I stutter back a step. The woman’s eyes land on me and flash angry, and I know I’m not where I’m supposed to be. There’s no mistaking the feminine jealousy flashing across her features, the condescension on her face as she looks me over.
“What do you think you’re doing here?” she asks with an upturned lip.
She seems totally unconcerned with her nudity, but I have my arms crossed over my bra and I’m backing away instinctively.
“Hey, babe, what’s up with all the candles? Trying to burn my house down?”
The woman’s eyes widen and her face is like a flower, puckered and closed at the sight of me and now blooming at the sound of his voice.
“I’m in bed, baby,” she calls, her calculating eyes never leaving mine. “But you’ll need to take out the trash before we can get started.”
Asher comes around the corner and freezes when he sees the woman in the bed.
I’m waiting for him to fix this. Waiting for him to ask her what the hell she’s doing here. Waiting for him to kick her out.
“Juliana.” He looks at her, then me, then back to her.
Juliana? His daughter’s mother? Are they still together?
“I’m home,” the woman says, sweetness dripping from every word. “Aren’t you going to give your wife a kiss?”
“Your wife?” Another step back and I knock over a candle. Hot wax splashes onto my bare feet and pools on the shining wood plank floors. “Shit.” I hop away from the candle, the wax burning my foot.
“Juliana, get dressed,” he growls. Then he turns to me. “I thought we weren’t meeting here for another couple hours.”
I blink at him. This has to be a dream. Has to be. A horrible nightmare. There’s a na**d woman in his bed calling herself his wife and he’s looking at me like it’s my fault because I arrived early?
“You’re married?”
“Of course he’s married,” Juliana says, coming toward us. Her br**sts are perky and full and her hip bones protrude on her painfully gaunt frame.
I shake my head. “Is this a joke?” Or a dream. A joke or a dream. But the cooling wax hardening on my foot feels so real, and this would be too cruel a joke from a man I’ve fallen for.
“Maggie,” Asher says softly. “Juliana is Zoe’s mom. I told you about her.”
“You didn’t tell me you were married to her.”
His gaze ping pongs between us and his jaw works for a minute before he says, “It’s not even a marriage anymore. Just a technicality.”
I feel both like I’ve fallen and jerked to a stop in midair. Now I’m just hanging here, suspended in time. “But you are married.”
Juliana wraps her arm around Asher’s waist and he pushes it away. “Clothes,” he growls.
I can hardly breathe. This is it. This is the proof that I will always be a home-wrecking slut.
I don’t know how long I stand there, staring at her as she pulls one of his t-shirts from his drawer like they’re her own, staring at him as he repeats, “Listen to me, Maggie.”
When Juliana walks back over in the same old band tee I toured this house in last week, I want to vomit. Her arms are crossed under her breasts. “Is she the reason you’re leaving me?”
Leaving?
“She’s the mother of your child.” I’m trying to get this straight, to make sense of it. Oh, God. What have I done?
“We’re not together anymore,” Asher’s saying. “We haven’t lived together in over a year. We’re getting a divorce.”
Juliana sneers at me. “Are you the reason he sent me those divorce papers? Huh? He’s leaving me for some teenage country bumpkin?”
I don’t tell her I’m not a teenager. I don’t tell her I didn’t know he was married.
I don’t say anything because I’ve used up all the excuses, and I don’t have a single new one worth speaking.
I stagger backward toward the door.
“Don’t go, Maggie.”
I shake my head. The words “I’m sorry” slip out and I don’t even know who I’m apologizing to. Juliana? Asher? Myself?
“I won’t let my marriage be ruined by some loose co-ed,” Juliana calls. Anger drips from every word. Anger she’s entitled to. Anger I deserve.
Asher’s calling after me, but I run, and when I hit the stairs I hear him behind me, closer, and run faster. I lose my footing and slide down the last five stairs.
I cry out when I hit the tile floor but I scramble to my feet and reach for the door handle.
“Maggie, don’t go, not like this.” His hand slams against the door before I can open it. “Talk to me.”
I force my panicked hands to release the handle and roll my shoulders back. When I turn to him, his face is so close, so agonized, and I hate how much I want to curl into him. I hate how much I want to listen to his explanation. I hate how tempted I am to make excuses. For him. For me.
“I assumed you knew,” he says softly.
“Why would I know?” God, it hurts to speak, my throat so thick with jagged bits of my pride. My heart.
“It’s never been a secret, Maggie. You never asked and I thought you knew.”
“That’s not something I should have to ask.” My eyes are burning with tears. Tears. Fuck him.
