Chapter 7
brEATHING EASY
Natasha holds up a paperback with a shirtless cowboy on the cover and a title in raised gold foil. “New releases shelf or front display?”
“Front display. Face out.” I take it from her and angle the cover toward the window where the afternoon light hits hardest. “Impulsive buyers love a shirtless cowboy.”
“Forty percent, baby.” She grabs another stack from the cart and we work in easy silence, sliding spines into slots, adjusting the shelf talkers, rotating the older stock to make room.
The store smells the way it always smells—paper and wood and the lavender candle Natasha lights on the back counter every morning.
My shoulders are down. My jaw isn’t clenched.
I slept five hours last night without waking up once, which is a record for the past month.
“So.” Natasha leans against the endcap with a stack of memoirs balanced on her hip. “David Joseph.”
My hands stop on the shelf. “What about him?”
“I heard from Janet, who heard from her husband, who golfs with someone at Haldeman-Worth.” She sets the memoirs on the cart. “He terminated Randall for cause. Last Friday.”
My fingers are still wrapped around a book spine. I can feel the embossed letters pressing into my palm but I couldn’t tell you the title.
“Selma sent the forensic report to their compliance department,” I tell Natasha. “As part of the filing. They investigated. David got the results through proper channels.”
The system did its job. Selma fed it the evidence—the hidden accounts, the LLC, the fraud allegations, every page of Gail’s report—and the machine ate Randall alive.
No theatrical confrontation. No private dining room.
Just paperwork moving through the right desks until it landed on the one that mattered.
“How do you feel?” Natasha asks.
I put the book on the shelf. Straighten it. Press my fingertip along the top edge until it’s flush with the others.
“I feel like I should feel something bigger.” My voice is quiet in the empty aisle. “Two months ago I would have paid money to watch it happen. But now—” I shake my head. “It doesn’t give me the cabin back.”
Natasha is quiet. The lavender candle gutters on the back counter, the wick swimming in its own wax.
“She still has the condo,” I say. “Sienna. For now. Selma says the LLC is part of the asset claim—the condo, the renovation costs, all of it. But even if a judge awards me every dollar.” My throat closes.
I press the shelf talker hard between my fingers and breathe through my nose.
“The cabin is a stranger’s house now. Someone probably ripped out the dock.
Repainted the bedroom where Gram kept her sewing machine. ”
The pressure behind my eyes swells. I stare at the ceiling—water stain in the corner, same one that’s been there since Natasha and I painted this aisle two summers ago—and push it back down.
“I’m not going to pretend losing him doesn’t hurt.
” The words come out rough. “Not the man he actually was—that man can rot. But the man I thought he was.” My thumbnail bends the shelf talker in half.
“The one who drove twenty minutes out of his way to bring me moussaka. The one who squeezed my hand across the counter and said Thursdays.” A crack runs through my voice.
Just a hairline fracture. “I’m grieving someone who never existed.
And I can’t even be angry about missing him because the person I miss was never real. That’s the cruelest part.”
Natasha picks up the cart handle. She doesn’t reach for me. Doesn’t try to fix it with a hug or a face full of pity. She just stands there, solid, the way she’s been solid since the night she sat in a parking lot for two hours waiting for me to walk out the other side of my marriage.
“You know what I think?” she says. “I think you’re going to be really good at whatever comes next. Because you are the most terrifying person I’ve ever watched walk through a door.”
A laugh rips out of me—raw, surprised, the kind that hurts in the best way. “I’ll put that on my résumé.”
“You should. Bridgette Logan: will destroy your career on your own marble countertops.”
I laugh again, harder, and my eyes are wet but it’s not grief this time.
The bookstore is warm and the candle is guttering and my best friend is making me laugh in the fiction aisle and this—right here—is mine.
Not Randall’s. Not the version of myself I performed while I held my face together with my teeth.
Just me, in a place I chose, next to a person who showed up.
I touch the pearls at my throat. Warm from my skin, smooth under my fingertips, the clasp sitting in its familiar groove at the back of my neck. I’ve been wearing them every day since the condo.
I straighten the last book on the shelf. Step back. The display looks good—clean lines, bright covers catching the light.
“Close up?” Natasha asks.
“Close up.”
We lock the front door together, and I step out into the evening air, and the sky is going pink at the edges, and I am alone in a way I haven’t been since I was twenty-three years old.
It doesn’t feel like falling.
“Forty-two thousand.” I set the check on his kitchen counter and slide it toward him. “Every dollar.”
Brendan Frye picks it up. Reads it. Sets it back down and looks at me—not surprised, not grateful. He already knows who I am.
“You didn’t have to bring it in person.”
“I know.”
His kitchen is small. Butcher block counters, open shelving, sawdust and coffee in the air. His sleeves are pushed to his elbows and his forearms are tan and corded and I’ve been staring at them for about thirty seconds longer than the situation calls for.
He leans against the counter. Crosses his arms.
“I heard what happened at the condo.” The corner of his mouth tightens. “Crown molding I hand-cut. Tile I spent three days laying. And the whole time, he was paying for it with money he stole from your grandmother.”
