Sweet Temptation: A Trick-Or-Treat Collaboration

“My Abuela once told me the most important thing in the world is family and love. If you have both, you are rich in life. You don’t need anything else.”

Inside, I’m laughing. I have the most fucked-up situation, ever. I’m in love with my family… that is the problem.

“My family’s complicated,” I tell her.

“All families are complicated. I have six brothers and seven sisters. But I love them. We fight, we speak our heart, but we always come back together because we are blood.”

I let out a loud sigh. How can she possibly understand this conundrum?

Hey, Mama Valentino, I’m in love with my sister’s husband, who is her soon to be ex-husband. I’ve spent countless nights wishing it was me who walked down the aisle and said I do. Me who bore his child, and me who woke up every morning in his arms and became the air he needed to breathe.

“I sense your heart is in trouble.”

The words are barely hanging on at the tip of my tongue. My racing heart and equally confused mind is desperate for a resolution to the troubles which eat away at me every waking moment. I’m sick of feeling this way yet, no matter how hard I try, or who I attempt to jump into bed with, nothing erases my yearning for Noah.

“Do you sometimes wonder what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes? To experience love in a different way,” I ask boldly.

Silence follows my question. The room almost feels like I’m alone.

“I lost my husband five years ago,” she admits, then continues, “I look at the people around me in love, and I miss him. I would never erase what we had.”

“But what if you could go back and feel it, just for one moment?”

“My dear, be careful what you wish for.” The tone of her voice remains calm, but it’s not without a sense of warning. “Every wish, every desire, has a consequence. Trust the path that God has put you on. Your life begins once you trust the journey.”

Mama Valentino pulls the needle out of the dress, placing it back in the box. “All done. Te ves como un ángel,” she whispers with a smile on her weathered face.

Staring into the full-length mirror, I can’t argue the perfection of this dress. Something about it tells a story. It brings joy and happiness, and wearing it makes me feel like the most important person in the world.

With minor alterations, the dress no longer sits loosely around my waist. Thanking her for the work, she gazes back at me with an odd expression. The weight of her stare almost hypnotizing me. The hairs on my skin begin to rise, goosebumps rapidly spreading all over my body.

“Thank you, again. You may l-leave now,” I sputter, slightly creeped out by the weight of her lingering stare.

In the same slow and agonizing pace, she turns her back to me and shuffles out of the room. The second the door closes, I release the tight breath I’d been holding in.

My nerves need to calm the hell down. Perhaps it’s the full moon predicted or being the night of Halloween that’s rattled my nerves in a way I can’t explain. Witches and spells, magic and warlocks, all the fairy tales we’re taught from a young age which magically come alive on Halloween.

But maybe, just maybe, it’s none of that.

It’s the biggest demon of all, one I will face tonight—Noah Mason.

My sister’s ex-husband.

The man my heart brutally ached for.

And the same man, who only last week, admitted he knocked-up some airline stewardess on a one-night stand four months ago.

This is going to be one hell of a long night.

The summer of 1998 was the year a small-town-girl named Sarah-Jo Winters entered a beauty contest at Little Rock Mall.

My mother, former aspiring beauty queen, had spent all morning fussing over my blonde trusses, sticking bobby pins into my hair to hold it strategically in place, and followed with an enormous amount of hairspray.

The makeup I wore was purchased especially for this occasion, and although Daddy would argue every night at this preposterous ritual, Mom totally ignored him and insisted I wear the bright pink dress with white ruffles beneath the skirt.

Every night, leading up to the event, Mom would teach me how to walk down the runway, pose correctly with my knee slightly bent and posture straight, with one hand resting on my hip. We practiced my smiles, answers to questions I would be asked, all the while my sister, Morgan, would raise the music in her room to drown out the noise.

I still remember the nerves leading up to the moment I walked out on stage. The small crowd inside the mall, screaming kids running around, and a bunch of overly dressed-up girls the same age as me waiting behind the curtains. I had no clue then how this moment would define my life or be the start to a long career in show business.