“Juliana and I haven’t been together in years, but neither one of us was ready to admit it was over.” He touches my face. I let him touch my face because I am so f**king weak. His thumb tilts up my chin until my eyes meet his. “I was too apathetic to end it. Until you.”
A single hot tear rolls down my cheek. “Asher,” I say softly.
“Tell me what you need from me, Maggie. You can have it. You know that. Anything.”
“I need you to be honest.”
“I have never lied to you.”
“Are you married?”
His face contorts with pain. “Yes, but—”
I put my finger to his lips. “No.” I shake my head. “I’ve heard all the but’s I can bear. I’m not the gullible child who believes them anymore. I won’t be that woman for you. I won’t be her for anyone.”
“You aren’t that woman. I’m in love with you. My marriage is over.”
“That’s what they all say.” The laughter that spills from my lips sounds half crazed. “And you know what’s so ironic? You’re the one who made me give enough of a shit about myself not to believe it anymore.”
“Don’t lump me in with them.” His jaw is hard now. “I’m not like them.”
“Let me go, Asher. If you really love me, you won’t ask me to stay. You won’t make this any harder for me than it already is.”
He studies me hard for a moment, as if he could will me to see things his way. Then he drops his hand and steps back, and I rush out the door before I can change my mind.
Chapter Twenty-Two
William
“Jay-sus,” Lizzy breathes. “I think everyone in town is here.”
The gallery is swarming with locals and out-of-towners, and the crowd spills over onto the patio in the front and the balcony in the back. Wine is flowing, art is selling, and I am f**king miserable.
“You guys should be so damn proud,” Lizzy says with a shake of her head.
Krystal’s across the room, chatting with Granny, and something tugs long and hard in my chest at the sight of her. We did the right thing. I know we did. But that doesn’t keep me from mourning the would-have-beens.
“Oh my God,” Lizzy squeaks. “Maggie’s here. What the hell happened to her? She looks a mess. Where’s Asher? Oh my God, do you think they took him back to prison?”
“No, they didn’t press charges.”
“But—”
I walk away from Lizzy without excusing myself. Her rapid-fire questions are more than I can bear tonight—even if they’re the same questions I have.
Maggie’s eyes are puffy and it’s obvious she’s been crying.
I weave through the crowd and have nearly reached her when Ethan Bauer’s assistant squeezes my arm.
“We’re ready,” she says reverently.
I shift uncomfortably. The side room holding Ethan’s top secret collection has been locked up tight since his assistants came to stage it this morning. They insisted the room stay closed until a crowd had gathered.
I nod and the woman scurries over to the steps. “If I could have everyone’s attention, we will now open the south room, which features a collection from the illustrious Ethan Bauer.”
The crowd applauds and I continue to work my way toward Maggie, who looks lost.
“I present to you,” the woman says, “the Discovery collection.”
Maggie’s head snaps up, and she mouths “No” as the doors open and the crowd files in, their murmurs carrying back into the main room.
I finally reach Maggie’s side and she’s staring toward the newly opened double doors, her eyes wide. “What is it?” I ask softly. “Are they paintings of you? It’s okay, Maggie. No one will know.”
She doesn’t answer. Instead she says, “Asher is married,” and my breath leaves me in a rush. Her eyes meet mine, red-rimmed and vacant. “You knew, didn’t you? That’s why you said he was just using me for sex.”
I swallow and lift a shoulder. “I don’t keep up with celebrity gossip, but I knew he used to be. That actress, right? Juliana Weisnith?”
“Yeah. Juliana,” she says softly. “God. I trusted him. You’re right. I always give myself to the wrong guys. Maybe my dad was right about me. Look at everything I’ve destroyed.”
“No.” I take her hand and squeeze. “Don’t say that. Your dad didn’t even mean the things he said at the end, Maggie. He just…he lost his best friend and his baby girl in one fell swoop, and he said terrible things to try to cope.”
She blinks at me and the crowd mills around us, sneaking glances Maggie’s way that tell me all I need to know about the paintings in that room.
She cuts her eyes to the doors and back to me. “Will you go in with me?”
I give another squeeze to her hand. “Of course. I’ll be right by your side.”
The crowd seems to part as we make our way through the doors, and the moment I step inside, I understand, and my feet freeze beneath me. “My God.”
The room features four large canvasses. The painting on the far wall catches my attention first. It’s stunning. A woman dressed in nothing but a man’s white dress shirt. She’s stretched out on a couch, one hand gripping the cushion, the other tucked between her slightly parted legs. Her head is tilted back, her mouth half open, eyes closed, sheer ecstasy shaping her features.
