Her fall from grace hadn’t taken long. Sutton—Justine—was simultaneously furious with herself and wallowing in the glory of sex with a new person, in a strange bed, in a strange but all too familiar city.
Constantine felt her stir and put a hand possessively on her hip. She stopped moving and he fell back asleep.
She shut her eyes, too, blocking out the world, and thought about Ethan.
It was wrong to. She knew that. Thinking about a man while in bed with another wasn’t a good, healthy way to live. It seemed she’d done it once too often lately, too.
They’d been happy in the beginning. She remembered telling her mother how very happy they were.
“We are happy. So very happy. Happy, happy, happy.
“We’re perfect for one another. Both writers, both creatives. We are on the same schedule—we both like to write first thing in the morning, like to stay up late, watching movies and TV shows. We both like action movies, and despise horror films. We don’t read the same authors, so we’re able to expose each other to new ideas.
“Money? Well, not to brag, but he has plenty, but you know, Mother, so do I. Maybe not quite as much as he—okay, Mother, if I tell you a secret, will you swear not to say anything? I actually made more than he did on my last contract. It’s just the nature of commercial fiction versus literary. We genre writers are always seen as being so vulgar because we actually make money at our art. But don’t tell a soul I told you that. You promise?
“Yes, he loves me, Mother. He really does.
“Yes, he knows.
“Yes, I told him.
“Oh, for God’s sake. I need to go.”
Her mother. Was it ever possible to have a normal, loving conversation? Always dredging up the guts of the past. Threatening and cajoling.
Once, as a teenager, so fed up with her life and needing a little sympathy, Sutton concocted a fantasy for her friends. She confided that the woman she called Mother, Siobhan Healy, wasn’t her real mother. Sutton had no idea who her real mother was. She had a name, of course, off the birth certificate, but that woman had left Sutton behind on the steps of a fire station in Indiana and hadn’t ever come back. Finally, when she was old enough, Sutton had done the research and learned who her biological mother was. She’d tracked her down, saw the woman’s shiny new life, with her shiny husband and three shiny children in a shiny house with two shiny cars and a shiny fucking dog, and had known she’d never fit in there. So she’d gone home, back to her decidedly nonshiny trailer with Maude, her foster mother—she hadn’t yet changed her name to Siobhan—who was between husbands and needed a little extra cash, and so gamed the system to allow her to foster. Maude, pedestrian old Maude, who smoked Pall Mall cigarettes and drank rotgut vodka out of Coke cans because she thought that vodka didn’t make your breath smell like alcohol and her boss at the Kroger didn’t know she was showing up shit-faced.
It had been fun while it lasted, pretending not to belong to her reality, but word got back to Maude, who set the friends and parents straight, then grounded Sutton for lying.
Still, Maude was a poor substitute for a real, loving, kind, gentle, guiding mother. The woman thought of when she thought of mothers, and had an urge to have a conversation with a maternal figure, was her aunt Josephine—a cousin to Maude once removed by marriage—who’d swooped in to rescue Sutton after Maude was sent to court-ordered rehab for a DUI. Josephine had raised her for a while, made sure she was fed and clothed and had a roof over her head, until Maude got out of rehab and went to AA and found God and straightened out and changed her name to Siobhan and found a boyfriend named Joe, who had a nice two-story split-level near Nashville, and moved them in with him before he could change his mind, lickety-split.
No more Aunt Josephine. No more loving, motherly conversations.
Instead...Joe. Joe the Schmo.
Her mother didn’t know what Joe was saying to Sutton behind her back, or didn’t care.
Oh, stop already. Enough of that train of thought. You’re supposed to be thinking about Ethan, not Joe the dickhead Schmo and the consequences of your mother’s inability to see him for what he was.
Ethan was good in bed. Electrifyingly good. He knew exactly what turned her on, which buttons to push, and didn’t ever miss a chance to take her screaming over the edge into oblivion.
Constantine hadn’t been awful. He’d actually been pretty good. A little wider than Ethan in terms of penis girth (she was a bit sore), and she’d been exactly right about those long fingers and what they could do and how they would feel.
The thing was, as much as she hated to admit it, no one else would ever be quite good enough for her. Ethan was mind-blowingly spectacular in the bedroom. There was some truth to the old adage, it’s not the size of the ship, it’s the motion in the ocean. Ethan may not have had the biggest dick on the planet, but man, oh, man, did he know how to use it.
The first year they were together, Sutton made a small dot in her journal every time they had sex. They were so far above average it wasn’t even funny; she stopped keeping track.
The second year, she started tracking again, and noticed it had dropped off. The third year, well, that was the year of the first incident, the house, and that little cunt, so it shouldn’t have counted at all.
Because inevitably, Ethan’s eye began to wander. He was beautiful, with a great accent, a sharp wit, and a brilliant mind, and he was being pushed up against pretty young things at the conferences and book signings and private teaching gigs, and he was a man, after all. A man like any other, designed to go forth and propagate his seed in every available fertile vagina.
Did he have any other children?
The thought brought her up short. Nausea spiked. She’d never thought to ask, or to accuse. Except for the one time, he always denied cheating on her, but she knew he lied. It was nice of him, in a way, to try to protect her feelings by not openly admitting the humiliation. She expected the worst of it happened while she was in the hospital (that damnable place) when they wouldn’t let him in to see her for a week. She’d been in bad shape and had made it very clear she didn’t want him to see her this way, and the staff listened. When she got home there was a pair of skimpy undies under the bed. Red. Thong. Barely anything but string and a scrap of lace. The kind an expensive whore would wear, or perhaps a graduate student in English wanting to impress her favorite writer by showing him how very inventive and free she was.
Truly, Sutton had never expected to be able to keep him all to herself forever. But to fuck another woman in their bed, a bed they’d shared while busily making their child, when she was incapacitated? That was beyond heartless. Couldn’t he have just taken his whores to a hotel? Did he have to shove it in Sutton’s face? All because he hadn’t wanted the house?