Bait: The Wake Series, Book One(108)

I desperately needed to do that the memories of Casey and the part of my heart he lived in. I kept replaying over and over the things that he'd said to me before the wedding.

He told me that he loved me. He told me that I was his. Deep down, I knew that was the truth. But, why hadn’t he told me sooner? Why hadn’t he offered permanent before? He told me he got me, so surely he should have known that was what I wanted all along.

I sat there on the sand, popping all of the stupid fake nails off my fingers. My nails weren’t pretty, but at least they weren’t fake.

I thought about the word fake and how it applied not only to the nails I wore, but the wife I already was. I didn’t want to be a fake wife. A fake anything.

Clarity came to me on the beach as I wrestled cheap acrylics and bit at dried glue.

Then I wrote. I wrote everything that I hadn't ever let myself admit. Pen to paper my secrets leaked out.

I must have been gone for hours. When I returned to the room, Grant was getting out of the shower. He was attractive and fit. He looked every bit the put-together, perfectly groomed, and shaved blond man who I'd known for so long.

“So you're feeling better then, Betty?” he asked and I could have died. Had he literally just called me Betty? I didn't know what to do.

I laughed, and said, “What?”

I stuffed the letter that I didn't have the heart to throw into the ocean, into an envelope and then into the front compartment of my luggage, while I waited for him to clarify or prove that I really had lost my mind.

“Betty. You signed the note this morning with Betty. Is that something new?” He grinned.

“Oh, that,” I said. I'd signed a letter to my husband with a pet name I used with him. That was a new low for me. “I was playing around. You know. Seeing if you were paying attention.” I acquiesced.

He sauntered toward me with nothing on but a towel.

“Well, I like it. Betty. I think it suits you.”

Every time he said it my body reacted. Some twisted sensory thing misfiring inside my libido.

“You don't have to call me that. It was just a joke.” I felt embarrassed, and honestly it felt so wrong.

“I could call you Mrs. Kelly,” he said, as he wrapped his arms around me and kissed my neck.

“Well, I am Mrs. Kelly,” I told him. “So, maybe we try out Betty while we're here.” It was so immoral, but hearing it made nerves react and my blood flow like it hadn't in so very long.

“Betty it is then,” he said.

We made love and he called me Betty throughout. I would deal with the shame of it later. At the moment, I was enjoying the memory.

When he said it as he came, surprisingly I did too. I didn't have to fake it. I just had to fake who gave it to me.

I didn't pretend to be Betty. I was her. My brand of wrong started with imagining he was Casey and ended with me biting my cheek to keep from letting Grant know.

In the mornings, before Grant woke up, I'd go into the town. I'd shop around and it was nice. Grant did a lot of work after he woke up on most days, so he barely noticed I wasn't there. I bought two bronze ships that reminded me of Casey and me. Always passing, never headed in the same direction. That was the problem. We never had the same goal.

In an island off the coast of somewhere sunny, I changed my direction.

Everything was all wrong. Up was down. Left was right. Only a few days before, I'd made vows to this man. And on the beach one morning, I made vows to myself to undo them.

I had but one goal. If it wasn’t too late.





Monday, May 25, 2009


MY MAIN GOAL WAS letting her go. And a few days after May twenty-f*cking-third, something entirely different stole my focus.

I walked into my mom’s house and found her lying on the couch, something that I couldn't ever remember seeing her do. She was napping. In the middle of the day.

I went to her and sat down on the hardwood floor.

I shook her gently.

“Hey, Mom. It's me. Are you okay?” I asked as I sat on the floor beside her. She looked sick, and not at all like the last time I'd seen her. When was that? A month ago? The hospital when Foster was born?

She looked a little thinner then, but not really ill. She hadn't mentioned anything when we talked on the phone.

She stirred and her eyes fluttered open.

“Hi there, baby boy,” she said. Her eyes looked puffy, probably from sleep, but they also looked a little sad.