I’d know the shape of that body anywhere. I would recognize her from the pleasure on her face.
Beside me, I hear a small cry and I turn to see Maggie biting her lip, eyes fixed on the painting labeled DISCOVERY.
Her hand covers her mouth as her eyes scan the other portraits.
“I’ll get everyone out,” I whisper. “We’ll close the room back up. It’s not worth it.”
She shakes her head, eyes brimming with tears. “No. I’m not hiding anymore. Let it be.”
I feel completely helpless as I watch her look at the paintings, one by one, as if she’s forcing herself to take in every detail, to catalogue her own sins.
“Holy shit,” someone says behind us. I think it’s Lizzy, but I don’t turn to see.
A painting labeled FRIDAY MORNING shows a bed with a fluffy white comforter, a red head peaking out the top, eyes sleepy and seductive.
Another appears to place the viewer from the most erotic position between her legs. The perspective shows her inner thighs and bare stomach, her red hair covering her breasts.
Yet another appears to have been painted from the perspective of the person she’s straddling. A yellow sundress is bunched around her hips, and her head is tilted to the side, her eyes closed, mouth parted in ecstasy.
Maggie spins a slow circle, taking in each painting, blood draining from her face.
By the time she looks at the last one, she’s pale and unsteady. I hold her up.
“I’m fine.” She steps back. “Fine.”
She’s not fine and we both know it, but she doesn’t want to lean on me. Doesn’t want to need me. Not anymore.
“I need to go.” She turns on her heel and pushes through the crowd.
***
Maggie
Several smokers mingle on the front patio and eye me curiously as I exit the gallery. I excuse myself and follow the sidewalk away from the building to a garden area with the solitude I crave.
I should have never trusted Ethan. That is so obvious now I can only shake my head in bewilderment at the girl I was.
“I’m so sorry, Maggie.”
I turn to see Will, regret written all over his expression, and my shoulders drop. Funny the difference a month makes. A month ago, I would have thought that exhibition was the worst thing that could have happened. Now, my heart is so torn up over Asher, the exhibit is only another bad bit of luck, but nothing life altering.
“I didn’t know what was in there,” Will says.
“It doesn’t matter.” Funny how it took me all these years and all this pain to realize that keeping a secret doesn’t change the past. It doesn’t correct our errors or mend the things we’ve broken.
The secret only harvests the hurt next to our hearts, blocking the sunlight from the spot where happiness is supposed to grow.
“What do you think you’re doing here?” she asks with an upturned lip.
She seems totally unconcerned with her nudity, but I have my arms crossed over my bra and I’m backing away instinctively.
“Hey, babe, what’s up with all the candles? Trying to burn my house down?”
The woman’s eyes widen and her face is like a flower, puckered and closed at the sight of me and now blooming at the sound of his voice.
“I’m in bed, baby,” she calls, her calculating eyes never leaving mine. “But you’ll need to take out the trash before we can get started.”
Asher comes around the corner and freezes when he sees the woman in the bed.
I’m waiting for him to fix this. Waiting for him to ask her what the hell she’s doing here. Waiting for him to kick her out.
“Juliana.” He looks at her, then me, then back to her.
Juliana? His daughter’s mother? Are they still together?
“I’m home,” the woman says, sweetness dripping from every word. “Aren’t you going to give your wife a kiss?”
“Your wife?” Another step back and I knock over a candle. Hot wax splashes onto my bare feet and pools on the shining wood plank floors. “Shit.” I hop away from the candle, the wax burning my foot.
“Juliana, get dressed,” he growls. Then he turns to me. “I thought we weren’t meeting here for another couple hours.”
I blink at him. This has to be a dream. Has to be. A horrible nightmare. There’s a na**d woman in his bed calling herself his wife and he’s looking at me like it’s my fault because I arrived early?
“You’re married?”
“Of course he’s married,” Juliana says, coming toward us. Her br**sts are perky and full and her hip bones protrude on her painfully gaunt frame.
I shake my head. “Is this a joke?” Or a dream. A joke or a dream. But the cooling wax hardening on my foot feels so real, and this would be too cruel a joke from a man I’ve fallen for.
“Maggie,” Asher says softly. “Juliana is Zoe’s mom. I told you about her.”
“You didn’t tell me you were married to her.”
His gaze ping pongs between us and his jaw works for a minute before he says, “It’s not even a marriage anymore. Just a technicality.”
I feel both like I’ve fallen and jerked to a stop in midair. Now I’m just hanging here, suspended in time. “But you are married.”
Juliana wraps her arm around Asher’s waist and he pushes it away. “Clothes,” he growls.
