Jacqueline

Things are fine. And that’s not just a mantra I’m repeating to myself so I can sleep at night. Things really are fine.

Since the day at the park over a week ago, Vince and I have been working together and seeing each other and eating lunch together. Granted, no one has spent the night at anyone’s house lately. I made an excuse that I had to get home and do laundry and he let me go without argument.

Which is fine.

I think.

It should be. We’re not a couple who has to spend every single second together. We’re not a couple at all, technically. When he suggested we should try things out, it didn’t include us having a label.

So. We’re fine.

“And then”—Vince is practically shouting, nostrils flared as he stands over my desk—“the asshole told me the problem with his shitty marketing plan was our execution. You know as well as I do that he wouldn’t budge when our design team suggested he try a different tagline. ‘Joe’s Stables.’ ” he drawls. “ ‘Ride ’er hard.’ ”

I can’t help tittering out a tiny laugh.

His eyebrows rise. “Bestiality funny to you?”

“No. It’s not. You, on the other hand…” I smile. “You’re funny to me.”

The anger whooshes out of him with his next exhale. Palms flat on my desk, a hint of a smile plays at the corner of his lips. “Is that so?”

I tip my head, encroaching on dangerous territory. Flirting at work could draw attention. Him being in here with the door shut, especially. But he doesn’t kiss me.

“I’ve been weird lately.” His voice is low, his eyes on mine.

“A little,” I admit.

“I don’t want to be weird with you, Butler. Normal weird, yes, but not weird weird. That doesn’t work for us.”

“Okay.” I’m not sure what we’re agreeing to, but anything to end the weird weird works for me.

“Think I could steal one kiss without getting caught?” he asks, leaning closer.

A sharp knock at my door, followed by the twisting of the knob, propels Vince into a ramrod-straight position. Kayla sweeps in, a stack of papers in hand. “For Joe’s Stables, as per your request,” she tells Vince. “His contract.”

“Thanks.” Vince takes the papers. “You could at least pretend not to know I’m in here.”

“I had to see Jackie about something. The spying is a bonus.” She grins.

“Fine. I’m going.” He sends me a heated look, then a cautionary one to Kayla.

I shake my head at her as we both watch him swagger away.

“I’ll hand it to you, Jackie,” she tells me, her voice quiet. “He has a great ass.”

Vince

Kayla’s comment about my ass has me smiling all afternoon. I’m not above a compliment from a happily married woman. It’s fun that she knows about Jackie and me.

It’s not like I get off on keeping things a big secret, but neither do I want to rock the proverbial boat. Relationships at work seem inevitable, but the cavemen who own our company subscribe to the old view of things. Men are better. Don’t diddle the women. That kind of thing. It’s unfair, but I’m honoring the rules and keeping Jackie out of the hot seat.

Day done, I’m home with the refrigerator door open as I inventory the paltry offerings. A packet of processed cheese food slices wrapped in cellophane, mustard, beer, and what may have been a head of lettuce at some point. There’s a questionable plastic container in the back that contains…I’m not sure. Pasta? Soup? The souls of my enemies?

A knock on the door keeps me from finding out. I shut the fridge and open the front door. And freeze into a solid block of “oh, fuck.”

“Leslie.”

“Hey, Vince.” My ex-wife wears a smile and a dress and carries a box. “I found some of your old CDs and thought you might want them. I was going to ship them but that seemed immature. So I drove over.” Her eyes sweep past me. “You have a new couch.”

“Well, you took mine. It was either buy one or sit on the floor.”

She twists her lips. “You always were funny.”

So we’re doing this, I guess. I step aside. “Not as clean as you prefer, but you’re welcome to come in.”

She does, setting aside the box of CDs as she strolls into the living room and drops her purse on the arm of the sofa. Seeing her purse there, and her in the house we used to share, unbricks a part of me I worked damn hard to wall up.

“I was about to eat a slice of cheese for dinner and drink a six-pack. Can I offer you a slice of cheese?”

“No, thanks.” She’s still smiling. “I’ll take a beer, though.”

“Sorry.” I pull in air through my teeth and deliver the bad news. “I plan on drinking all six.”

“You haven’t changed much.” She quirks her lips.

Oh, but I have.

“You either. You look great, by the way.” She does. It niggles at me that she looks this damn good when she’s not with me, but in no way do I want her back.

“Thanks.” She wrings her hands and we stand awkwardly, both unsure if we should hug or not touch at all.

Well. Shit. I can’t not be nice to her.

“I was kidding about the beer, Les. Do you really want one?”

“I would love one. Ray and I are meeting up with a couple from his work I’ve never met before, but not until eight.”

Ray. The guy she started dating shortly after our divorce. I wait for the surge of jealousy but nothing comes. Beers uncapped, I hand one over and invite her to sit on my new sofa. She sits, in Jackie’s place, and the thought makes me smile. Jackie has a place.

“What’s new with you?” Leslie asks. “Something’s different. You look happier.”

“Happier than when you walked out on me? Go figure.” Her smile slips and I know I’ve overstepped a line. “Ignore me.”

“No. I deserve that.”

We drink in silence for a few seconds. I have an opportunity to do a bit of healing, so what the hell? May as well get closure or whatever. “I don’t have an ax to grind, Les, but I would like to talk to you about something. I can order a pizza if you want to stick around.”

She nods hesitantly. “I’m going to let Ray know where I am. Not because he makes me,” she explains as she pecks a text into her phone, “but because I want to be honest and open about everything. You know?” Finished with the text, she glances up at me.

