Not What I Expected

He grabbed me, spinning my body around, my back hitting the door. The Kael Hendricks eye sparkle was back and on steroids. “You think of me as your sex toy. You’ve said it before.”

I deflated, angling my gaze to the side. “Not in the way you think.”

“I think you’re using me for sex. I think you’re using me like a human dildo. I think you get a high knowing that other women in your little town of Epperly are throwing themselves at me, but I’m only into you—in the most literal sense. I think you like the secrecy. The simplicity. The sinfulness.”

He waited.

I kept a straight face.

He waited some more.

His body towered over mine, keeping me in my spot and plastered to the door until I gave him something back—acknowledgment. Nourishment for his male ego.

“Fine.” I shrugged, giving him a fleeting glance. “It is in the way you think. Now, move so I can get to work.”

There wasn’t another step for him to take, yet he found one, sucking all the air from my personal space. “Are you sure you’re done playing with me? I think we both have a few extra minutes to spare.”

“Careful. I’d hate for my shiny new toy to lose its luster.”

“Mrs. Smith … I’m not losing my shine in your eyes anytime soon. And you fucking know it.”

I burned in his presence, and he knew it. He pounced on every opportunity to reveal my weakness—him. Kael Hendricks was my weakness. The only thing that annoyed me about him was his incessant need to wear clothes and do things that didn’t involve giving me an orgasm. That and his natural flirtatious nature that drove all the women crazy.

“By the way…” he stepped back to give me a breath or maybe exhale the one I’d been holding “…I made a marketing decision after the vomit incident. I felt it was necessary to recoup a few customers. It was before you told me that Amie planned on making things right. So I just want to make sure we’re good. That’s what I was getting ready to tell you earlier when I mentioned our working relationship. Business being business.”

I tipped my chin up and cleared my throat. “Of course … business is business.”

“Great.” Without touching me with any other part of his body, he leaned down and kissed the corner of my mouth. I felt his lips bend into a smile.

I didn’t trust that smile.

“Have a great day at work,” he whispered, giving me a faint chill along my neck and down my spine.Slow day.

I wasn’t sure what my competitor’s marketing decision was or if it affected my slow sales day.

Until …

Grief recovery group.

“Rhonda just called. She’s running a few minutes late. We can pray and start without her. Or …” Kelly, shrugged nonchalantly. “We can real talk.”

“Real talk?” Deb asked.

“She wants to talk about the things our husbands did that we don’t miss.” Bethanne winked at Kelly. “Right?”

“We can just wait for Rhonda.” I smiled. What had I done to our little church group? Only one of us needed to go straight to Hell.

Me, of course.

Yet everyone else seemed to have a guilty conscience too. Real emotions weren’t supposed to feel so wrong. My husband drove me crazy and died. I didn’t physically wrap my hands around his neck and strangle him—even if I thought about it in that weird, uncontrollable part of my brain. Everyone had dirty, awful, shameful, unimaginable thoughts float through their heads on those rare occasions.

“It’s … freeing.” Kelly shared a sheepish grin. “I can’t fully explain it. Missing him is the part that comes naturally. It’s the part that everyone understands—everyone expects. It’s easy to miss all the good times. But it’s hard to live with the regret over the parts that weren’t great. I miss a million things about him … does that make it okay to not miss a dozen things that I literally started to hate about him? A million to twelve. That’s not terrible. Right?”

Silence settled over our group for a few minutes, letting Kelly’s words hang in the air—a familiar cloud I knew all too well.

“A tiny rock in your shoe on a ten-mile walk. It’s so freaking tiny compared to your foot. The size of a grain of salt. And the view is amazing. You love that pine scent filling the cool air. You know the soft trickle of the nearby stream is the most relaxing sound ever.”

“Blue sky.” Kelly took over, and I smiled at her. “Soft breeze. Archways and canopies of trees. A wonderland. But … you can’t enjoy any of it because the tiniest little thing is irritating you. It’s hijacked your mind. And no matter how hard you try to ignore it, you just can’t let that tiny thing go. It slowly steals your enjoyment … your happiness. And if you don’t get rid of it, you know it will ruin the hike, and you’ll regret not doing something to remedy the situation.”