Love Is Hell: A Valentine's Story, Book 2 [The Male Order, Texas Collection] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting)

by Edith DuBois

  She looked absolutely livid.

  Hustling toward the front door, he quickly recounted any recent activities he’d been involved in that would make her angry with him. He couldn’t think of anything and hoped this didn’t have to do with him.

  “Benji!” she called as soon as he walked out the door. “Look at this shit. Look at what some asshole has done to our shed.”

  As he rounded the corner of the house, he saw a large spray-painted graphic on the side of the small wooden structure. There was a phrase written in French, which had been painted in black. The words were circled with a red heart and then angrily slashed through in red.

  “Whoa,” he said. “What does it mean?”

  “I’m on the phone with Emilie right now. Her house got hit, too. She said it reads ‘L’enfer, c’est l’amour!’ which means something like ‘love is hell’ and that it’s from some old French play.”

  Benji walked closer to the shed to inspect while Sherri continued ranting with Emilie on the phone. A minute or so later when she hung up, she came to stand next to him, shaking her head.

  “How the hell did we not see this happening? Whoever did it must have hit it between now and when I got home from work.”

  “I was probably in my office.” He couldn’t have seen it from there. It was on the other side of the cabin and the window was on the totally opposite side from the shed. “You were in the kitchen.” Those windows faced the back, and the shed was out of view. “They just snuck up here and did it.”

  “This makes me so mad. I want to find this person and punch them in the nose.” Sherri growled and kicked at the dirt. She also sported an intense scowl. With her delicate, upturned nose, her wide full lips, and the hint of rose on her pale cheeks, she looked pretty damn adorable.

  “Well, it was probably time for a new paint job anyway,” he said, pulling her to his body, trying to console her.

  “That’s not the point.” She wrapped her arm around him as they stared at the offensive oeuvre. “Who would do this? I mean, what’s the purpose of spray-painting someone’s private property? I thought the point of graffiti was so that a lot of people would see it. You know, as a sort of ‘eff you’ to the man.”

  “Definitely an amateur.”

  Sherri giggled a little bit. “This is no Banksy.”

  Hugging her close, he kissed her temple. He knew she couldn’t stay mad about this. In fact, it kind of seemed like something she would have done in her youth.

  “We’ll get Ethan to take a look when he gets back. Maybe he can do a patrol around the neighborhood or something. It might at least scare the hoodlum off.” They headed back into the house. “Oh, sweetie,” Sherri said.

  “Mmhmm?”

  “Can you run to Whole Foods and pick up some pasta? I thought we had enough.”

  “Sure.” He bent down and kissed her cheek.

  “And maybe some hot French bread? If it’s nice and fresh?”

  “Anything for my babay.” He kissed her cheek again.

  “And some chocolate ice cream.”

  “Whoa, now. I’m gonna need something a little more for chocolate ice cream.”

  Chuckling, she turned to him and planted a firm kiss on his mouth. He sneakily darted his tongue in, and her arms tightened around his body in response. The kiss deepened until both their tongues were pushing against each other, twirling and rolling and thrusting. Sherri pressed her hips against his and ran her hands down his back, stopping at his ass and pulling him against her.

  “God,” she said, breaking slightly away. “You better get out of here before I have my way with you on the front porch.”

  “I wouldn’t object.”

  “I know you wouldn’t, but what if they’re lingering nearby?”

  “Who?” he asked, nuzzling her neck, half hoping she would let him have her right here on the front porch.

  “You know. Whoever did that.” She nodded toward the shed.

  Benji stopped his nuzzling. “Ugh, you’re right. That’s creepy.” He looked out toward the woods, feeling a chill zip up his spine as he scanned the trees for any movement. A moment or two later, they went back inside.

  He grabbed his keys and his wallet, but before leaving for the store, he snuck back to the kitchen to quietly watch Sherri darting here and there, cutting up vegetables and mixing them up for the spaghetti sauce. He studied her face, the way her hands moved, the set of her shoulders. He was looking for any signs, any hints of the sadness he’d seen earlier. It was so well hidden, he realized. He almost started to think he’d imagined the whole thing, but then he saw her falter.