“Yeah, I know.” We both made mistakes. I grab my phone from the coffee table. “Papa Joe’s? Deep dish. Mushroom only.”

“That’s it.” She smiles. Some things don’t change at all. Order called in, I grab two more beers from the fridge and put them on the coffee table between us. She’ll drink two. I know she will.

“So what did you want to talk about?” she asks.

“Us,” I answer frankly. “Past tense.”

“I’m going to need that second beer.” She takes a hearty guzzle of the one in her hand.

“Yeah,” I agree, following suit. “So am I.”

Jacqueline

I slow down as I approach Vince’s driveway. There’s a car parked in front of his garage that I don’t recognize. Then his front door opens and out steps…a woman I don’t recognize.

Vince isn’t expecting me and hasn’t noticed my car, so I drive up his street, turn around, and park along the curb behind a big blue Cadillac that perfectly hides my silver compact. Whoever just came out of his house has her back to me and Vince is smiling at her. She pushes a lock of her hair behind her ear and tosses her head back and laughs.

“He wouldn’t cheat on you,” I say aloud to my car. Although this isn’t similar to the way I found out Lex was having sex with Ashleigh, I can’t help but feel a stab of betrayal. “But why wouldn’t he tell you?”

Tonight when I asked what he was up to, Vince said he was going to go home and finish a project he’d started last weekend. “Building shelves for the garage,” he explained.

Now that I’m watching him with the leggy brunette, I’m starting to wonder if he knew she was coming. And what their relationship is.

And why he didn’t tell me about her.

“That’s his wife,” comes a voice from my passenger-side window.

Startled, I jerk my head toward the open window to find Vince’s neighbor Riley, cleavage spilling from her shirt, leaning on the frame.

“We used to be friends. Or, well, we used to be friendly,” she says. “Her name’s Leslie.”

“I know his ex-wife’s name.”

Riley doesn’t visibly react to my clipped tone. “I’ve seen lots of women at Vince’s place since the divorce, but never once have I seen the woman he divorced,” she says. “Wonder what she’s doing there?”

You and me both.

My heart shrinks into a deep, dark part of my chest cavity. Vince kept a picture of Leslie on his desk when they were married, but she was wearing her wedding gown. It’s no surprise I didn’t recognize her.

“You’re his current squeeze, right?” Riley asks. “The girl he was running with that afternoon.”

I nod.

“Thought so. I’ve spotted you over at his house a lot more than I’ve seen any of the others.”

“For some reason that’s not very comforting right now.”

“I know.” She pats my car door. “Come in, sugar. I’ll get you a glass of iced tea.”

The inside of Riley’s house is like a greenhouse. It’s filled with plants of all kinds. Maybe she really was outside to water her outdoor blooms that day Vince and I went jogging by. The sunroom would be too warm but it’s tempered by an oscillating fan. I sit on a wicker couch with a clear view of the front of Vince’s house.

He leans forward and puts a kiss on Leslie’s cheek, then pulls her in for a hug. My fingers clutch the couch’s frame as I watch, horrified.

“You’re in my seat,” Riley announces, a Mason jar in one hand and two short glasses in the other. “I’m outta iced tea, so I brought moonshine.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t—”

“Your guy is kissing another woman in his driveway,” she tells me gently. “You should.” I offer to vacate her seat but she waves me off, pouring the red liquid into the glasses. “This one’s apple cinnamon. Tastes like a red hot, if a red hot could kick your ass and steal your wallet.” Riley lets out a husky chuckle. “She gone yet?”

Vince walks his ex-wife to her car, shoving his hands in his front pockets and squinting in my direction. I duck, but Riley tells me he can’t see anything through the tinted windows. He turns back to Leslie, lingering too long for my taste. A glass of red apple-cinnamon moonshine lands in my hand and I take a sweet, spicy sip. Yum.

“Good, isn’t it?” Riley sits next to me. “It’s easy for men to go back to what they know.”

I beg her with pleading eyes to stop talking, but she’s not looking at me. She’s watching Vince and Leslie chat, or maybe not….It’s like she’s seeing through them and remembering something that happened to her.

“Don’t worry. It won’t last. Those two are awful together.” She downs her drink in one swallow and gestures for me to do the same. I do, wincing from the burn as she pours me a refill. “She bitched about him nonstop. He wasn’t doing enough for her. Wasn’t doing enough to her.”

“Spare me.” I do not want to picture what Vince and Leslie used to do together.

“She wanted bigger, better things than Vincent Carson. I always thought he and I could’ve had some fun.” Riley shrugs, then changes the subject so fast I get whiplash. “I have a casserole in the oven, sugar.” She bottoms out glass number two. “You may as well stick around for dinner. Get good ’n sauced and then head over there and hand him his ass.”

I sip my refill and smile. That doesn’t sound so unpleasant as I’m sinking into my moonshine buzz. I shoot the rest, and it doesn’t burn going down as much as the last one.

“What’s your story, Riley Mason?” I’m curious now that I have time to kill.

“You mean am I the local cougar hell-bent on stealing Vince away from his wife, my former friend, or do I have a deeper, less clichéd story to share?” She smiles, an attractive, strong woman over a decade my senior who drinks moonshine, loves plants, and has a secret.

Leslie’s car pulls out of the driveway and Vince waves, watches her drive away, then walks back inside. He’s smiling when he turns around, and that cuts deep. I settle in with my drink and ask for a refill. I could use a third with whatever casserole Riley is baking in there.