Hot Sauce (Suncoast Society #26)(16)

“This rope thing. I’m looking at the event listing right now. I’m assuming you’re SRQtango_girl.”

Jenny laughed, but the sound didn’t hold most of her usual easy humor. “Yeah, that’s me. I was going to cancel and come over and spend time with you.”

“How about I meet you there? Will they let me in?”

A moment of silence almost had Vanessa checking the connection before Jenny spoke. “Yeah, anyone can attend a class as a guest. But…why?”

“Because a lot of his friends are listed as going. At least I can give them the respect of telling them to their faces instead of just posting an impersonal message on a website that they might not see for days or weeks.”

“What’s really going on here? Do you want me to tell them, or post a message about it for you?”

“No. I want to meet them.” It poured out of her. “If these people were an important part of his life, I want to meet them and thank them in person for being friends with him. He was happier since the divorce than he’d been in years. I wish he hadn’t hid all of this from me, but I would have supported him had he told me.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you sooner,” she said.

“No, I get it. But now I understand why he wanted a very tiny service for us.”

“He was really afraid of someone accidentally outing him in front of you guys and shocking you,” Jenny said.

“Yeah. That’s what I figured once I found this.” She took a deep breath. “So, you’ll be there Friday?”

“If you’re going, yes, I’ll be there. Me and Ken. I’m going straight from work. He’s going to meet me there. You sure you’re okay about this?”

“It’s one small way I can still have contact with him. I want to know him the way his friends knew him.”

“Then I’ll see you Friday night.”

After saying good-bye, Vanessa ended the call and stared at the laptop for a moment. Then she logged out. There were private messages waiting in his account, but she didn’t want to contact those people yet.

She couldn’t.

She didn’t have the emotional or mental strength to. What reserves she had were all used up.

What she needed to do right then was to take Carlo out for a long evening walk in the neighborhood and then come home and start going through Tony’s room again. She hadn’t made much progress other than under his bed. Reading his entire journal a second time earlier that afternoon didn’t count as progress.

Then again, maybe she could start on the garage. It might be easier with a little emotional distance, not being right there in his room, the bed still made with sheets and a pillow that smelled vaguely like him.

It was too easy to want to curl up around his pillow, bury her face in it, and cry.

And if she was going to move on with the rest of her life, she needed to find a way to keep moving forward or she’d end up drowning once treading emotional water got to be too much for her.

Others had survived far worse grief, far worse tragedies. She knew she shouldn’t compare herself to others, but if that was what she needed to do to get through the next few days and weeks, she’d do it.

And she suspected there would be plenty of renewed tears when she got to meet more of Tony’s friends—the vanilla and kinky ones—in person.

For right now, she didn’t want to cry. She wanted to breathe, to find a safe, neutral mental median she could pull over onto, hit pause, and not focus on all of this.





I got to try fire cupping for the first time at the club tonight. Kel did it on me. Wow! It was amazing! I’ll have to make sure I wear a shirt around Nessie until the marks disappear so she doesn’t see them and start asking uncomfortable questions. I know she reads spicy stuff on her Kindle, but reading something and having her big brother involved in it are two different things.

The past three months living with Nessie have proved to me how wrong I was to stay married to Kelly for so long. It wasn’t fair to her. When I finally realized how I was, I should have talked to her about it, opened a dialog with her. Maybe she would have been okay with it, maybe not.

I suspect not, based on her not-quite-subtle jabs about certain subjects in the news.

I was struggling too hard to be normal, to fit in, when I realize now I didn’t need to. It wasn’t fair to Kelly to use her as my attempt to conform to society’s expectations of me. I wasted her life and mine. And I feel badly about it.

At least now I can spend time with Nessie when I want to instead of Kelly whining about it. That should have been my huge red flag, right there. That Kelly obviously didn’t think very much of my sister, or my parents. Although she did hide that from me pretty well until after we were married.

Then Carlo. Oh. My. God. He loved Nessie and hated Kelly. Clue number two, right there, and I ignored it. That should have been the last straw…

Vanessa slipped her thumb between the pages and closed the journal, her mind racing. Her brother had lived a double life pretty much all his adult life. First while with Kelly, then while living with her.

Although at least with her, he’d been able to have that part of his life that he’d needed.

And no, Vanessa—and her parents—had pretty much hated Kelly on sight, but they’d done their best to pretend to like and welcome her into their family. Vanessa and her parents had always found the woman to be very shallow and materialistic, more interested in fashion and reality TV than in the real world and the people populating it. Hell, even the birthday cards from them had always been bought and signed by Tony. Vanessa knew his handwriting.