  After pouring the chopped veggies into the tomato sauce, she sort of floated to a stop. Her stirring spoon was in the pot, but she didn’t stir. Instead, she stared out the window for a long moment. It was so long that he almost said something, but then he noticed the hand holding the spoon. She gripped it so hard that her knuckles were white and the muscles in her arm were rigidly flexed. The rest of her body was still, but she was squeezing the spoon so tightly that her arm began to tremble.

  When finally she relaxed and began stirring, Benji let out a small, silent breath. He hadn’t even realized he’d been holding it.

  “I’m going to head out,” he said quietly.

  Sherri jumped and whipped around. “Oh, God,” she said, clutching a hand to her heart. “I thought you’d already left.” She giggled nervously. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  “I didn’t mean to.” He held her eyes.

  He saw that her fear went deeper. It wasn’t only that he’d scared her. He knew she was wondering if he’d seen that moment, if he’d seen her vulnerability.

  “Okay, well I’ll see you in a little bit then,” she said, turning from him, breaking away, not wanting to push up against him now.

  “Sherri,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you.”

  She kept stirring, not daring to look at him. “I love you, too, sweetie.”

  Chapter Two

  Sheriff Ethan Blacker didn’t know whether to be angry or impressed. He stood on the back patio of the Ellises’, staring at the oddest bit of graffiti he’d ever come across. Not only was it in French out in the middle of Male Order, Texas, which to the rest of the world constituted the middle of nowhere, but also it was on the Ellises’ double glass door. It was such a strange location for tagging.

  Dalton Ellis had called the sheriff’s office about half an hour ago to report the incident, and Ethan decided to come take a look on his way home since he, Sherri, and Benji lived less than five minutes away from the Ellises’.

  Madeline was inside with her kids and with the babysitter, getting ready for a Valentine’s Day dinner, but her two husbands, Dalton and Garrett, were studying the door with Ethan.

  “Do you know what it means?” Garrett asked.

  “No,” Ethan answered, snapping a photo with his iPhone. “But I’m going to send this to Emilie, see if she has any insight. At least she’ll know what it means, but maybe there’s other significance to it as well.”

  “I’m still astounded at the boldness.”

  Ethan nodded. Whoever it was had walked right up to the glass door and painted while Dalton, Madeline, and Garrett were inside. If any of them had happened to walk by, the offender would have immediately been caught. It was either completely ballsy or completely idiotic.

  He didn’t get the feeling that this was an act of spontaneous idiocy, though. If that were the case, why wouldn’t the perpetrator have simply tagged some highly visible locations downtown? And why the French? And why during the day?

  This seemed to have a particular madness to it that bordered on brilliance. Whoever had done this had done it right under everyone’s noses like a sneaky, clever fox.

  He walked to the edge of the patio. There was a slender line of crushed grass leading away from the stones, out through the yard and then back toward the road. “Has anyone been riding a bicycle back here?” he asked. />
  Both Garrett and Dalton shook their heads. “We haven’t been on our bikes since the end of summer,” Garrett said.

  “All right, well, this looks like a bike track, so I’m thinking whoever this was arrived and left on a bike. I’ll let my units know and have them maintain a lookout. I’ll keep in touch with you on any developments in the case. You have my cell, right?”

  “Yep,” Garrett answered.

  “Good. Please contact me if you see or hear anything else. I’ll head straight over.”

  “Thanks, Sheriff.” Each man shook his hand, and then he crunched gravel back to his cruiser. His phone lit up with a message from Emilie Benson-Stephens. When he opened her message, she sent a picture of her garage door, which had been tagged exactly like the Ellis’s back door, only much larger. “I’ll be damned,” he said, zooming in. Along with “Love is hell,” the translation of the phrase, Emilie informed him that his shed had been defiled in the same manner. So that made three houses in the same neighborhood in the span of less than an hour. She also said the phrase was a rip-off from a famous line in the play Huis Clos by Jean-Paul Sartre. The original phrase translated to “Hell is other people.”

