“I’m not a size five, babe. Not everyone is as down for my fluff as I am.” I scowled. My tone was sharper than I'd anticipated.
I shouldn’t be taking the anger out on my best friend. She’d done nothing but love me since day one when we both had braces, didn’t know a decent color scheme to save our life, or wore way too much aqua blue eye shadow. We were awkward and nerdy. We still are.
Stacy grew into a tall, leggy brunette with as much sass as she had ass. Her chest was far too big for her body but gave her the perfect hourglass figure. Her freckles gave her character, and her dimple-free smile even more so. I’d always been a chub, but she didn’t care. Her love for me was for my personality—unlike that son-of-a-bitch who'd claimed to love me.
I stood, towing my laptop, planner, and notepads for book plotting. I retreated to the porch. My stomach dropping from my horrid imagery of Carl. The woman my husband decided to screw was a size two at the largest. Her little pencil thin body messed with my self-confidence. I’d always had issues with it before, but now, it felt ten times worse. Am I that repulsive?
“You are gorgeous, babe!” she yelled out, chasing after me and bringing her own supplies. “We should check out that new site. Babes & Bros.”
All week long, she'd pushed this, turning it into a mantra, and promised that it’d get my libido up and running. Babes & Bros was this new dating site that connected millions of people. Our mutual computer guru friend, L.J. created the entire site and app along with it. Stace swore by it, and so did our author friends that suggested it to us all the time. Many of them were newly divorced and had used it with much success. There were sexy men and woman, and they were ready to play.
“Let’s create a profile then, but I’m doing this for my characters. I’m not doing this for personal reasons,” I relented, wanting to see what the hoopla was all about. “For Babes & Bros. No funny ideas for those other hookup sites like Bumper, or whatever the hell they’re calling them nowadays.”
I still rested on the stairs of my wrap around porch. Stacy opened her laptop, scooting next to me and tapped her little fingers. The site she pulled up was like all the others I’d had the bland opportunity of experiencing. It asked for your bio, age, hobbies, and gender. I knew about these sites because Stace had me signing her up left and right to find the perfect man for her.
Stace lifted the laptop, handing it over to me while waggling her eyebrows suggestively. “Fill it out,” she said. More than likely, her head stayed in the gutter, waiting to pounce on its next prey. I’d be the unwilling victim. I pushed it back into her lap, unwilling to commit to this odd plan of ours.
“No, you do it. You know everything about me.” I closed my eyes, rubbing the annoyance away as best as I could. Get your shit together.
I’m not worthless.
I deserve more.
What he did doesn’t define me.
As I tapped my foot on the cold, cemented ground, I remembered when it all went to shit-town, USA. It was a subtle change. First, he disapproved my smutty writing. No matter how many times I told him it wasn’t the same as porn, he made me feel small. Even if it were porn, there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with that either.
It led to him leaving our room late at night for texts, calls, and emails at the ass crack of dawn. I wrote it off as dedication for his work. Then, he came home later and later after work. Originally, his excuses were business meetings running late and extra “clients” he took on. Eventually, I stopped keeping track. If something smelt fishy, it probably was.
I’d gone to book signings with him, but he’d beg me to take him home. He'd tell me how unimportant everything was to him or how everything was insignificant in his eyes. It isn’t a real job, right, Carl?
What a fucking drag.
It wasn’t like I got a twitchy clit from reading hot and heavy stories, or eye-fucked the models. Even if I did, that wasn’t a crime either. Books turn people on, especially ones with hot as sin sex scenes. Look but don’t touch rule. I enjoyed every part of my husband, always pleasing him even if I was left feeling unsatisfied. Now, the only thing I imagined was how many times he fucked her in our bed, how he’d pleasure her when he hadn’t me, and how she was nothing like me. Polar opposites.
Felicity, the skinny blonde, and me, the curvy redhead. She had nothing going for her except my husband, and I had everything a woman could dream of. I’d released over fifteen novels and hit the bestseller list more times than I didn’t. Becky with the nice hair, as Stace and I liked to call her, made nothing of her life. She was only twenty-two, a college dropout, and a man-stealing whore-on-a-stick. With an average secretary job after being there for four years, she wasn’t going anywhere.
We’d known each other forever in the small town of Mt. Pleasant. We used to talk about our virginity as if it were a contest to see who could lose it first. She won that bet. Stace wasn’t like all the other girls in this godforsaken town. Our population was the insignificant amount of three thousand, and a bunch of stereotypical Mormons. Don’t tell them I said that. They might throw a Book of Mormon at my head.
Stace and I were the, “Most expected to succeed,” in school. We didn’t disappoint, but we both ended up as successful romance authors instead of doctors or world-changing scientists. Tough shit for them. Stacy wrote under the pen name Babe Kinsley, and regardless of her claiming otherwise. I knew it had everything to do with a certain teacher with six-pack abs. Conor. Me, I wrote under Rebel. No last name, no abbreviations, just Rebel. My name was too fun to shorten or change it for privacy. But in a way, it was its own pseudonym.
Living in an unimportant town had its feats like everyone scowling at you weirdly for writing “porn.” I wouldn’t change it for the world, though. No one asked you, Sharon. My mind tended to say everything I wish I yelled out loud to all the naysayers. It also enjoyed the name, Sharon.
Peace and quiet was worth the daily sacrifices. We’d walking around town, hearing the whispers of being a whore because we wrote raunchy, fun stories. Maybe you need to be fucked well, Sharon. I wish I would have screamed. Maybe then they’d take the hint, but no. It’d probably only get worse.
Carl, my soon-to-be-ex-husband, was no one special. He’d ended up being the first man who showed real interest in me, and we were high school sweethearts. When you were raised by someone who believed in fairy tales, you dreamed of Prince Charming and getting away to the city like in the stories she read before bed. I didn’t plan on going anywhere without Stace. No big city dreams for this lady. This is my home.
Stacy hated him from the get-go and said Carl only needed a wife who wouldn’t fight back and bit her tongue while he did all the talking. It’d turned out to be true. I’d never argued the first seven or so years and sure as hell never let him know how much it hurt me to do so. He was a controlling bastard through and through. Under no circumstances would I hold back ever again.
I’m coming out of my shell and fighting for me.
Eventually, my writing career took off, and I became confident and vivacious despite my husband. Carl didn’t fancy that. He constantly badgered me to quit to be a stay-at-home wife or a working wife because writing wasn’t a real job. That was my last straw, and the first time I fought back in all the years we were together.