by Josie Brown
Ryan has refused my request to “divorce” Jack.
“It’s his cover,” he says. “You’ll have to learn to live with it.”
Even when I begged him, he wouldn’t budge. Instead, he gave me a rotten impersonation of JFK. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for—”
At that point, I walked out, slamming the door behind me. Everyone thinks they can pull off a Kennedy accent. Here’s a news bulletin. You can’t do Kennedy. You can’t do Elvis, either. Live with it.
So Jack now sleeps in the guest room. I don’t know if that will cure his amnesia, and I know it won’t heal my broken heart. But what else can I do?
This is exactly the question I ask my shrink, Dr. Hartley.
Of course he’s confused by it. “Wait…I thought your goal was to divorce him.”
“I’m divorcing the deserter. The papers were served, and everything. The guy I’m talking about now is his… replacement.”
“Oh.” Dr. Bob tilts his head back as he considers this new bit of information. Okay, well, you certainly moved fast. And replacement is… Well, it’s a tough word to use in a relationship.”
“Your advice was to get on with my life, so I did.”
He smiles, pleased that I took his sage words to heart. “You’re right. Let’s not get hung up on semantics. So what’s the issue with the new man in your life?”
“Apparently he’s married to someone else. That little tidbit conveniently slipped his mind. I feel as if I’m in a bad dream.”
“Been there, done that.” Dr. Bob laughs tepidly. “Donna, it all boils down to this. You love him, but you no longer trust him.”
I nod. He’s hit the nail on the head.
“Can you think of a reason why he wouldn’t have told you this information up front?”
“Other than the fact that I might have killed him? Hmmm. Well, let’s see. We met because we work together. We didn’t like each other initially, so I never bothered to ask. When things heated up between us, he never offered it up, because they’re separated.”
“Now that you know, have you given him a chance to explain himself fully?”
“Not really. We’ve just come back from a business trip. Between that, and the kids—”
“No excuses. If you feel the relationship is worth salvaging, you two need to talk. You need to hear him out. It’s time both of you put your cards on the table. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to trust him, and it will be over anyway.” He leans in. “Donna, if you don’t resolve it with him, you may never trust anyone, ever again.”
He’s right, and I know it.
“Okay, Doc. Thanks.” I smile through my tears. “You wife is a very lucky woman, to be married to such an insightful man…What’s her name again?”
“Joanna… I mean, Emily.” He shakes his head at the slip up. “See? Easy to do. Just give him a chance to make things right.”
When I enter the Sand Dollar, Anna’s brow raises in concern. “I’m almost afraid to ask. Your usual table?”
I nod. “And Jack is meeting me here.”
“Good. The other dude needs an anger management course, big time.”
“Or a long plane ride around the world, where the flight attendants make him wear a hood while they’re waterboarding him.”
She shrugs. “I’ve dated a few who deserve a ticket on that airline.” She grabs a couple of menus. “Follow me.”
My date doesn’t keep me waiting long. He’s got a dozen yellow roses, my favorite.
We give Anna the high sign for our usual. After she brings us our drinks, Jack takes a gulp, then clears his throat. “You’re right. The moment we knew this relationship was what we both wanted, I should have told you everything.”
I nod, but say nothing.
“Her name is Valentina. Valentina Petrescu.”
“The name is, what? Polish?”
“Romanian. She was a Romanian gymnast.”
A gymnast? Figures.
“You may recognize her. She was on the Olympic team that won the gold, twelve, thirteen years ago.” He takes a photo out of his pocket. The woman in it can’t be more than nineteen or twenty, at the most. She’s doing a flip off the double parallel bars.
“She seems quite… flexible.”
He can’t stifle the smile on his lips. “Yeah… well, she was flexible, in another way. Her father, a university professor, had been falsely accused of being a dissident. To get him out of prison, she approached the SIE—the Romania’s Foreign Intelligence arm—to become a carrier. As a gymnast, she had the perfect cover.”
“How were you able to turn her?”
“You mean, other than my obvious charms?”
Seeing that I’m not laughing, he shrugs.
“They did it for me when they killed her father. And not by throwing him back in jail. He was so ashamed of the position he’d put her in that he sliced his wrists in the bathtub. She found him after coming home from a tournament in Germany.”
I can see the pain in his eyes—pain he feels for her. It is enough to make me look away.
“So, she got word to our side that she was willing to double up?”
“Yes. I was working that part of the world and was assigned to be her handler for a while. We became… close.”
“So, what happened to your ‘happily ever after?’”
“Someone tipped off the SIE. They put a tail on her while she was at the European Gymnastics Championships in Paris, and she was caught making a drop. She escaped to one of our safe houses. To keep her from being sent back to Romania, I married her. This gave her diplomatic immunity.”
“So, it was a marriage of convenience.”
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t in love with her. We’re beyond lying to each other, aren’t we, Donna?”
“I hope so.” I wipe away a tear. “Which begs the question, why aren’t you with her now?”
His back stiffens. “She was in love with someone else. End of story.”