  He mulled these facts over in his head on the way home, trying to pinpoint a common link. The method seemed at once totally random but also meticulously planned. The message didn’t imply that the perpetrator had any sort of malicious intent or aggression toward the families whose houses had been hit, yet why this neighborhood? He had to cross out socioeconomic reasons as he, Sherri, and Benji, while certainly well off, didn’t quite fit in the same class bracket as the Stephenses or the Ellises. He had to rule out targeting ménage families. There were several others in Male Order who were also openly engaged in ménage relationships.

  There was something connecting the acts of vandalism. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what, though.

  When he pulled into his driveway a few minutes later, he shook his head and made a sound of disgust at their shed and its new accoutrement. Sherri was probably all fired up about it. She loved that shed and often bragged about how it had been on her family’s property for over eighty years.

  As soon as he opened the door, the savory aroma of sautéed onions and peppers, tomato sauce, and herbs permeated his olfactory glands. “Baby, that smells delicious,” he called out toward the kitchen as he hung his belt and jacket in the hall closet. He sucked in a few more deep breaths.

  “Can you believe all this crap? And on Valentine’s Day, no less. I just hope they’ve finished and don’t get any more houses. It’s gonna be a hell of a mess to clean up. Do you have any ideas on who you think—” He’d made it to the kitchen and caught a glimpse of Sherri, which made him pause midsentence.

  She sat at the kitchen table, her shoulders hunched over and her face in one of her hands. He could see that her shoulders were shaking ever so slightly.

  “Sherri, honey,” he said, rushing to her. “Are you okay? What happened? Did you hurt yourself?”

  She sniffled and lifted her head.

  “Let me see.”

  He’d started inspecting her hands and glanced over any visible area for some kind of wound, but her voice stopped him. “I didn’t hurt anything. I’m okay.” He looked up into her face. “I just…I…” She couldn’t say it. Whatever she needed to say, it wouldn’t come out. Instead, she buried her face in his chest and began crying harder.

  “Shh,” he said, holding her and pulling her into his lap.

  The way her face had crumpled just now as they locked eyes, it reminded him of the night they’d had the memorial service for Jessica Marie. Sherri had put her pajamas on and was walking from the bathroom to bed. Benji was in the shower or putting up food in the kitchen from all their visitors throughout the day or something. It was only Ethan in the bed. Sherri looked at him as she was walking, and then she fell. Giant, soul-rending sobs came gasping and clawing from her throat. She’d been so strong all day in front of everyone, but finally it overwhelmed her and knocked her to her knees.

  Ethan had rushed to her. He’d gotten on the floor, and he’d lain with her. She’d clung to him, completely wracked by her grief, and he tried to take in as much of her sorrow as he could. He would never forget that look on her face, how suddenly it hit and how completely.

  There was an echo of that now, and the memory sent goose bumps up his arms. “Sherri,” he whispered after a long while, after her tears slowed to intermittent sniffles, “you have to tell me.”

  She squeezed her hands in his shirt but didn’t answer.

  “Tell me what’s wrong, baby. You can’t hold it in.”

  Pulling back, she looked at him with her wide blue eyes. He grabbed a napkin from the table and wiped the dampness from her cheeks. “You wanna blow?” he asked.

  She nodded and took the napkin, turning her face and blowing her nose.

  “Now what is it? Did something happen at work today?”

  She shook her head and furrowed her brow. He could see her struggling. It was like she didn’t know how to phrase it or like she was afraid of how it would sound.

  “It’s okay,” he said, holding her face.

  “I—”

  “I’m back!” Benji called, bursting through the front door. Sherri jumped and snapped her mouth shut.

