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“He was blaming you for his own weakness!” Phyllis said. “It’s so stereotypical I can’t believe you bought it. Even for a second! You’re a smart woman, Martha. You know better than that.”
Martha had to blink to keep tears from showing in her eyes. “He’s right,” she whispered.
Which was why she’d had to break away from David Marks the week before. She couldn’t bear to have him know just how sexless she was. It made no sense. She didn’t want him. Didn’t want any man. And didn’t care if the world knew she wasn’t a passionate woman.
But she didn’t want David to know.
And that was why she was losing her mind.
What the hell did it matter what the preacher knew?
“I tell my girls that sex can be wonderful, but I never was all that good in bed.” After twenty years of marriage, she revealed the stark truth. “Todd tried. He was gentle, patient, at least in the early years. I just never got all that excited. I didn’t hate it. I just didn’t need it. Most times I could take it or leave it.”
“Oh, sweetie,” Phyllis said.
Martha heard the sympathy in the other woman’s voice and wished she’d kept her secret another twenty years. At least. Her face burned with humiliation and with anger, too, that there was something about her that inspired pity.
She was strong. Capable. In control. She offered sympathy. She didn’t receive it.
“How many men had you kissed?” Phyllis asked.
“One.” She had no idea what that had to do with anything, but since her other failures were out there, her lack of dates might as well join
the queue.
“One besides Todd?”
“No, just one.”
“Him.”
“Yep.” There you had it. The life and loves—no, make that love, singular—of Martha Moore, woman extraordinaire. Mother of four. Give her a project and she would tackle it, a task and she’d complete it, a problem and she’d solve it. But have sex with her? No, thanks.
“Will you do something for me?”
“Sure.” Feeling better now that the awful news was behind her and she was still sitting there, on a beautiful campus, at a job she loved, having lunch with a trusted friend, Martha didn’t mind humoring Phyllis.
She waited while Phyllis went to toss their trash in a nearby can.
She’d already decided that she wasn’t going to ask Phyllis’s advice on the problem she’d come to discuss. She’d put herself through enough humiliation. She wasn’t bringing the preacher into it.
Wouldn’t the town have a field day with that? The woman who’d discovered her former preacher in a compromising position with one of his parishioners—caught kissing the new preacher! The man who’d been hired after she’d been instrumental in having the first one dismissed.
Never mind that both parties in the first case had been married and neither of the people in the second case were. The sense of crossing boundaries would be the same.
Or Martha chose to believe that, anyway.
“Okay.” Phyllis settled back on the bench directly across from Martha. “Play a game of make-believe with me.”
“Okay…” She wasn’t really good at those.
“Promise you’ll honestly apply yourself to it?”
Who could deny that earnest expression?
“Yes.”
“Then close your eyes…” Phyllis paused, and Martha did.