“Obviously not, or else you wouldn’t still be married to her.”
He looks around, at the other couples seated around us, all of whom are laughing, smiling, or holding hands.
We could be like that, if he loved me instead of her.
He gives his head a single angry shake. “In hindsight, I should have killed him. I’ve survived her duplicity, but Acme is still playing catch-up.”
“I… I don’t get it. She fell in love with another agent?”
He doesn’t answer me.
He doesn’t have to. His gaze is weighted with compassion. Or is that commiseration? And if so, why?
Then it hits me. “Carl.”
He nods. “I thought she’d be happy to retire. She was, at first. We had a little place in Paris in the First Arrondissement, off the Rue de Rivoli. They met there. It was a stupid thing to do, but I brought him home with me because he thought his hotel room had been compromised. That night we let off steam. We drank and told old war stories. He was charming. She was fascinated. Little did I know she was also bored. A bored housewife.”
Yes, Carl can be charming. It’s how he gets away with murder.
“Sometimes, he came to town when I was on assignment.” Before I can ask the question, he adds quickly, “And no, I don’t know when it started up between them. For years now, I’ve been trying to figure out the whole timeline. Was he already a Quorum operative when I first brought him home? In hindsight, Ryan seemed to think so. Did he seduce my wife in order to search our apartment for intel? The day she left, a microdot with the code to access the DasS cloud with the Acme Directory went with her.”
“Oh my God.” I shake my head in dismay. This digital directory, which lives on a virtual private network, lists every agent, and every mission, as well as all our leads, assets, agents and contacts in nations
and agencies around the world.
“Of course, at first I didn’t suspect either of them. I’d been away for a week. When I got home, I found a note that said, ‘I’ll be home soon.’ She added something that, at the time, I thought was a joke. ‘Jusqu’à la mort nous sépare.’ In English, it means, Till death do us part.’”
“The wedding vow?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you consider it a joke?”
“I guess ‘joke’ is the wrong word. We gave our vows in front of a civil judge. At the time, Valentina knew very little French, but the judge insisted she repeat the vow in his language, word for word. Afterward, we laughed at this.” He puts down his drink. “When I first read the phrase in the note she left behind, I presumed it was her way of kidding around. You know, a sweet way of saying she missed me. But when I realized the microdot was missing, and she never came back that night, I presumed she’d taken it with her, perhaps as leverage in case the SIE caught up with her. For the longest time I had faith that, one day, she’d come home to me. Still, you can imagine what Ryan’s reaction was when I broke the news to him.”
“Ha! I’m glad I wasn’t part of Acme then.”
“You came on the scene a year or so later. Carl’s supposed murder was reported a week after Valentina’s disappearance. I didn’t put two and two together until eighteen months ago, when I saw video of a hit that went down in Bulgaria. The assassins took out an Acme agent who was following up on some chatter regarding a Quorum mission. As luck would have it, the hit was caught on a surveillance camera. The shooter was a woman. Valentina.”
“What a transition!”
He nods. “We all have it in us, I guess, when we’re angry enough. You’re a perfect example of that. I got angry, too, when Carl was ID’ed at the murder scene. He was driving the getaway car. That was when we realized he’d faked his own death.”
Jack is right. Anger changes us. Right now, I should be feeling angry at Jack. But I now find it hard to be, knowing that he and I have something else in common: spouses who betrayed us.
Their betrayal made us different people, too.
Sadder people.
I’m through letting Carl ruin my life. I don’t know if Jack feels the same way about Valentina. Only time will tell. In the meantime, I can only hope and pray that, in time, we can both put our past behind us and realize a future together.
I pick up his hand and kiss it gently. “Let’s go home.”
“You don’t want to order something?” He strokes my cheek gently, as if I’m some apparition who might disappear again into that darker dimension from which I’ve just emerged.
I pick up his bouquet and breathe deeply into its fragrant petals. “Nope. It’s time to stop and smell the roses. I’m guessing they’ll smell great floating in our bathroom Jacuzzi tub. Care to join me?”
He doesn’t have to be asked twice. He tosses some cash on the table for our drinks, then takes my hand and pulls me through the restaurant, toward the lobby and out the door.
There’s something about makeup sex that makes it so special. Perhaps it’s the urgency you feel to get beyond “I’m so pissed at you” to “I’m so horny for you” that makes it hard to keep your hands off each other’s bodies. Or maybe it’s the way your skin tingles whenever his finger grazes your skin, or when his tongue tickles your nipple.
During makeup sex, have you ever noticed that, when your hand wraps around his cock, it instantly springs up, grows large, and stays stiff? It beckons to you. The slit in the head is like a sly wink, and the gentle curve of the shaft gives a nod as if to say, “I missed you! I can’t live without you! Hurry up and climb onboard! Don’t worry! I’ll make you happy…”
Content. Satisfied. Lusted after.
Loved.
