Chapter One: Zoe

I didn’t chase after him. He wasn’t even mine to chase after. He was never mine. But his leaving felt like I was sucker punched in the stomach. I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me as I stood there feeling devastated and confused. I was angry that the paper published the article. They were supposed to wait for another week. Goddammit!

I felt the tears stinging the corners of my eyes. Why is it every time something good happens in my life, people end up getting hurt? That’s not how it’s supposed to go, but it seems like it never fails. I always end up hurting those that are the closest to me. Even though Mark was not mine to love, I cared deeply for him and never set out to hurt him. I didn’t even know how or why I cared for him, but I did. The sex had never been that good. Heck, tonight was the best sex we’ve ever had.

I dried my eyes and took one more glance in the mirror before opening the door and slipping out of the bathroom as inconspicuously as I could. I kept my head down as I walked through the crowd and headed right toward the exit. I just wanted to get the hell out of there. This was not how the night was supposed to go.

“Zoe Maxwell! In the flesh! How have you been?”

I stopped dead in my tracks, took a deep breath and turned around. It was Andrew Brock, a book reviewer for The Times who loved to take selfies with famous authors, yours truly included. I had to be nice to Andrew, even though he got on my last nerve.

“Andrew,” I said, grinning as I held out my hand. “How have you been?”

“I’ve been fabulous,” he said with a smug smile. “I hear you’re about to take a little island vacation to work on your next book.”

“Well, I guess you could say that,” I said, grinning.

“I see your name everywhere now. Zoe Maxwell… Zoe Maxwell … Zoe Maxwell. Book signing here, personal appearance there, author meet and greets… Add to that yet another bestseller. Congrats.”

“Thank you, Andrew,” I said, feigning modesty. “And thank you for your glowing reviews.”

“I’ve enjoyed all your books but I must say, the one with Jenny and Jake, now that story is my favorite. I gave it 5-stars, I believe, which I am sure helped sales quite a bit. Tell me, how do you come up with such steamy sex scenes?”

“Well, I just…”

“There you are!” A woman literally yelled at me from across the room. Shit. I recognized the shrill voice of Carla Grogan, a PR agent who had been pressing me for my business for years. I took a deep breath and held the plastic smile as she approached.

“Carla,” I said as she gave me an air kiss on each cheek. “So nice to see you. How have you been?”

“Oh, I’m fine, but let’s talk about you. I hear you’re leaving for Costa Rica to write a new hot romance series for Roland House?” she said, hand squeezing my arm. “Do they pay you to go there?”

“Well, no, I pay for it,” I said, frowning at the question. “The next book series takes place in Costa Rica and since I’ve never been there, I’d like to get a feel for the country, the lifestyle. So that’s where I’m headed.”

“Lucky you! And your latest book, Pleasing Him. Oh my god, I loved it! It’s like this sexy love affair slash erotic S&M thing with all the… “

“Zoe?”

I turned around as a great sigh of relief escaped my lips when I saw Graham Elliott, an executive at Roland House, my publisher, approach with his arms out. Graham was tall, thin, and as usual, impeccably dressed. His hair had gone silver when he was in his thirties, twenty-something years ago, but his face was tanned, youthful, and free of lines. Graham would have been the perfect man for me—older, reliable, handsome, successful—if he hadn’t been gay.

“Graham, darling, how have you been?” I gave him a hug and whispered in his ear. “Save me, please.”

“Nice to see you, Zoe,” he said with a knowing wink. He nodded at Carla and Andrew. “Carla, Andrew.”

They wrinkled their noses at him and said his name as if it left a bad taste in their mouths. In unison, they said, “Graham.”

“Andrew and Carla, it was nice seeing both of you,” I said, backing away. “But I have to call it a night.” I glanced at my watch as if it were a countdown to midnight clock. “Graham, we should meet for drinks or dinner before I leave.”

“Yes,” he nodded. “I’d love that.”

“Well, you all have a good night and I’ll see you all later.”

I waved from over my shoulder as I bolted toward the exit, keeping my head down to avoid eye contact with anyone else.

I burst out the door, sucking in the crisp night air as I asked the doorman to please hail a cab for me. I stood off to the side, waiting, trying to go unnoticed. I didn’t want to talk to anyone else.

I just wanted to get away from all these horrible people and the memory of Mark in the bathroom. And with any luck, the memory of Mark himself.

* * *

I don’t even recall the ride home. It was a blur. A complete blur. I felt awkward and confused. I wanted to talk to Mark but at the same time, I never wanted to see him again. He had no right to be in that bathroom, whether I was his mistress or not. There were boundaries in any relationship, though Mark would never let such things stop him from getting his way. Still, the sex had been amazing. I had actually orgasmed, something I rarely did with Mark.

Typically, with Mark, it was, “wham bam thank you, ma’am” and then he was gone before I could catch my breath. I was always left to finish myself off. I could still feel the orgasm from tonight shaking through my knees. I’d only been manhandled like that by one other man in my life: Chad Walters, my college boyfriend who I hadn’t seen in years.

Chad was a control freak, but in a good way. It was always his way or the highway. The sexual positions were always of his choosing and rarely, if ever, did he give me any form of control. He liked it rough and so did I. He liked to play and explore and he let me know over and over how he was in control. Sometimes his nature got on my nerves, but ultimately the sex was so fucking great I didn’t care who was in control. I would have left him sooner if I hadn’t been so addicted to his cock.

After a while, though, I began to feel used by Chad and that was how I was feeling now with Mark. I felt I had no choice but to leave. A few months in Costa Rica would do me a world of good.

