Page 6 of February

“I can do fun.”

“Really? You told me you loved me two months into our relationship. And I repeat: you asked me to move in at month four.”

“Well, I don’tloveyou anymore; I know that much. I just miss it. I miss… God, I miss really, really good sex.”

Bridgette hadn’t meant to say that last part to Toya. It was more for herself because that was true. She missed having sex with a beautiful woman. Yes, she wanted a relationship, to fall in love like Melinda and Kyle, but she also just missed being touched by another woman, touching her, hearing her come at Bridgette’s fingers or mouth, and coming in return.

When no immediate response followed her statement, Bridgette thought that was probably a good thing, but she could still hear Toya breathing, so she knew that the woman hadn’t hung up on her.

“We shouldn’t be talking about this,” Toya finally said. “I’m at work, anyway, and my break is over, so I need to go.”

“But you’re thinking about it, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Bridge… Just drive safe, okay?”

“Yeah. Fine. Bye,” Bridgette replied.

When Toya hung up, Bridgette disconnected as well and wondered what she’d just done, knowing full well that she’d just started something that she had no idea what to do with.

CHAPTER 2

“Representative,” Monica said into the phone.

“If you need to speak to one of our–”

“Representative,” she repeated louder.

There was a moment of silence on the other end, and Monica was hopeful the demon machine had heard her.

“If you need to speak to–”

“Fuck you,” Monica said and hung up her cell phone.

She then pressed a button on her desk phone.

“Yes, Miss Arnette?” her assistant said.

“Can you please get the stupid shipping company support line on the phone and find out what happened with my package? I keep getting the robot and can’t get to an actual human being to help.”

“Of course, Miss Arnette.”

Monica pressed the button again to disconnect them, wondering why she’d tried to do it herself, to begin with. She had an assistant for a reason. And she didn’t technically insist that people around the office call her Miss Arnette. It had just happened the day she’d started working here right out of her MBA, and she hadn’t corrected anyone. She supposed it was a combination of two things that had led them to believe that she’d prefer it. One, she was the heir to the Arnette empire, which spanned so many businesses now that she’d lost count of howmany they owned. And two, her father had expected everyone to call him Mr. Arnette. He was seventy-five years old, so that moniker was more of a holdover from other times, but as a result, they’d all begun callingherMiss Arnette and, for a short while, Mrs. Arnette because she’d gotten married but never changed her name.

She was supposed to wear the shoes she’d ordered to an event tonight. Yes, she had other shoes that she could make work; she had an entire closet of them in her Manhattan penthouse that she’d paid far too much money for after her divorce, but since half of it had been paid by the divorce settlement, she didn’t consider it to be all that bad. These shoes, though, were a limited edition, and she’d managed to find them prior to them being released, which meant that she could ensure she’d be the only one wearing them at the gala and wouldn’t end up in the same awful situation she had last year when she’d shown up in the same shoes as her now-ex-wife’s new girlfriend because she’d tried letting a stylist dress her. No more of that. Monica would be dressing herself from now on, and she’d do everything she could to ensure that she wouldn’t match the younger woman her ex had left her for. How cliché was that?

Monica probably should have known it would happen. After all, she’d been the younger woman once. Her ex was ten years older than her and had a son from her previous relationship, which she’d ended to be with Monica. Now, Monica was forty years old, watching her fifty-year-old ex-wife bring her thirty-year-old girlfriend to parties. It was all very New York society to Monica, which was annoying and frustrating, and all she had wanted was the perfect pair of shoes to show off to the thirty-year-old who had once been a model and still looked rail thin; way too thin for Monica’s taste. She preferred her women to look like they enjoyed eating food, not that they counted every calorie.

“Monica,” her father said in his usual scraggly voice that hadn’t aged well due to his insistence on smoking a pipe at least once a day and sometimes, twice.

“Yes?” she asked as she looked up from her computer, knowing he’d just walk in without asking for permission anyway.

“Acquisitions wants us to pick up this little company,” he said.

“Well, I’m over the acquisitions team, so that’s a little surprising.”

“You’re over four departments, so you don’t hear everything,” he replied.

“Okay. Why am I hearing about this one?” she asked.

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