  Benji popped around the corner. “These are for you, my sweet.” He held a bouquet of red roses in front of his face. “I know you think Valentine’s Day is a meaningless, consumer-driven abomination of a holiday, but it was the last one, and I thought, why the hell not, so I picked…them…” He trailed off after peeking around the roses, noticing Sherri in Ethan’s lap or noticing her red face or noticing Ethan’s tight-lipped expression. Whatever it was, he picked up on it and quickly cut himself off. “Oh,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “Sherri was very upset when I came home,” Ethan answered. “She was just about to tell me what’s wrong.”

  Tossing the bouquet of flowers on the table, Benji quickly opened the package of pasta and poured it into the boiling water. Then he sat down next to them, taking one of Sherri’s hands in his, first kissing and then rubbing it. Ethan ran his hand across her back between her shoulder blades.

  “Tell us what’s wrong, sweetie.”

  She swallowed and nodded. “You know earlier when Emilie called?”

  Benji nodded.

  “The reason she called wasn’t just to tell me about her garage. It was because she wanted to know if Gaston and Penny could come stay over here because their babysitter, Gabby, got a little unsettled by the graffiti. And I know we’ve watched them dozens of times, but today, when she asked me, I don’t know…it was different.”

  “How?” Ethan asked, running his thumbs up and down the muscle that lined her spine, kneading and prodding as he went.

  “I go to the drugstore every day,” she said suddenly. “I stop on my way home from work every day. When you called me, Benji, I was there.”

  Ethan glanced at his brother and knew that Benji was just as confused by the abrupt change in topic.

  “When I go there, to the drugstore, I always go to the aisle with the home pregnancy tests.” Ethan met his brother’s eyes again, and this time, he saw a tiny bit of fear. He imagined it was reflected in his own eyes. This had to do with Jessica Marie, he realized. When he’d come home to find his wife crying earlier, when he’d been reminded of his daughter, something about her sadness both then and now must have struck a chord in his subconscious.

  “It’s sick isn’t it?” she asked. “I just go there and stand in front of all those tests. I look at them every day and think about what they mean. It’s been two years. I should be done. I should be okay by now. People say I should be better. I know I should be better, but I’m not. I’m not okay with what happened. I don’t have a daughter. I never will. It’s so fucking wrong. Everything is. I mean, why do I keep going to stare at those tests? Why does Emilie have two perfect children and not me? Why am I still drowning? When I�
��m in front of those tests, all I can do is think about how I’ll never use one again and about what I’ll never have. I think about what we’ll never have.” She was shaking now, but she paused for a moment and looked at both of them. “I want a baby.” In that one tiny sentence, in her small, heartbroken voice, Ethan heard all the longing in the world. “I want a baby so bad, and it’s killing me.”

  * * * *

  Silence breathed heavy all around her.

  It was so scary to tell them. She hadn’t even realized at first that her words were taking her there or that it would come to such a revelation. Now, in the still, quiet moment between what she’d said and what her husbands were about to say, Sherri almost couldn’t breathe. She only wanted to hear a soft, reassuring noise or feel a tender, accepting touch along her neck. She wanted to be not crazy. Ethan and Benji were the only men in the world who could do that now. They were the only ones who could keep her anchored to sanity, and more than ever, she needed that from them.

  So she held completely still, and she waited, and she breathed.

  It didn’t take them long.

  Ethan pulled her closer, tucked her head under his chin, and kissed the top of her head. “Oh, baby,” he said with a hush, rocking her in his lap.

  Benji scooted his chair closer so that he could wrap his hands around her waist and rest his cheek against her back. “Sherri,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  They held on to each other for a while.

  She knew they had a lot of things to discuss, but for the moment, this was all right. This would help. Sometimes she forgot how much she needed to just be held by her men.

  The timer for the noodles went off, yanking Sherri out of her reverie. Benji groaned and pulled slightly back, letting her uncurl and pick herself up from Ethan’s lap. Nobody said anything while Ethan got a colander, and Benji got the olive oil from the cabinets. Sherri grabbed some potholders and picked up the pot of noodles. Ethan held the colander while Sherri poured. Benji put some oil in the pot, and then Ethan dumped the noodles back in.