Chapter 5 Jules
Jules
Book Club—or “The Curvy Girls Smut Club,” as Lucia, our resident smart-ass dubbed it—is held every Thursday night, usually at Yelena’s house, because she married well and when her husband died, he left her a big place in South Tampa.
She has plenty of room for our rowdy group at her mini-mansion and we love to gather there.
Frankly, I’m just happy to be in such a nice house—it’s a huge contrast to my own dinky apartment near USF.
Yelena opens the door before I can even ring the bell. She’s a gorgeous, statuesque blonde in her forties with full curves and sharp blue eyes. I think she might be from Ukraine, but her English is perfect and only slightly accented. One thing I love about her is that she knows her worth.
“Darling, hello. Let me take that from you.”
She grabs the two long loaves of Cuban bread as she ushers me into the foyer. There’s a crystal chandelier that probably cost more than my car shedding golden light over the white marble floor and antique fixtures.
“Thanks Yelli.” We give each other air kisses on the cheek and she smells the bread, inhaling deeply as her eyes flutter closed.
“Oh, they must have just baked this! It smells delicious.”
“Tasha asked me to get it,” I confess. “I was going to get a fruit tray.”
She makes a shooing gesture.
“Oh please—as if we want to eat fruit during Book Club! I want to sink my teeth into something fattening. ”
I can’t help laughing.
“True. I guess there’s a reason Lucia calls us ‘the Curvy Girls Smut Club.’”
“Speaking of which, did you finish the book?” Sophia bounces up to meet us on the way back to Yelena’s massive kitchen.
She’s the baby of our group—only twenty-seven and it shows.
With soft brown curls and big blue eyes, she’s absolutely adorable.
Too bad she’s got an absolutely horrible boyfriend—not that I would tell her that. She’s not ready to hear it yet.
“Oh my God, did you read what they did in Chapter two? I mean, they barely got to know each other first!” she exclaims.
“Yeah, but someone slipped an aphrodisiac into her drink.” Hanna comes up as we enter the kitchen. “He had to help her or she was going to die.” She widens her green eyes dramatically and pushes a loose auburn curl out of her eyes.
“Oh, please, Hanna—you’re a hospice nurse,” Lucia says, stalking over.
“You know perfectly well people don’t die of being horny.
” She’s happily divorced and a few years older than me.
I see she’s still wearing her work clothes—a black pencil skirt and a white silk blouse that looks good against her light brown skin.
But she’s let down her hair so it flows over her shoulders in a jumble of sable waves.
“We know that, Lucia, but it’s romantic.” Marisol sighs deeply as she goes back to chopping cheese for a charcuterie platter sitting beside her on the marble-topped kitchen island.
Mari is half Korean with warm, golden skin and a waterfall of straight, shiny black hair that’s currently pulled back in a ponytail.
She makes the most gorgeous jewelry to sell on Etsy, but unfortunately, it doesn’t pay enough to live on so she also has a side-gig at Smoothie King.
I know from talking to her one-on-one that her parents are very disappointed in her choices.
They wanted her to be a doctor like her brother.
“Hi, Jules. How’s it going?” Naomi walks in with a key lime pie covered in whipped cream in one hand. “Oh, I see you went to Publix too,” she says, nodding at the two long loaves of Cuban bread.
Naomi is originally from New York. She’s also a single mom since her husband left her about a year ago.
Luckily for her, her kids are in their teens now and they can be left alone long enough for her to attend Book Club.
She’s got curly black hair, dark blue eyes, and a motherly way about her I appreciate.
She works as a secretary for the Head Curator of the Tampa Museum, but she doesn’t love her job—apparently her boss is an asshole and a creep.
I know how she feels.
“Yeah, we really need to coordinate better. I could have gotten a key lime pie while I was there,” I say, smiling and giving her air kisses.
“It’s okay—I had to do some shopping anyway. Publix has the best pie.” She smiles at me.
“Where’s Tasha?” I ask, looking around. I’ve been wanting to talk to her again since we hung up earlier.
“Here I am.” She sweeps in and gives me a big hug and a kiss. She’s wearing her hair natural I see—tight black curls that fall down her back. Her deep maroon lipstick looks great with her gorgeous brown skin tones and I’m sure it’s going to leave a mark on my cheek—not that I mind.
Tasha is a middle school teacher and I don’t know how she does it. I get stressed out just listening to some of the crazy stories she tells about her students and their awful behavior. She has the patience of a saint, I guess—she’s a better woman than I am for sure.
Now that we’re all together in Yelli’s big kitchen, I feel the warm glow of community. In the past five years, these women have become my family. We love and support each other through every crisis.
We were all there to cry with Sophia when her mother died unexpectedly and we supported Naomi through her divorce when her asshole of a husband left with his mistress.
He tried to take the house and leave her with nothing but luckily Lucia stepped in and got her divorce lawyer boss involved.
He wiped the floor with Naomi’s ex and she got to keep everything as well as getting generous alimony and child support settlements.
