by Aly Martinez
I’d proposed that we start a restaurant together.
Did I have time? Fuck. No.
Simmer was soaring and I was slammed with a filming schedule I could barely keep up with. But Porter desperately needed the distraction.
And I desperately needed him to be happy again.
Given how much we fought, going into business together probably wasn’t our brightest idea. But when push came to shove, we were the Reese brothers. We made shit happen.
Porter had a fancy-ass college degree in business, but he was an investment banker with absolutely no experience as a restaurateur. I assured him I knew what I was doing. It might have been a slight exaggeration. I could run a kitchen like a beast. But after the food hit the plate, my expertise was limited.
Whatever. We could figure out the rest as we went along.
Porter disagreed.
He presented me with a Trapper Keeper of graphs and charts. Yes. A fucking Trapper Keeper like he was eight again. I hadn’t known you could still buy those damn things.
I presented him with an unimpressed glare and a few choice words.
I threw the first punch.
He threw the last, which led to me getting six stitches above one of my baby-blue moneymakers and a threatening letter from my producer.
After that, we were forced to get creative on how we solved our copious amounts of arguments. Building a Ninja Warrior course in my backyard seemed like the logical answer. That course served as our own personal judge. Winner took all and decisions were final.
Six months later, The Porterhouse was born. Despite the stupid name, we garnered rave reviews from critics and patrons alike. And within a matter of days, we were fully booked for the rest of the year. It wasn’t long before we were making plans to open a second restaurant, The Tannerhouse. Yeah. I’d won the course the day we’d named that one. Truthfully, I had only been joking when I’d suggested the nonsensical name, but it pissed my brother off to no end, so I decided to keep it.
With only a few weeks before the soft opening of The Tannerhouse, Porter had been bombarding me with shit that was his job to stress about.
Shit that I did not have time to stress about too.
Shit that ultimately we’d both stress about until it was done.
And there he was, ready to dump more of it at my feet.
“Of course we do,” I groaned.
“I need some advice,” he stated, fisting his hands on his hips.
My eyebrows nearly touched my hairline, and a slow, arrogant smile curled my lips. “I’m sorry. Did you say you need advice?”
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“No. I’m serious. Could you repeat that?” I grinned like the smug bastard I pretended to be with him.
He glared and it made me laugh.
Opening my bottom drawer to grab one of my signature white tanks, I said, “You have asked me for advice exactly three times in our lives. The first was when you wanted to know the best way to scramble an egg without burning it. Second was when you needed to know how much water went in Rice-a-Roni after you accidentally threw out the directions. And last was when you asked for my advice on the best way to salvage a frying pan after you scraped the Teflon off while trying to scrub away a layer of the aforementioned scrambled egg.” I arched an eyebrow. “Notice a pattern?”
“Cry me a river. You aren’t exactly known for your sage wisdom. Crème de la fru fru or whatever the hell that shit is that you cook? Absolutely. But real-life advice that’s applicable to anyone with even the most sluggish moral compass? Not a chance.”
I blinked and a satisfied smile grew on my lips. Nothing Porter could say could hurt me, but knowing that I’d gotten under his skin was more satisfying than any insult I could have hurled back at him. Slinging shit at each other was what we did.
“And yet here you are, asking for advice.”
He blew out a hard breath and raked a hand through his hair. With desperation in his eyes, he opened his mouth, but Andrea got there first.
“Later.” She grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the door. “Let’s go, pretty boy. You and your brother can hold hands and cry over whatever boy band tragically broke up while I’m at home.”
Porter turned his scowl on her.
I grinned, remembering all over again why I gave Andrea a yearly Christmas bonus.
* * *
“Just do it. Rip the Band-Aid off.” I stopped pacing and gave her my eyes.
Charlotte was staring at me, her face emotionless. This wasn’t unusual. Some people had resting bitch face. Charlotte had resting blank face. She’d been my best friend for nine years and I still couldn’t read her sometimes. But if I knew anything about her, it was that a snarky comment was headed my way.
“It’d probably be more satisfying to rip his balls off instead,” she said as she got busy scanning the papers I’d handed her shortly after dragging her into her office and locking the door behind us.
The contents of that envelope were too ugly and embarrassing to be unleashed in public.
I smiled, and it was genuine, but it did nothing to quell the nerves ricocheting inside me. I’d been losing my mind about this moment since I’d found Tammy’s texts on Greg’s iPad. Poor dumbass, graduated from medical school at the top of his class, but he couldn’t figure out how to unlink Messenger from his phone and iPad.
Or maybe I was the dumbass because it had taken me six months of suspicions to finally check up on him.
My heart sank and a herd of angry barn moths armed with daggers and spears fluttered in my stomach.
“That would definitely be better,” I replied. “But he’s not mine to castrate anymore.”
Her dark-brown eyes grew soft and she avoided my gaze. Charlotte wasn’t the nurturing, pep-talk kind of best friend. But that was probably why we got along so well. I was the busybody, meddle-in-everyone’s-personal-life type in our relationship. And God knew I’d been trying to puppet-master some happiness into her life since the drunken night when she’d told Greg and me about her hollow existence.
