The Dirty Book Club(38)
* * *
M.J. WAS SITTING on her new porch swing, when Britt pulled up in the Mini—top down, hair whipping against her sunglasses, Mariah Carey’s “Dreamlover” blasting from the stereo.
She turned off the engine. “So, how pissed is he?”
M.J. planned to say that Dan was livid; that she never would have made Britt drop everything on a Friday afternoon if he wasn’t. That he has a “thing” about loaning cars and the fact that it had been a birthday gift made it worse. But when it came down to it, she didn’t have the heart, especially since Dan hadn’t even noticed the damn thing was gone. “Turns out he’s fine. Not pissed at all.”
“I thought you said he was—”
“I lied.”
“Lied? Why?”
M.J. got in the car and shut the door. “I’m bored.”
“Why didn’t you just say that?”
“Would you have come if I did?”
“No.” Britt’s dimple deepened. “But only because I was getting laid.”
* * *
M.J. LEANED BACK in her plastic chair, giving the busboy the space he needed to wipe the sticky sheen from their table. The raucous beach bar, with its bikini-clad waitresses, two-dollar test tube shots, and sand-footed clientele was nary the atmosphere M.J. had in mind when she suggested lunch. But Britt feared an unexpected run-in with a client or mom friend who would think nothing of asking to join them—the “small-town sabotage” as she called it—and was certain there would be no such interloper at Poncho and Frieda’s.
“So you were getting day-laid? Sounds like your big date went well,” M.J. said, once the busboy had gone.
“Date?”
“At Marrow. With your husband.”
“Oh, you mean Paul?”
“Yeah, sorry, isn’t Paul your husband?”
“He is, but that’s not who I met at Marrow.”
Fleur, their waitress, chucked two baskets of glistening crab cakes onto their table.
“Paul never showed,” Britt said. “He had passed out on the couch with half a salami sandwich stuck to his pregnant stomach. He has no clue he even missed it.”
“So who did you meet at Marrow?”
“Long story medium: I couldn’t let Jules’s makeup go to waste, so when they gave my table away I hit the bar and small-town sabotaged Mandy, this girl I know from high school. She was with her boyfriend and a couple of his work buddies and those work buddies were buying me shots and calling me sexy. So, being the tragic married-mother-of-two cliché that I am, I soaked up the attention like a super sport tampon.”
“And then?” M.J. asked, eager to know how drinking with random guys lead to Britt forgiving Paul and having sex with him on a Friday afternoon. She loved when seemingly incongruous threads of a story came together in the end. It was so satisfying.
“Then, one of them had me laughing so hard—something about a wad of toilet paper he found in his Tinder date’s V when he was going down on her—that a bit of pee dribbled out. I was tight as a nostril until I had twins. It sucks. Anyway, while I was waiting for the bathroom, the manager kicked them out for being too loud.”
“That’s it? That’s the end?”
“No.” Britt grinned. “It’s the beginning.”
CHAPTER
Thirteen
Pearl Beach, California
Saturday, June 25
Waning Gibbous
THEY’RE IN AN elevator. Before she knows it he grabs her ponytail and yanks down, bringing her face up to meet his. His lips are on hers. She moans into his mouth. She can feel his erection against her belly . . .
M.J. shut her Prim-covered copy of Fifty Shades of Grey, pulled the sheets over her naked body. Why did her inner snob insist on making bitchy faces at Anastasia’s inner goddess? Why couldn’t she fall in love with Christian Grey, like millions of other women had? Why couldn’t she let poor Ana fall for a tortured dominant if that’s where the day took her? Whatever tickles your clit, M.J. would have loved to say, and mean it.
But she couldn’t.
Britt’s “encounter” at Marrow was so much hotter, not to mention the high-stakes drama surrounding it, and M.J.’s thoughts were consumed by it. If Britt’s secret went public she’d suffer more than one of Christian’s stinging slaps to the ass. She’d be nursing the kind of pain that lasts a lifetime; the kind that red wine and a warm bath couldn’t soothe.
“What do you mean, it’s the beginning?” M.J. had asked during her lunch with Britt the day before. The vodka in her Bloody Mary was not about to let Britt’s comment fart by and evaporate into the salt air. “The beginning of what?”
Britt leaned forward and whispered, “Promise you won’t tell a soul?”
M.J. did. Still, Britt made her prove it by stuffing a whole crab cake into her mouth. When M.J. dry heaved Britt said, “That’s the feeling I want you to have if you even think about telling someone what I’m about to say, okay?”
Eyes watering, stomach lurching, M.J. said, “Okay.”
“So I’m waiting for the bathroom and checking my messages to see if Paul called—which he didn’t—when reality sets in. I’m not a sexy, free-spirited party girl; I’m a drunk mom with a loose bladder who was blown off by her husband on their anniversary.” She stirred her Bloody Mary. “I was about to start bawling when a man says, ‘You’re incredible,’ in that throaty Bruce Willis kind of whisper, you know?”