitis.” She plopped the rest of the salad fixings into the sink and glared across the kitchen at Jack. “As for you, well, I hope you lose a testicle in Belinda’s huge vagina. And then, Jack, I hope your dick falls off.”

  Very calmly, Chesney stuffed the wine and the edible panties back into the cloth shopping bag and left.

  “I have no idea how in the world I will tell Lyle and Madelyn Blake that once again, their let’s-give-our-daughter-a-fairytale-wedding bucks were wasted,” Chesney said now, in the quiet, slightly messy apartment.

  “Holy shit,” was Becca’s first response to the news. She dropped her head and ran her fingers through her hair. “Jack is a heartless son of a bitch.”

  Chesney blew her nose and tossed the used tissue aside, near the growing mountain of other tissues from the meltdown before the book signing. Once she returned from Jack’s apartment, she had viciously shredded the edible panties and sprinkled them out the window of her ninth-floor dwelling. The pieces fell on the dirty concrete like hot pink confetti, all over the sidewalk.

  Four years ago, she lived this moment. On the eve of their wedding day, Ernie Garrison didn’t show up for the rehearsal at the church. Near midnight, he finally called Chesney to tearfully confess that he would not be attending the wedding. He was leaving her for a guy named Enrico.

  “We were such a perfect match,” Chesney had wailed as Becca patted her back. “He was the most androgynous man I ever knew.”

  “That’s because he was gay, Chez,” Bec had sighed as she passed the tequila bottle to her broken hearted friend. “Straight men don’t usually knit for entertainment. Straight guys don’t hand wash their favorite sweaters. And they don’t usually own Yorkies or yell “Bingo!” when their favorite NBA team makes a basket.”

  “I truly thought Ernie had those wonderful qualities because he was secure enough to explore his feminine side,” Chesney had sniffled.

  “I bet he wore your panties when you weren’t around,” Becca said with an eye roll.

  “Shut up. I loved him,” Chesney sobbed, even though Becca’s comment also made her laugh.

  “Chez, would you please wake up and join this world? You know, the real one? Ernie only had sex with you when he was drunk,” Becca snapped. “Wouldn’t that be a red flag?”

  “I thought he was shy,” Chesney sniffled.

  “He wanted to be so intoxicated that he wouldn’t notice your vagina,” Becca said softly. “Ernie is gay, sweetie. Ernie wants a penis not a vajajay. Let it go.”

  Now here they sat again, in a very similar scenario. Chesney, the jilted bride. This time she had a bigger diamond. And she thought she fell in love with a different man. Jack was very heterosexual. He was successful and financially stable. He had no prison record. Yet here Chesney sat, right in the center of another failed-wedding misery.

  “I’ll have to call two hundred people,” she sobbed. “The same two hundred people I had to call last time I cancelled my wedding. Oh my gosh, Bec, I can’t face it.” She hid her red, swollen face behind a pillow and blubbered until the fabric was stained with tears and snot.

  “This time you’ve got to learn something from the experience, Chez,” Becca said. “You’ve got to make some serious changes in the way you look at relationships.”

  “Sure,” Chesney nodded with a big snort. “I’ll get right on that- unless my parents kill me when I tell them what happened.”

  Chapter Two

  Four days after finding Jack and Belinda together, Chesney stopped by to visit her parents unannounced, which was unheard of for her. But she was testing the waters, trying to find a way to tell her parents the truth about the February wedding date. She was literally sick with shame and hurt, not only about Jack cheating but also about the humiliating truth that it was Jack who cancelled the wedding. Jack, who was caught naked on the marble floor with his penis hidden inside another woman’s body. But it was Jack who cancelled the wedding plans. The shame of it burned Chesney’s cheeks, made her nauseous, made her unable to close her eyes and sleep. She had absolutely no dignity.

  She had no idea how to recover from this. She beat herself up with self-loathing. She knew she had to tell her parents the truth. But she slipped the engagement ring on her finger anyway, just in case she was not yet strong enough to tell them. She opened the front door and greeted her mom, even though she could not yet see her. Nothing in the living room was familiar anymore. And hadn’t been since the day Chesney packed a couple of pairs of favorite jeans and left for college. Actually Chesney doubted that even a month of college life had passed before her mother had taken over her oldest daughter’s childhood bedroom. Half of the room became a closet for Madelyn’s lovely clothes, shoes and accessories. The other half was crowded with exercise equipment. Every piece of who Chesney was before she became a pimple-faced college freshman vanished.

  Two years later, when Chesney’s younger sister Charlotte left for college, Madelyn was on a full-fledged redesign mission. Every single room of the sensible Cape Cod was redecorated, from paint colors and window treatments to flooring. Like Chesney’s bedroom, Charlotte’s room was also assaulted. Her yesterday was tossed out and replaced by hunter green walls, mahogany bookcases and a large desk. Their dad proudly introduced Charlotte’s bedroom as the study he had wanted for all of his life. And Charlotte blinked tears away every time their father spoke of his new library.

  A third bedroom, used primarily as a storage spac
e for Christmas decorations, gift wrap and out-of-season clothing, was now painted Pepto pink with spring green accents. Charlotte’s first child and Chesney’s sweet niece, Piper, sleeps in the lovely white crib graced with a soft pink canopy. At least a twice a week, the baby visits to smile and make messes for her doting grandparents.

  When she visited her parents’ home, Chesney still found herself scanning the rooms carefully hoping to find something from her yesterdays. She sat on the edge of the butter colored leather ottoman and looked over at the corner near the fireplace, hoping to see the large plastic box filled with Barbie dolls. She hoped to spot a tiny stray stiletto on the carpet, accidentally lost during Barbie’s ride across the living room to the beach, designated as the braided rug in the hallway. Barbie, in her pink sports car, powered of course, by Chesney’s slender, little girl hands. She wondered if finding one of Barbie’s lost accessories would somehow lead her to finding peace in her world. How dumb was that? Barbie stuff directly attached to surviving her latest crisis? That fantasy would not work. Ken never screwed Barbie over. He was happily content to love Barbie forever at the Malibu beach house. And Barbie never once found Midge handcuffing Ken to the coffee table, either.

  Chesney frowned as she realized that her father’s favorite faded recliner was gone. Twin wingbacks took the place of her dad’s favorite junky chair. The wingbacks had no personality, no fingerprints on the arm rests left by buttery popcorn fingers. No stack of Golf Digest and Time magazines on the floor. No scruffy house slippers. A heavy Italian leather sectional graced the far wall. Shiny end tables, accompanied by those snobby wing backs made the room a copycat from a home décor magazine. It was not a walk down memory lane. Chesney could not find her little girl self in this house. She could not envision the scrawny girl who stroked the family cat during Saturday morning cartoons.