Page 11 of Midnight Surrounds Us

Great. Even Miss Priss herself was trying to push me into something I had no intention of getting into. Or under. Whatever!

“How exactly would screwin’ that cowboy solve my immediate problems?”

“Um,” Billie’s best friend, Aislinn, hedged, “no one said anything about sex, Aubrey.”

Eyebrows popped all around the room; I could almost hear them pinging like in a cartoon.

“Mm-hm,” Juneau, our resident romance author, hummed. “This is the start to a romance book. You need something, and he’s got something. Pretty soon he’ll corner you somewhere discreet and offer himself up for the taking.”

Scoffing, I said, “My life is not one of your books. What’s Rye Graves got that I need?”

“Well,” she said, trying to hold in a laugh. “A big dick. You need some stress release, and those jeans leavenothin’to the imagination.”

“Ooo, girl,” Carly squawked, “go on!”

They high fived, and I rolled my eyes. Again.

Stomping my foot, I growled, “No.I don’t need some man tellin’ me what to do or how to run my life. I’ve already been there and done that.”

“You shouldn’t talk ill of the dead,” Cal said, disapproval ringing in her tone.

“Cal, Tommy wasmyhusband and the father of my children. I will never talk badly about his service to his country or his sacrifice, but you weren’t there in our marriage. You don’t know the sacrificesImade or the pain my boys and I have gone through since Tommy’s death. Respectfully, back off.”

“O-o-okay,” she said, palms and pristinely painted fingernails raised in front of her.

None of them knew. I’d given Tommy my whole heart, and when the boys were born, I thought we were happy. But things changed.

When my body morphed back into fighting shape, Tommy became more and more possessive. The other moms used to gush over the fact that he bought my clothes. “How thoughtful,” they’d said. Except I hadn’t told them that the reason Tommy shopped for my clothes was because he didn’t trust me. I would rather have died than cheat on my husband, but my bigger breasts and wider hips had him convinced otherwise.

Now, I knew it was Tommy’s own insecurities that made him act that way, and because he was gone, I tried to have some grace about it. It used to be a daily exercise, trying to make myself forgive him for treating me like a hunk of ham instead of his wifeand for showing the boys that women weren’t useful for much besides making dinner and cleaning up after it.

But the last thing I needed now in the middle of my life was another man with any power over me, real or perceived.

No thank you.

My buzz had mostly wornoff by the time Roxi dropped me back at the shop.

The coffee she’d forced down my throat from Coffee Shot down the street helped. And really, it wasn’t like I was operating a two-ton forklift. Drunk bookselling could totally be the new thing.

Unfortunately, the weak-ass hard lemonade hadn’t helped me forget about all the stuff I’d been worrying about before drunk book club, which could also be a thing. In fact, maybe I should put it to a vote.

I flipped the sign on the front door back to “Come on in, it’s nice in here,” and then my phone rang. My mom’s face popped onto my screen.

“Hey, Mama. How are you?”

“Hi, sweetheart. Dad and I are okay. How are you and the boys?”

“Oh, well, we’re… Yeah, we’re okay.”

“Aubrey Louise, don’t you lie to your mama. What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

The fact that I had survived stage one uterine cancer three years ago still made her freak out anytime she heard hesitation in my voice.

Luckily, I had zero plans to procreate again, and the cancer had been contained inside my uterus, so the surgery to removeit was the cure. But I still had two ovaries, a cervix, and lots of lymph nodes left, so the now-bi-yearly doctor appointments to check for other cancers had her in a tizzy every time her phone rang.

The thought had crossed my mind that maybe the surgery or menopause, or both, was the cause of my often disappointing and ineffectual “sexy me time” sessions, but I was way too embarrassed to ask mymalegynecologist.

“No, Mama. I’m not sick. Promise. And the boys are the same as they always are, aimless and blissfully unaware of the world around them.”

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