Between the Sheets Read Online Free Page B

history.
    And when he left after three weeks of strange unsatisfying, increasingly mean sex, she said good riddance.
    But Dean must have been engaged in his own mental breakdown, because he wanted more from her and he wouldn’t take no for an answer. So much so that on the morning of America Today ’s live taping he’d ambushed her, telling the world about their affair. The things she let him do to her.
    Why don’t you tell them all what you said while I was fucking you like an animal. While you were sucking my dick .
    The memory of the words while sitting in the teachers’lounge, Joe behind her at the fridge, made her skin quake. Bile rise in her throat.
    “How was Christmas?” Joe asked.
    She pushed it all away—the shame, the longing, the strange secret wish that Joe Phillips would believe what Dean had said about her and look at her, really look at her as a woman, as a possibility.
    “Good,” she said after clearing her throat. Mom’s mind had been pretty clear on Christmas and they’d lain around watching kids’ movies on TV. Eating pizza. No salads. “Yours?”
    “My brother had the whole family at his house in Little Rock. My parents, brother, and sister. Ten kids.”
    “That’s a lot of kids.”
    “Made me happy I don’t live in Little Rock.” He shot her a smile over his shoulder and her stomach fluttered.
    “You’re in my class this afternoon?”
    “I am,” she said. “We’re working on some identity projects.”
    “You’re a masochist,” he said, walking back toward the door with his lunch in a plastic bag and his bottle of Coke. “It’s a crisis of identity in the sixth grade every day. Half the girls will probably start crying. See you later.”
    She laughed and with a wave he was out the door, taking all the air in the room with him.
    After a long moment feeling like the world’s worst coward, she bent back down over her students’ work.
    “Hey Shelby?”
    Joe was half in, half out the door. He was so handsome, not in any outrageous way, but in a regular guy way. A man who would probably lose his hair at some point and get a paunch, but his kindness and sense of humor made all of that unimportant. His hands were wide, his fingers long. Handsome hands. And he woreglasses, sometimes cockeyed. Which was silly but endearing.
    He was exactly the kind of man she’d pictured herself with. Exactly.
    He held his Coke bottle between his fingers and pressed it against the doorjamb.
    “Yeah?” Her heart kicked in her throat.
    “I … I ah …” He blew out a breath and laughed awkwardly. “I’ve always wanted to say that what that guy said last summer? The cookie guy?”
    The winter she was ten there’d been one of those freakish Arkansas storms that shrouded the world in ice. Trees, blades of grass, and toys left in yards were totally encased in ice. Daddy made her walk out to the church with him, a mile down the highway, and she’d been mad and spiteful and wouldn’t put on her boots or mittens like Mom told her to. She’d gotten frostbite on her fingers and ankles, and when the blood returned to that white, numb skin it caused an icy-hot pain, tingly and cold and swollen and awful.
    This moment felt like that.
    “What about him?” She stared at the blue-green foot of Jeremy’s stegosaurus, unable to look at Joe’s handsome face, those well-meaning eyes.
    “No one … no one believed him. I just want you to know that. Everyone knows he was lying.”
    Right. Lying .
    Her reputation was exactly like that ice storm, keeping her precisely as the town saw her. Encapsulated. Untouchable. Unfeeling. Undesirable.
    This was it, a moment when she could open up that box where she had all those things she desired and pull out something she wanted. She could say, Joe, I sucked his dick. I let him fuck me like an animal. I did those things. And I like those things. Perhaps not so much with Dean Jennings the horrible cookie guy. But in general, in theory, those are things I like .