I can hardly breathe. This is it. This is the proof that I will always be a home-wrecking slut.
I don’t know how long I stand there, staring at her as she pulls one of his t-shirts from his drawer like they’re her own, staring at him as he repeats, “Listen to me, Maggie.”
When Juliana walks back over in the same old band tee I toured this house in last week, I want to vomit. Her arms are crossed under her breasts. “Is she the reason you’re leaving me?”
Leaving?
“She’s the mother of your child.” I’m trying to get this straight, to make sense of it. Oh, God. What have I done?
“We’re not together anymore,” Asher’s saying. “We haven’t lived together in over a year. We’re getting a divorce.”
Juliana sneers at me. “Are you the reason he sent me those divorce papers? Huh? He’s leaving me for some teenage country bumpkin?”
I don’t tell her I’m not a teenager. I don’t tell her I didn’t know he was married.
I don’t say anything because I’ve used up all the excuses, and I don’t have a single new one worth speaking.
I stagger backward toward the door.
“Don’t go, Maggie.”
I shake my head. The words “I’m sorry” slip out and I don’t even know who I’m apologizing to. Juliana? Asher? Myself?
“I won’t let my marriage be ruined by some loose co-ed,” Juliana calls. Anger drips from every word. Anger she’s entitled to. Anger I deserve.
Asher’s calling after me, but I run, and when I hit the stairs I hear him behind me, closer, and run faster. I lose my footing and slide down the last five stairs.
I cry out when I hit the tile floor but I scramble to my feet and reach for the door handle.
“Maggie, don’t go, not like this.” His hand slams against the door before I can open it. “Talk to me.”
I force my panicked hands to release the handle and roll my shoulders back. When I turn to him, his face is so close, so agonized, and I hate how much I want to curl into him. I hate how much I want to listen to his explanation. I hate how tempted I am to make excuses. For him. For me.
“I assumed you knew,” he says softly.
“Why would I know?” God, it hurts to speak, my throat so thick with jagged bits of my pride. My heart.
“It’s never been a secret, Maggie. You never asked and I thought you knew.”
“That’s not something I should have to ask.” My eyes are burning with tears. Tears. Fuck him.
“Juliana and I haven’t been together in years, but neither one of us was ready to admit it was over.” He touches my face. I let him touch my face because I am so f**king weak. His thumb tilts up my chin until my eyes meet his. “I was too apathetic to end it. Until you.”
A single hot tear rolls down my cheek. “Asher,” I say softly.
“Tell me what you need from me, Maggie. You can have it. You know that. Anything.”
“I need you to be honest.”
“I have never lied to you.”
“Are you married?”
His face contorts with pain. “Yes, but—”
I put my finger to his lips. “No.” I shake my head. “I’ve heard all the but’s I can bear. I’m not the gullible child who believes them anymore. I won’t be that woman for you. I won’t be her for anyone.”
“You aren’t that woman. I’m in love with you. My marriage is over.”
“That’s what they all say.” The laughter that spills from my lips sounds half crazed. “And you know what’s so ironic? You’re the one who made me give enough of a shit about myself not to believe it anymore.”
“Don’t lump me in with them.” His jaw is hard now. “I’m not like them.”
“Let me go, Asher. If you really love me, you won’t ask me to stay. You won’t make this any harder for me than it already is.”
He studies me hard for a moment, as if he could will me to see things his way. Then he drops his hand and steps back, and I rush out the door before I can change my mind.
Chapter Twenty-Two
William
“Jay-sus,” Lizzy breathes. “I think everyone in town is here.”
The gallery is swarming with locals and out-of-towners, and the crowd spills over onto the patio in the front and the balcony in the back. Wine is flowing, art is selling, and I am f**king miserable.
“You guys should be so damn proud,” Lizzy says with a shake of her head.
Krystal’s across the room, chatting with Granny, and something tugs long and hard in my chest at the sight of her. We did the right thing. I know we did. But that doesn’t keep me from mourning the would-have-beens.
“Oh my God,” Lizzy squeaks. “Maggie’s here. What the hell happened to her? She looks a mess. Where’s Asher? Oh my God, do you think they took him back to prison?”
“No, they didn’t press charges.”
“But—”
I walk away from Lizzy without excusing myself. Her rapid-fire questions are more than I can bear tonight—even if they’re the same questions I have.
Maggie’s eyes are puffy and it’s obvious she’s been crying.
I weave through the crowd and have nearly reached her when Ethan Bauer’s assistant squeezes my arm.
“We’re ready,” she says reverently.