Jack doesn’t wait until the tub is filled before pulling me down into the churning bubbles with him. The water is warm and yet I shiver, not because I’m cold, but from the anticipation that is stoked by his soft gaze of adoration. By his hot, deep kisses. By the way his hand slowly caresses my mound before his long, thick fingers slip between its lips. Gently and methodically, he synchronizes his strokes to the natural rhyme of my desire.
As I burst, I bury my head in the pulsing water. My scream ripples up. When I resurface, he’s laughing. “You sound like a mermaid.”
“Oh yeah? Well, a mermaid can’t do this.” I straddle him, pulling his knees tightly around me. As I rock up and down on his cock, I only get tighter. The way his eyes widen shows me he loves what he is feeling.
His orgasm propels me up out of the warm water and into the cold air, where my nipples harden. He doesn’t mind this at all. In fact, he places his hands on them. This warms them up again.
Then he buries his head between my breasts for so long that I assume he’s fallen asleep.
But no. He’s smiling when, finally, he looks up at me. “Let’s fight every day.”
My response is to pull his legs out from under him, so that he drops under the water.
I think he gets the message because he pulls me under, too.
We’re still entwined in each other’s arms when we’re awakened by a steady tapping on our bedroom door, which gets more frantic with each passing moment, as do Trisha plaintive whispers: “Mommy! Daddy! Open up!”
Jack can groan all he wants, but she isn’t going away.
I reach for my robe, and toss the bedspread over Jack. He takes this as my tacit approval that he can go back to sleep.
I try to look stern as I peek out the door, but it’s hard to be cross with a five-year-old pirouetting in a pink tutu. With one leg outstretched, she hops toward me on the other. Then with all the grace of the dearly departed Black Swan, she hands me an envelope embellished with a lipstick heart.
“It’s for Daddy,” she whispers.
“Trisha, how many times do I have to tell you my lipsticks aren’t crayons?”
Her mouth purses into a pout. “I didn’t decorate the envelope, Mommy! The lady gave it to me that way.”
“A lady? Who is she?” I look down the stairwell. Thank goodness the front door is closed.
“None of those ladies you don’t like. This one was pretty. Mommy, is it Valentine’s Day?”
“No, sweetie, but it will soon be Halloween.” I stare down at envelope, then over at Jack. Yes, I’m tempted to open it…
I shake off this urge. My resolve is now aimed at my daughter. “Lock the front door. You know the rules. Next time, ask Mary to open it.”
“I did! But she wouldn’t get off the phone.” Miffed that I’m shooting the messenger, she twirls around three times before hopscotching down the stairs.
I close the door with a click. Jack has the pillow over his head, so he can’t hear it. Nor can he see me as I slide a nail under the gummed flap of the envelope and nudge it open, gently…slowly…
The handwritten card has no signature, and just one line:
Jusqu’à la mort nous sépare.
Till death do us part.
To keep from sobbing, I seek pain somewhere other than my heart by piercing my palm with the same nail that opened the envelope.
I had hoped he’d stay asleep until my tears stopped, but no. Instinctively he reaches over for me. Finding the bed empty beside him, he rolls over and opens one eye.
I don’t have to tell him something is wrong. He can read it in my face.
I walk over and hand him the envelope. The blood red heart on the outside tells him all he needs to know. Still, he pulls out the note that confirms it, then looks over at me in disbelief.
No need to beat around the bush. Even if he won’t say it, I will.
“Honey, she’s home.”
He slides back down in the bed.
I do, too.
We lay back to back.
“She’s a problem we’re going to have
to deal with.” I say this so softly I’m not certain he hears me.
Until he responds, “Carl is, too.”
We turn and hold each other.
Next up:
The Housewife Assassin’s
Killer Christmas Tips
Other Novels by Josie Brown
The Housewife Assassin Series
[Signal Press Books]
The Housewife Assassin’s Handbook / Book 1
The Housewife Assassin’s Guide to Gracious Killings / Book 2
The Housewife Assassin’s Killer Christmas Tips / Book 3
The Housewife Assassin’s Bloody Valentine / Novella
Totlandia (Series)
[Coliloquy Books]
Friendship. Lies. Seduction. Betrayal. Welcome to Totlandia.
The salacious secrets of Desperate Housewives meet the aspirational lifestyles of Sex and the City in San Francisco’s most elite mommies group. In this sometimes bittersweet (and always humorous) novel, the friendships among four women who meet in a moms-and-tots playgroup are tested as they address their presumptions, family traumas, love, passion, and the hard realities of parenting their children.
The Baby Planner
[ Simon & Schuster]
“Brown takes baby mania to its illogical, hysterical extreme in this bubbly romp… . But what begins as a light foray into Bugaboo country turns into something bigger than a satire of status-obsessed Bay Area yummy mummies as Brown takes a dark look at the fears of parenthood and family, with Katie’s heartbreaking longing for a child unveiling a disturbing reality about her marriage and family. Still, the message from the somber realities is one full of hope: love makes a family, commitment keeps it together.”—Publishers Weekly
“A funny, engaging, and often bittersweet tale from the author of Secret Lives of Husbands and Wives.” –Cincinnati Public Library Spotlight Feature