Prologue #2
“Last week, Mitch mentioned getting a couple of strippers for the party. I shut that shit down and told him that absolutely was not happening. He decided to hire them anyway and planned to have them meet us in the private room at the bar.”
My stomach heaved and I jerked my hand from Ryan’s grasp. He reached for me, taking hold of my upper arms and pulling me to him as I tried to get out of bed.
“Listen to me, sweetness. I know you’re upset, but I stopped him. I made him call to cancel them before we even ordered our food.”
“Why would he do that after you told him not to?” As another thought hit, I asked, “And why didn’t you tell me that he asked last week?”
Ryan cupped my face in his hands and stared at me. I could almost see the apology in his gorgeous blue eyes.
“I wasn’t trying to hide anything, but I knew it would bring up bad memories for you. I didn’t want to upset you, especially since I thought that was the end of it.”
He leaned down to press a gentle kiss to my lips. “I’m sorry, sweetness.”
I nodded distractedly, my mind already taking me back to the night my first marriage had imploded.
For a few moments, I was back there in the kitchen of the house Chad and I had rented right before Tanner’s birth.
Every second of that night was indelibly etched in my brain.
They were faint shadows lingering in the dark recesses of my memory, and at times like this, they would come flooding back into the light.
I had been cooking dinner, with Tanner safely ensconced in his highchair watching me and banging a spoon on the tray every once in a while to make himself laugh. The memory was so real that for a second, I could smell the garlic from the spaghetti sauce I’d been making that night.
Chad had just gone into the bathroom to shower and get ready to go out for his weekly “night at the bar with the guys”, a fact we had argued over for what seemed like the millionth time earlier that afternoon.
His phone rang where he’d left it plugged in on the counter to charge. Tanner had banged the spoon faster, almost whacking himself in the face as he tried to play along with the beat of the ringtone. I’d reached for the phone, assuming it was one of his friends calling about their plans.
The caller ID read “The Body Shop”. I’d looked at it in confusion, then set the phone down again as I figured it was some kind of a spam call. I went back to stirring the sauce, only to stop when the phone chimed with a voice mail, and then several text notifications back-to-back.
Thinking something might be wrong since someone was blowing up his phone like that, I’d picked it up again and swiped the screen.
The image that had popped up caused everything around me to fade into the background – the garlic, the argument, Tanner banging his spoon and babbling a string of nonsense words – everything, except the sight that met my eyes.
The woman on the screen was nude, with her legs splayed open obscenely. The contact name on the text? The Body Shop.
I was frozen in shock for several seconds before my brain came back online. Ignoring Tanner’s near-constant spoon smacking, I opened the text thread. Bile rose in the back of my throat as I skimmed over the messages, dozens of them spanning months, each one filthier than the last.
My heart was beating out of my chest as I pressed “play” on the video Chad had sent to her last week, along with a message telling her to watch it.
“Look at how fucking hot we are together.”
For the next seven minutes and twenty-three seconds, I’d watched as my husband fucked another woman, in a bedroom that I was intimately familiar with, on bedding that had been a house-warming gift from my parents. He’d paid particular attention to her enormous tits.
I’d stormed into that very same bedroom just as Chad had been fastening his belt, throwing the phone on the bed he’d desecrated with the woman he’d listed as “The Body Shop” in his phone.
During the epic showdown that had followed, I’d learned that she was a stripper, one of many he’d apparently slept with during our marriage.
I’d also learned the weekly “bar night” with his friends was actually at a strip club, not the sports bar I’d been told it was.
They’d been going there for years, since before I met him.
Oh, and the strip club name? The Body Shop.
Once he realized he couldn’t talk his way out of it, he’d changed tactics, becoming angry and blaming me, telling me that if I’d only gotten the boob job he’d asked me to get the year before then he wouldn’t have had to cheat.
“You know those itty, bitty titties of yours just don’t do it for me, babe,” he’d smirked, and I’d come closer to smacking another human being than ever before in my life.
I’d demanded a divorce and thrown him out, then spent the next six months getting repeated STI testing because he hadn’t bothered using a condom in the video I’d found, and I was terrified he might have given me some horrible disease.
I’d gotten lucky that the only lingering effect of his cheating was the trauma I carried.
“Sweetness? Melanie?” The urgency in Ryan’s voice broke through the barrage of painful memories, and I reached for him like a lifeline to pull me out of the past.
I clutched at his shoulders and stared up into the face that I’d memorized within five minutes of meeting him eighteen months ago. Those gorgeous, steel blue eyes I loved – now filled with concern – stared back at me.
“I’m so sorry, sweets. I told him not to do it, and I assumed that would be the end of it. Mitch just pushes the envelope sometimes, but I would never go along with that stunt.”
Ryan cupped the back of my head, holding me in place as he brought his forehead down to press against mine.
“I made a promise to you when you told me about the hell you went through with your fucking ex, and I will never, ever break that promise. I love you, and you are everything I could ever want, and more.”