His jaw is set and his eyes are locked on mine and his body hasn’t moved but the air between us just got heavier.
“You walked into that unit and burned his whole life down.” His voice drops. “No shortcuts.”
My skin goes hot. My neck, my chest, the insides of my wrists.
The kitchen is too small. He is too close.
I can smell him—sawdust, something warm beneath it, clean sweat—and my body is responding with a bluntness that has nothing to do with my brain and everything to do with the fact that I haven’t been touched by someone who wasn’t lying to me in longer than I can calculate.
“I should go,” I say. I don’t move.
“Probably.” He doesn’t move either.
The refrigerator hums. My heart is slamming against my ribs—not fear, not rage. Hunger. So strong it makes my fingers curl against my palms.
I close the distance. My hands find his chest—solid, warm through the cotton—and I push him back against the counter and kiss him.
Hard. His mouth is hot and he tastes like coffee and he doesn’t hesitate.
His hands grip my waist and pull me flush against him and the sound I make into his mouth is raw and desperate and completely unperformed.
He lifts me onto the counter in one motion.
The butcher block is cool against the backs of my thighs and I wrap my legs around him and pull him between them.
His mouth drags down my neck, teeth grazing my pulse, tongue flat against the hollow of my throat.
My head falls back. His hands slide under my shirt, rough palms against my ribs, and he pulls the fabric over my head and drops it on the floor.
“Tell me to stop,” he says against my collarbone. His breath is ragged.
“Don’t.”
He unclasps my bra with one hand and his mouth drops to my breast, sucking my nipple between his teeth, and my back arches off the cabinet.
I yank his shirt up because I need skin.
He pulls it over his head and I press my palms flat against his chest, his stomach, the hard ridge of muscle along his hip.
Thicker than Randall. Rougher. Built from work.
I trace a scar along his ribs and his breath catches.
“Bedroom,” I say. My voice sounds like the woman who stood on stolen marble in her grandmother’s pearls and detonated a marriage without raising her voice. Certain. Clear.
Ten steps down a short hallway. Dark gray sheets that smell like laundry detergent and him.
He lays me back and peels my jeans off slow, his mouth following the fabric down my thigh, my knee, my calf.
When he looks at me stripped bare on his bed his face is exactly what it is—want, unhidden, no performance—and the honesty of it hits me so hard my breath shakes.
He pulls my underwear down my legs and puts his mouth on my pussy and my hands fist in the sheets so hard my knuckles ache.
His tongue is slow, deliberate, pressing flat against my clit, and I’m so wet I can feel it on the insides of my thighs.
He doesn’t tease. When I gasp he does it again.
When my hips roll up against his face he grips my thighs and holds me open and keeps going, his tongue working my clit in tight circles until my entire body is a wire pulled past its tolerance.
I come hard. My spine bows off the mattress and the sound I make is loud and graceless and I don’t cover my mouth. He stays with me through it, his tongue softening as the aftershocks roll through, his thumbs stroking slow circles on my inner thighs.
Before I’ve caught my breath he’s kneeling up, unbuckling his belt, shoving his jeans down. I watch him roll the condom on and my mouth goes dry. His cock is thick, hard, and the look on his face as he lines himself up is focused in a way that makes my stomach drop.
He pushes in slow. My breath shreds apart. He fills me completely—heavy, solid, stretching me until my legs shake and I grab his forearms and hold on. He holds still for a second, buried to the hilt, and his forehead drops against mine.
“Okay?” His voice is wrecked.
“Fuck me.”
He does. Long, deep strokes that hit the spot inside me that makes my vision blur.
My hips rise to meet every thrust and the sound of us fills the room—wet, rhythmic, the creak of his bed frame, my breath breaking into gasps I can’t contain.
His hand slides between us and his thumb finds my clit and I bite down on my lip hard enough to taste copper.
“Don’t hold back,” he says against my ear. “I want to hear you.”
I stop holding back. My voice fills his bedroom while his pace picks up and his thumb circles my clit in a rhythm that matches his thrusts.
My nails drag down his back. He hisses through his teeth and drives deeper and I shatter—legs clamped around his hips, his name in my mouth like something I didn’t plan to say.
He follows me over. His hips stutter, his grip on my thigh tightens hard enough to bruise, and the sound he makes against my neck is low and broken and real.
His weight presses me into the mattress. Heavy and warm. The room smells like sweat and sex and sawdust.
He rolls to the side. His hair is damp at the temples. The scar on his ribs catches the light from the window—late evening, gold going orange.
“You good?” he asks.
I laugh. Loose, easy, a sound that belongs to a woman lying in a bed she chose with a man who doesn’t owe her anything.
“Yeah. I’m good.”
He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. His calluses catch against my skin and I lean into his hand. The pearls are still around my neck, smooth against the pillow, pressing gently into my pulse.
I close my eyes. Gram’s pearls against my throat. Sawdust and clean sheets and honest hands.
I deserve everything.
Thank you for reading!