The girls supported me when my Grandma—who raised me—first had a stroke and then passed away the day before my birthday. That was a hard year—I know I wouldn’t have made it through without them.
I could go on and on but you get the point. We’re not just a book club—we’re family. And the funny thing is, our book club—the Curvy Girls Smut Club—didn’t even have anything to do with books when it started.
The eight of us met for the first time at a TOPS meeting—that stands for Take Off Pounds Sensibly, in case you’re wondering.
It’s kind of like an old-fashioned version of Weight Watchers but a hell of a lot cheaper and without all those three point snack bars that taste like cardboard that the WW counselors are always trying to sell you.
Anyway, the meeting was being held in the activity center of the First Methodist Church over in Seminole Heights—which is kind of a central Tampa location.
That’s probably why we all ended up there in the first place, even though we live in different parts of the city.
I still remember the first time we met—how we all had to go through the weigh in and then we sat around in a circle in those hard, folding metal chairs that hurt your ass and talked about our “weight loss challenges.”
Only instead of talking about how we ought to exercise more and eat more fruits and vegetables, it kind of turned into a recipe swap.
At first people were talking about recipes for veggie soup and “egg roll in a bowl” which is really low calorie if you make it with lean ground chicken breast and lots of cabbage.
Then the woman who was running the meeting had to take a phone call. When she stepped out, things got real.
“You know what I love to make—lasagna,” Naomi confessed. “I mean, it’s not diet—my Nona’s recipe calls for homemade noodles and all the cheese—but it’s amazing.”
“Oh, you have a family recipe? I want that!” Sophia exclaimed. “I mean, if you don’t mind sharing. I have a really good recipe for smothered pork chops,” she added.
Before we knew it, we were all trading family recipes. Tasha told us about her grandpa’s technique for the perfect chicken and sausage gumbo and Marisol gave us the marinade for Korean pork ribs—I think they’re called galbi? Anyway they’re delicious—but definitely not diet.
Lucia chimed in with her mother’s best fried yucca and I offered to share my Grandma’s cherry-chocolate dump cake recipe. (It comes out incredibly moist and the secret ingredient is a can of Coke.)
We were all just getting along like a house on fire, as my Southern Grandma would have said. I had never felt such a swift and sudden connection to any group of women in my life—it was like we just clicked.
At that point, the woman who was running the meeting, who was skinny as a string-bean—another Grandma expression—came back in and heard what was going on.
“What’s this I’m hearing?” she demanded, her thin eyebrows drawing down over her bony nose. (Yes, even her eyebrows were skinny.) “Here at TOPS, we encourage recipe sharing with other members, but they must be healthy recipes.”
We all stopped talking abruptly and Hanna—who had been just about to tell us the secret to making really amazing fudge lava cake—turned beet red with embarrassment.
The meeting was almost over by then, so we left—glad to get away from the judgmental meeting coordinator—and gathered on the sidewalk outside the church.
“Well, I guess she told us,” I muttered under my breath as I shot a look at the door we’d just come out of.
“That’s what she gets for leaving a lot of curvy girls together unsupervised,” Lucia said. “Skinny bitch,” she added, which made Sophia and Mari start snickering.
Their laugher was contagious and pretty soon all of us were laughing so hard our sides ached. I was too—I didn’t even know what was so funny—it just felt so right to be in that group. Like we all belonged together somehow.
Yelena laughed so hard her cheeks turned bright red.
“You know—this is like a scene from a book I read,” she said, when she finally caught her breath. “Cupcakes and Catastrophes.”
“Oh, I read that!” Mari exclaimed. “Did you read the next one in the series, Crimes and Cocktails?”
“I love that book!” I exclaimed. “But I like The Saucy Sisters Society even more.”
And we were off again. It turned out we all loved to read.
I think a lot of curvy girls do. I know I read a lot in high school because I didn’t get asked on many dates.
Of course, that’s not always the case—plenty of full-figured goddesses out there have lots of male attention.
I’m just not one of them. Not that I really want to be, as I said before.
So we dropped the TOPS meetings and started a book club instead.
The only rules of The Curvy Girls Smut Club are that we only read trashy books with plenty of smut and we only bring tasty snacks. No cardboard diet crackers and celery sticks and yogurt dip for us. We adore carbs, sweets, and smut and we love and support each other fiercely.
And now, five years later, we’re still going strong.
You’d think in all that time, someone would have moved away but no—I think none of us wanted to go.
Sophia even confided to me that she turned down a good job in Georgia to stay here, (she’s a vet tech) because she would have missed the Smut Club too much.
I feel the same way. I’d love to get away from the Florida heat. My dream has been to move to someplace with four seasons for as long as I can remember. But I just can’t leave my girls.
As we laugh and chat about our latest book—a Mafia romance called, The Devil’s Consort—I feel a warm glow of love and happiness and connection.
I have no idea that this is going to be my last Book Club meeting for a long time…possibly forever.