I shift uncomfortably. The side room holding Ethan’s top secret collection has been locked up tight since his assistants came to stage it this morning. They insisted the room stay closed until a crowd had gathered.
I nod and the woman scurries over to the steps. “If I could have everyone’s attention, we will now open the south room, which features a collection from the illustrious Ethan Bauer.”
The crowd applauds and I continue to work my way toward Maggie, who looks lost.
“I present to you,” the woman says, “the Discovery collection.”
Maggie’s head snaps up, and she mouths “No” as the doors open and the crowd files in, their murmurs carrying back into the main room.
I finally reach Maggie’s side and she’s staring toward the newly opened double doors, her eyes wide. “What is it?” I ask softly. “Are they paintings of you? It’s okay, Maggie. No one will know.”
She doesn’t answer. Instead she says, “Asher is married,” and my breath leaves me in a rush. Her eyes meet mine, red-rimmed and vacant. “You knew, didn’t you? That’s why you said he was just using me for sex.”
I swallow and lift a shoulder. “I don’t keep up with celebrity gossip, but I knew he used to be. That actress, right? Juliana Weisnith?”
“Yeah. Juliana,” she says softly. “God. I trusted him. You’re right. I always give myself to the wrong guys. Maybe my dad was right about me. Look at everything I’ve destroyed.”
“No.” I take her hand and squeeze. “Don’t say that. Your dad didn’t even mean the things he said at the end, Maggie. He just…he lost his best friend and his baby girl in one fell swoop, and he said terrible things to try to cope.”
She blinks at me and the crowd mills around us, sneaking glances Maggie’s way that tell me all I need to know about the paintings in that room.
She cuts her eyes to the doors and back to me. “Will you go in with me?”
I give another squeeze to her hand. “Of course. I’ll be right by your side.”
The crowd seems to part as we make our way through the doors, and the moment I step inside, I understand, and my feet freeze beneath me. “My God.”
The room features four large canvasses. The painting on the far wall catches my attention first. It’s stunning. A woman dressed in nothing but a man’s white dress shirt. She’s stretched out on a couch, one hand gripping the cushion, the other tucked between her slightly parted legs. Her head is tilted back, her mouth half open, eyes closed, sheer ecstasy shaping her features.
I’d know the shape of that body anywhere. I would recognize her from the pleasure on her face.
Beside me, I hear a small cry and I turn to see Maggie biting her lip, eyes fixed on the painting labeled DISCOVERY.
Her hand covers her mouth as her eyes scan the other portraits.
“I’ll get everyone out,” I whisper. “We’ll close the room back up. It’s not worth it.”
She shakes her head, eyes brimming with tears. “No. I’m not hiding anymore. Let it be.”
I feel completely helpless as I watch her look at the paintings, one by one, as if she’s forcing herself to take in every detail, to catalogue her own sins.
“Holy shit,” someone says behind us. I think it’s Lizzy, but I don’t turn to see.
A painting labeled FRIDAY MORNING shows a bed with a fluffy white comforter, a red head peaking out the top, eyes sleepy and seductive.
Another appears to place the viewer from the most erotic position between her legs. The perspective shows her inner thighs and bare stomach, her red hair covering her breasts.
Yet another appears to have been painted from the perspective of the person she’s straddling. A yellow sundress is bunched around her hips, and her head is tilted to the side, her eyes closed, mouth parted in ecstasy.
Maggie spins a slow circle, taking in each painting, blood draining from her face.
By the time she looks at the last one, she’s pale and unsteady. I hold her up.
“I’m fine.” She steps back. “Fine.”
She’s not fine and we both know it, but she doesn’t want to lean on me. Doesn’t want to need me. Not anymore.
“I need to go.” She turns on her heel and pushes through the crowd.
***
Maggie
Several smokers mingle on the front patio and eye me curiously as I exit the gallery. I excuse myself and follow the sidewalk away from the building to a garden area with the solitude I crave.
I should have never trusted Ethan. That is so obvious now I can only shake my head in bewilderment at the girl I was.
“I’m so sorry, Maggie.”
I turn to see Will, regret written all over his expression, and my shoulders drop. Funny the difference a month makes. A month ago, I would have thought that exhibition was the worst thing that could have happened. Now, my heart is so torn up over Asher, the exhibit is only another bad bit of luck, but nothing life altering.
“I didn’t know what was in there,” Will says.
“It doesn’t matter.” Funny how it took me all these years and all this pain to realize that keeping a secret doesn’t change the past. It doesn’t correct our errors or mend the things we’ve broken.
The secret only harvests the hurt next to our hearts, blocking the sunlight from the spot where happiness is supposed to grow.