After college, I took a job a few states away on purpose and cried the entire drive there. I felt horrible for breaking things off with Chad. I felt horrible for leaving him the way I did. I loved him. I really did. And he loved me and there I was running away.

Chad called and begged me to return several times, which was so unlike him. It almost made me think the whole control thing was just an act and that he really cared for me. Gradually, however, time and distance took their toll and we slipped away from each other. The last time he called, I didn’t even answer the phone and he didn’t bother to leave a message.

Even though he was gone, Chad had never strayed far from my mind. It still hurt to hear his name and every relationship I’d had since, didn’t compare to what we shared. We shared some intimate moments that were better kept secret. But sometimes secrets knife you until they bleed free. And that’s what happened to me.

All the secrets Chad and I shared, things that were meant to remain just between us, ended up in my diary. Then, the heart-spilling, jaw-dropping, erotic moments ended up in a book, then on the shelf of every bookstore in the world. I changed the names of the characters, of course, but now my entire relationship with Chad had been read by tens of thousands of lusty readers. Yes, another bestseller. Fiction to everyone, sweet memories to me.

Somehow getting it all out was like therapy. It took me years to write that story and tell it just as it happened. Every detail, every date, every sexual moment, that I could recall. Along with some secrets I never even told him.

Writing that first book helped me close a chapter in my life that needed to be closed. Somehow, even though it was closed, it never seemed to go away. It didn’t seem to ease the feelings. It seemed to create more urges than I had to learn how to live with— urges I knew could never be fulfilled because he was no longer in my life. I had to learn how to live with the void of knowing there was nothing that could ever completely erase or ease the feeling of loss I felt when it came to losing Chad.

Mark surely didn’t fill that void. If he wasn’t married, who knows what would have become of us. But he was married and I was just the mistress who sat by the phone waiting for him to call.

We couldn’t make plans because his family always came first, which I completely understood and was okay with, at least at first. I knew he’d never leave his wife. I’d never asked him to leave her. Not once. I figured if he was going to leave her, he was going to do it on his own, not because of me.

I wasn’t there to make such decisions for him. Just like he wasn’t going to be making decisions for me. Meaning, I really had no obligation to tell Mark anything that was going on in my life. It wasn’t like we were that close. It was mostly about the sex. Or the thrill of the sex. The feeling of doing something dirty we really shouldn’t be doing in places where we shouldn’t be doing in.

And it was also about having someone to talk to who understood my crazy life. Mark spent his days as an attorney at a big firm uptown, but he was a successful author in the moonlight—spies and assassins and all that— and he could commiserate with the daily ups and downs of the author life. We talked every day. The conversation was usually more satisfying than the sex. It was just nice to have someone to connect with.

My writing kept me busy and I never had much of a social life. I didn’t count the tours and book signings as social events. They were more like forced labor. I’d fly into town in time to show up at some bookstore that Amazon had yet to kill, welcome the crowd, read a steamy passage from my book, shake hands, pass out hugs to people I didn’t want to touch, sign books, smile for the camera…

It was torture for someone like me, who could barely stand to be in crowds, much less crowds where everyone was facing me, wanting something from me, reaching out like a zombie horde with my book in their decaying hands.

Sadly, that was the only time I ventured out to really interact with people. Aside from those trips, I was pretty much a hermit, living in my little Manhattan cave with my fingers tapping on the keys to my laptop, creating sex scenes for thousands of horny, lonely women—like me— to enjoy.

I typically wrote all night until sun-up, then slept the mornings away and forced myself to get up around one or two in the afternoon.

The life of a writer did not mesh well with the daily 9-5 grind. In fact, we were a completely different kind of animal, mostly nocturnal, mostly introverted, mostly happy to just be alone with our thoughts and the blank page.

That was why my social groups were not of the norm. People assumed famous writers lived these fabulous lives of glitzy social events, celebrity dinners, and traveling to Cannes every summer to see your latest book on film. To the contrary, being an author, at least in my case, made for a very lonely existence, which sometimes made me wonder why I loved it so.

* * *

I slid into bed and lay there for a while listening to the faint city noise far below my penthouse window, thinking about the events of the evening and where I’d left things with Mark.

Mark and I had always been covert with our affair, or at least tried to be, which made the fact that he came into the ladies’ room in the middle of a big publishing event even more out of character for him. I wasn’t sure what the heck he was thinking, unless he just couldn’t wait to fuck me and break the news that he knew about the Costa Rica trip.

We had used Graham as our go-between because we wrote for the same publisher. Graham was never judgmental, though I knew he didn’t care much for Mark and worried incessantly about me. He thought Mark was arrogant and smug, with far less talent than other writers who never made it big. Graham did it for me, not for Mark. I knew he was thrilled that I was leaving town to research the new book series in Costa Rica. In fact, Graham was the one who made that happen, in part, I believe, to get me away from Mark.

Mark treated our affair like the plot of one of his spy novels. We communicated through Graham or by “burner phones” that he purchased at Wal-Mart. I didn’t even have the number to his regular cellphone. And I never called him without texting first to make sure the coast was clear to call. It was all very cloak and dagger, which was fun at first. Then it got old because he would not respond to my texts until the middle of the day and then want to come over for a quickie.

Meeting up usually meant at my apartment or someplace out of the public eye like a “no tell motel” or Graham’s apartment on those rare occasions that he would agree to let us in. Once we met by chance, as I was running through Central Park, and snuck off for a quickie in the bushes. Like I said, Mark was all about the quick fuck. He was like a breeder rabbit. He’d hop on my back, hump till he came, then quickly move along. I’d miss good old Mark, but probably not as much as he’d miss me.