To say Charlotte’s life had been tough would be the understatement of the century. I couldn’t even fathom how she’d survived after losing her only son ten years earlier. But, somehow, she’d used the tragedy to fuel her success—at least professionally. She’d not only graduated med school, even closer to the top than Greg, but she’d become one of the leading pulmonologists in the state, if not the country. Her dedication to her patients and her career made Greg look like a monkey in a lab coat.
I was going to miss seeing her every day when Greg finally canned me.
I’d been the office manager at North Point Pulmonology since Charlotte and Greg had gone into private practice together years earlier. Until ten days ago, I had loved my job. Sure, it wasn’t nearly as glamorous as having an M.D. after my name. But I’d gotten to work with the man I loved, stealing kisses in his office and sharing lunches in the breakroom. Now, all of that was out the window, and the only perk I had was knowing that the woman he had chosen to abandon our marriage for was no longer stealing those same kisses or sharing those same lunches. Charlotte had fired Tammy approximately ten minutes after she’d found out about the affair. She’d lied and told the rest of the office that she’d quit. But I knew.
So yeah, Charlotte wasn’t the girlfriend you called if you wanted someone to commiserate with. She was, however, the one you called if you wanted clear and concise action taken without question.
I swallowed hard and sat down in the chair across from her desk. “Okay. I’m ready. Give it to me straight.”
I hadn’t slept in days, partly because my entire life had been flipped upside down and partly because… Yeah, okay—that was all of it. But that horrifying envelope was one less thing I had to obsess about.
Her face remained stoic as she announced, “You don’t have any STDs.”
Tears welled in my eyes. “HIV, chlamydia, gonorrhea, anything?”
She offered me a weak smile.
“Nothing. You’re completely clean.”
Christ. How was this my life?
Short bursts of the breath I had been holding escaped as my shoulders shook with silent sobs. I’d been with one man my entire life. I’d married him. I’d loved him. And there I was, celebrating that he hadn’t given me an STD when he’d cheated on me.
“You okay?” Charlotte asked.
I shook my head, unable to formulate a response.
“This is good news, Rita.”
I shifted in my chair. “I know. But the fact that I’m even sitting here is asinine. This was not supposed to be my life. This kind of stuff happens to other people.” I smoothed down the top of my short, blond hair.
Greg liked it when I kept it styled in a short, angled bob. He said that it made me look young and smart—the perfect doctor’s wife, as though I were an accessory and not a person. I did daily yoga and Pilates to keep in shape and wore expensive dresses and heels because he always commented on how much he liked them. I’d just turned thirty, but I spent hundreds of dollars on weekly facials to keep my skin bright and wrinkle-free for no other reason than I adored the way his face would light with pride when his friends and colleagues checked me out. My nails were always freshly manicured. My toes polished to match. Legs shaved. Skin lotioned. Makeup done. Jewelry on.
Because Greg liked me that way.
But then he’d cheated on me with Tammy Grigs. A woman so different from me that the only thing we had in common was the fact that we both had a vagina. She had long, brown hair that was constantly pulled back in a messy bun. She wore ill-fitting scrubs to work every day, and if her attire at the office get-togethers was any indication, tattered jeans and dingy T-shirts made up the majority of her wardrobe. She had large breasts and a similarly sized ass. She was a thirty-three-year-old single mother of two with a few rogue gray hairs and crow’s feet to show for it.
Sure, she was cute. But she was no sex kitten. Definitely not the kind of woman a wife—jealous or not—would worry about her husband stepping out with.
No. I’d been bested by a regular woman who hadn’t even been on my radar as competition.
“You do realize he slept with Tammy Grigs, right?” I whispered. “Tammy fucking Grigs, of all damn people.”
Charlotte leaned back in her chair and folded her hands before resting them on the desk between us. “He slept with,” she stated matter-of-factly.
“What?” I snapped.
“He slept with. Those are the only words in that sentence that matter. He could have slept with a Victoria’s Secret model or an eighty-year-old nun and it wouldn’t matter. It’s the fact that he did it.”
I stabbed my finger down on the desk. “But I was better than her. I worked my ass off to be the wife he wanted me to be. And he chose her?”
She shook her head and leaned forward, propping herself up on her elbows. “Stop worrying about whether you’re better than Tammy and focus on the fact that you are better than Greg. He slept with another woman. He did it. And he did it to you.”
My chest caved in like she had punched me. “I don’t know what the hell to do with that,” I admitted.
She looked down at the papers and whispered, “There’s nothing to do with it, Rita. Life isn’t fair. It’s cruel and calculating. But it is real. Accept it. Or don’t. It won’t change anything.”
Charlotte had a way with words. She was blunt and honest, which was nice for the age-old does-this-dress-make-my-ass-look-fat debate, but not so much for the I’m-dying-inside-please-make-me-feel-better discussion.
I crossed my arms and rested them on her desk. Then I folded over to rest my head on them. “I need a new best friend. One who will bring over cupcakes and wine and then help me build a dummy and burn it in effigy.”
She laughed softly and then went silent.
I peeked my head up and her face was once again blank.
“What?” I asked.
