Chapter Sixteen Soraya #2
“I completely agree,” Daisy said slowly. “That sex with a stranger, or even sending nude pictures online or whatever, is not worth breaking a family up over. I will never justify what David did to you, or what Jonathan did to me. Or what Ben is doing to Nora. But sex can be pretty great.”
“Yeah,” Nora agreed. “It can make you do very stupid things.”
“Not in my experience. In my experience, you . . . just wait until you’re married, and then you have planned sex on your wedding night, and it’s fine. I didn’t have trouble resisting.”
“Oh, Soraya.” Nora pinched the bridge of her nose.
“Well. I’ve just never . . . I’ve never lost control.”
“Maybe that should go on your list.”
“I don’t have a list. I already told you, I can’t . . .”
“Listen.” Nora paced into the room and touched the candle on the mantel, where their rings were still sitting on the wick, a reminder of the anger from the night of the spell.
A reminder of why they were here. “If you feel like having sex with somebody you aren’t married to is wrong, then I won’t try to talk you into it.
But if it’s just a reaction to what other people are telling you? Then maybe I will.”
“Are you going to have a fling with some other man?”
“I need to deal with Ben first,” she said darkly.
“What about you?” Soraya asked Daisy.
“I might.” Daisy looked away. “He’s getting married to somebody else. I have weekends without the kids and . . . no reason not to. Except it’s embarrassing to be my age and to only have been with one man.”
“I’m in the same boat,” Soraya said.
“At least you have a reason. Everyone will get it if you say you grew up in a purity-culture church. I just hooked up with Jonathan so early I never had the chance.” She sighed.
“I’m so mad. I was faithful to him. When I decided he was the one when we were teenagers, I gave up the idea of ever having other partners, and he didn’t do the same.
I’ll never know if he was with other women the whole time or if it was just Amberly or . . .”
“You could ask,” Soraya pointed out.
“Why?” Nora asked. “That sounds like borrowing heartache to me.”
“I want to know,” Soraya said. “While I was being a faithful wife, while I was getting the just-fine sex, what else was he giving other women?”
“We need to learn divination,” Daisy said.
“I don’t know about that.” Soraya’s hands automatically retracted to her chest, like she was seeking out pearls to clutch.
“Too much Satan for Soraya.”
Daisy rolled her eyes. “This has nothing to do with Satan. Or demons of any kind. Witchcraft is about tapping into your own intuition, your own power.” She sighed.
“Even if it isn’t real. Even if the tarot cards aren’t telling us anything, or if the spells don’t do anything, I’d rather feel like I could change things than feel powerless. ”
Nora smiled, just slightly. “Maybe the real witchcraft was the friends we made along the way.”
Daisy was right, though. The worst part about all this, under the betrayal and heartbreak and everything else, was feeling utterly and completely powerless.
“Poor Alexandra,” Soraya said. “This is why she went . . . This is why she went crazy. This is why she was gambling and staying out late and engaging in all the destructive behavior that led to her accident. Because it makes you feel like everything is . . . fake. Like everything you believed in doesn’t .
. . mean anything.” She let out a long, slow breath.
“Part of me kind of wants to . . . self-destruct. Part of me wants to erase every part of myself that ever loved him. That gave so much time to him. Part of me wants to make that good, perfect wife into something else. A not-insubstantial part of me wants to sleep with the guy across the hall just to . . .” She sighed.
“He’s making everyone think I’m the villain, so maybe I should be. ”
“We’re working on corrupting you,” Nora said.
Soraya set the takeout on the table. They began to dish pad thai and pad see ew onto their plates, and it was Nora who retrieved a bottle of white wine and opened it.
“You said you didn’t drink,” Nora pointed out.
“Well, we didn’t used to,” Soraya hedged. “But we started to drink wine sometimes at home. But I . . . I’ve been embarrassed about it, because a lot of people in our church don’t believe in drinking at all. But he said it was fine and . . .”
“And you like it,” Nora pointed out.
“Yeah,” Soraya said. “I enjoy a glass of wine.”
“Then you should have it. Not because your husband said it was okay. Because you want some.”
Soraya huffed a laugh. “I know I don’t make sense to you, and I’m kind of pathetic. I’m starting to agree, by the way.”
“I don’t think you’re pathetic.” Nora got a corkscrew and opened the bottle.
“I really don’t. Not now, anyway. It was easy for me to feel like .
. . I don’t know, like you were just being mean to me, because I feel like I didn’t understand how sincere your faith is, how deeply you believe what you do. ”
“I always have. What kind of ruined my life is realizing how little the people around me believe the things they say. Because they’re not holding him to the standard they would hold me.”
“I think some people have real, genuine faith,” Daisy said.
“I think you do, Soraya. I think other people like what a community like that gives them. Connections, power. A way to wield fear. I’m not even sure they know that’s what they’re doing.
But there’s a perfect set of rules for you to hold other people to while you don’t hold yourself to the same. ”
“That’s how it feels. Like the rules are just a convenience. But I never . . . I never looked at it that way. I’ve always really believed.”
“You still can,” Nora said. “They don’t get to take that from you.”
“No.” Soraya snagged the bottle of wine from Nora’s hand.
“They don’t get to take it from me. But also, I’m allowed to change.
” That was the scariest thing she had ever said.
That she was allowed to change. Because change was something that was set up as a bad thing.
“That’s the problem. I was told that I knew all the secrets of life and of the world from moment one.
So learning new concepts and ideas, integrating them, letting them change who you are is seen as an enemy.
But I didn’t know everything. I can see that now.
I need to change. I can’t just . . . dig in and learn nothing from this. ”
“Well, that’s not what you’re doing.”
“So maybe I will have sex with somebody.” She immediately felt a little bit bad even saying that. “Maybe, but not to prove something to anyone else. Just for me.”
“Just for you,” Nora agreed.
Daisy lifted her glass. “To Alexandra. Who isn’t here, and should be. And to us, because we are going to help each other through this.”
“To us.” Nora lifted her glass.
Soraya was the last one to lift hers, and she clinked her glass against the others. “To us.”
It was Nora who took her phone out and opened a music app. “Do you guys like Fleetwood Mac, because really nothing says spiteful breakup music like ‘Silver Springs.’”
“I don’t know it,” Soraya said.
“I love that one.”
The song started playing, a slow musical intro, and Nora backed away from the table into the most open part of the kitchen. “Stevie Nicks very famously sang this song right at the man who broke her heart. Imagine being stuck in a famous band with one of these jerks we were married to.”
“Singing spitefully at them sounds good, though,” Daisy said.
“Agreed.” Nora spun in a circle as the tempo of the song picked up. She grabbed a broom from where it was wedged between the fridge and the wall and held the top end to her mouth like a microphone.
Even the song felt like a spell. A prayer. A promise.
That the man in the song who had left the woman in question would never escape, even though he was done with her.
Even though he betrayed her.
It did feel perfect for the moment.
Daisy stood and joined in, waving her hands in the air and moving her hips in time with the music, her voice clear and beautiful like it always had been. It had been way too long since Soraya had heard her sing. Daisy reached out to Soraya, and she took her hand, jumping into the dance.
As she did, tears slipped down her cheeks. Because this felt new and amazing and scary, all at the same time. But it was her life. There was pretty much no escaping it.
Just like she knew, somehow, that David wouldn’t escape the consequences of this.
Because the three of them together were magic. If she was certain of one thing, it was that.