Page 5 of See You Sometime
But early on, it hadn’t seemed…inequitable. He’d paid for more, wooed her.
She’d been young and stupid and dazzled and not really thinking clearly when she’d signed the prenup that didn’t entitle her to any alimony when they divorced, no matter how long they’d been together.
She’d stupidly thought if that ever happened that he’d do the right thing.
He…hadn’t.
I guess I’m lucky he didn’t give me an STI.
Just a raging case of the shit out of lucks.
At least she started her new job on Tuesday. A friend of her mom’s, in the same book club, had hooked her up with it. Doing billing for a doctor’s office. Nothing exciting, but at least a paying job and benefits.
And in Florida. Twenty minutes from her parents’ house.
She’d interviewed over the phone, and, fortunately, it was in a field that while it in no way related to her English degree, it was a medical billing job, for which she had several years of working experience.
She didn’t even have to buy work clothes because she already had scrubs, and they didn’t wear a required pattern or type.
One lucky break, at least.
I’m going to focus on work, find a reliable kinkster to beat my ass without wanting to do more than that to or with me, and rebuild my life.
Maybe then she could put the ghosts of Kelly—short for Kellog—Carling’s damaging words and actions out of her head for good.
Chapter Two
“So what do the women look like?” Rusty asked.
Eliza lightly backhanded his shoulder from where she sat next to him. “Does itmatter?” She tipped her head toward Darryl’s son, Kyle, who was nearly fifteen and sitting on the other side of the table.
Rusty blundered on, clueless as always. “Ofcourseit matters. If there’s five chicks skinny-dipping in the pond, I want to know what they look like.” He arched his eyebrows in expectation as he smiled at Axel.
Axel damn well knew what Rusty was doing. Axel was no frigging prude, and he knew darn well some of their friends sitting around this table right now were either kinky or definitely non-vanilla. But Rusty frequently had fun teasing him, because they all assumed Axel was the straight-laced guy in the group.
Why did I even go there?
These were five inconsequential NPCs, for chrissake, not even real NPCs he’d made up in advance and planned for the actual campaign. But when Rusty had led the merry gang of murderhobos currently masquerading as their first-level D&D characters the wrong direction at the crossroads andawayfrom the town where they were supposed to be going, where Axel had, oh, actuallyplannedfor them to go and had spent all of last week setting them up to go, Axel had said the first thing that came to mind when they’d decided to explore the surrounding countryside.
Behind his DM screen, Axel quickly jotted notes in pencil in his spiral notebook as he talked. “Roll a spot.”
Everyone at the table did, calling out numbers. He rolled against them, not glancing at the die yet as he quickly pulled five non-existent NPCs out of his brain.
Then he glanced at the D20 and hoped he hadn’t groaned out loud.
“Show of hands, everyone above a thirteen?”
Everyone except Mike raised their hands. “I didn’t seeshit,” Mike said. “Rolled a one.” Even with a ranking in spot, a natural one was an automatic fumble.
“You think you need new shoes,” Axel told Mike. “Those are looking pretty worn out. Maybe you can buy a new pair in the next town. Everyone else sees what looks to be three humans, possibly an elf, and a humanoid woman with golden-hued skin and dark eyes.”
Rusty perked right up. “I break cover and walk down to them, calling out a greeting in Common.”
Of course he does.
Just to keep it above-board, Axel rolled his D20 five times, one for each NPC. “The three humans scream and swim deeper to get away from you. The elf disappears below the surface and you can’t see where she goes. The golden-skinned one just stares at you.”
“Ohhh, this isn’t good,” Darryl said. “Come back to the road.”