“We didn’t get to the results of your pregnancy test.”
My back shot ramrod straight as chills pebbled over my skin. I’d gone off birth control almost two years earlier. We’d gotten pregnant right away only for it to end in an early first trimester miscarriage. Greg and I were devastated, but we remained hopeful for the future. From the start, we decided not to try to have babies. No charting or plotting my cycle. I didn’t want the pressure or stress of trying to conceive to create problems in our marriage. Though, over the last year, our sex life had become strained at best.
I didn’t think much of it at first. Our lives were busy. He was at work, spending several nights a week at the hospital with his patients. I was planning the Spring Fling, hitting speed bumps at every turn. But that was how it went in marriages; there were ebbs and flows. Greg and I had definitely been in an ebb, our only physical connection being the occasional obligatory quickie when he’d get home late and crawl into bed with me.
Little had I known then, he’d just crawled out of someone else’s bed.
So, while it was highly unlikely that we’d created a child, it wasn’t impossible.
I covered my mouth with my hand and then asked around it. “Am I pregnant?”
“Do you want to be?”
My stomach knotted, and I toyed with the strand of pearls at my neck. Pearls he had given me. “No. I mean…maybe. I don’t know. It’s not exactly a choice I get to make at this point.”
“I know you and Greg were trying there for a while.”
I laughed, but it held no humor. “Well, that’s not saying much. Technically, he was trying with Tammy too. Maybe not to have a baby, but same deed.”
“Let me rephrase. I know you wanted a baby.”
“I did.” The admission burned on the tip of my tongue.
“And now you don’t?”
“Again, it’s not up to me at this point. Am I pregnant?”
“Would you stay with him if you were?” she asked, dragging her long, raven hair up into a ponytail before releasing it back down to her shoulders.
My heart raced, and I stood from my chair as a blast of adrenaline hit my system. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
She frowned. “Kids fix everything, huh?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Staying was the easy route—the cop-out. I wasn’t too proud to admit that I’d considered taking that route a few times since I’d first read those text messages. We could have gone to counseling, figured out the root cause of why he had done it. I would have pretended to forgive him. He would have pretended that he would never do it again. And then, in a few years, after the monotony of marriage had settled back in, one of us would stop pretending. I’d forget I wasn’t allowed to be bitter. He’d forget he wasn’t allowed to sleep with every woman who opened her legs. And then we’d be right here all over again. Only this time with a kid or two and a few more years of our short lives faded into the past.
Staying in a marriage where only one person was committed wasn’t an option. I’d given up too much of my life already. I’d be damned if I gave more.
“I lied,” I mumbled.
I felt like a rubber band was winding inside me. The mounting pressures of the future were wrenching it tighter with every tick of the second hand.
She arched a knowing eyebrow. “So you wouldn’t stay with him?”
“No. But that’s not what I lied about.” I chewed on my bottom lip. “The truth is, I never wanted a baby.” I lifted my eyes to hers. “I wanted a family, Charlotte. You know Jon and I didn’t have much when we were growing up. Our parents… Well, they just sucked. I’d vowed to myself to get out of that life. I wanted the husband, the house, the dog, the picket fence, the two-point-five kids. I wanted the full package.” I swept invisible tears from under my eyes. “But Greg isn’t that husband. And I’m going to have to sell our house because I can’t afford to keep it on my own. And let’s be honest here. Even if I found another man, I don’t want to be that woman who has two-point-five kids with two-point-five different men.” I shot her
a shaky smile. “Honestly, I’m not even sure if I like dogs. Some of them—”
“You’re not pregnant,” she blurted.
“What!” I yelled, shooting to my feet as the most amazing—and telling—blast of relief filled my veins.
“You’re not pregnant,” she repeated.
“Then why the hell did you act like I was!”
She rose from her chair and walked around her desk. “Because I was scared that, when shit got hard and the darkness closed in on you, you’d run back to Greg. I had a speech planned and everything. I went so far as to price out a plane ticket and private cabana in Barbados to get you away from him until you got your head straight.”
I blinked at her, my emotions even more scattered than they had been when I’d walked into her office.
I had no STDs.
And I wasn’t pregnant.
There was absolutely nothing tying me to the man I had committed my life to seven years earlier.
I should have been relieved. It was exactly what I’d wanted when I’d asked her to read me the results.
Yet it was the emptiest feeling in my life.
I swallowed hard. “First of all, you are fired as my best friend for making me believe I was pregnant.”
Her lips curled up into a small smile.
My heels clipped on the floor as I closed the distance between us. Pulling her into a hug, I whispered, “But I officially rehire you, seeing as how you were contemplating sending me to Barbados in order to keep me away from my no-good piece-of-shit soon-to-be ex-husband.”
She returned the embrace for only a second before setting me away. Touching wasn’t her thing. But it was my thing, so she put up with it in small doses.
“Are you sure you don’t need a place to stay?” she asked, moving back behind her desk.
“Nah. He hasn’t tried to come home. I may or may not have programmed our address into his GPS as a location called I Will Neuter You.”
She chuckled. “Okay. Well, if you need anything, you know where I am.”
“At the hospital with a patient?” I teased.