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ChapterTwo
Sera
“Mama! Mom! Mama! Mom!”
The shrill voice penetrated the dream I was having where I was sipping the world’s coolest, sweetest, lemonade ever in existence while watching six men play intensely loud and painful bongo drums beside me. With a groan, I pried my dry eyes open and then immediately shut them again when my five-year-old daughter, Marigold, jumped on my bed and then on me, making the mattress bounce and my head spin.
There was a reason I never drank more than a glass or two of wine and this was it. Being hungover with kids was not a good combination. Neither was being hungover and having to get up and go to work. I forced my eyes open again and looked at my phone. It was after eight. I needed to force myself to sit up. My daughter was doing her best to accomplish that, currently leaning on my bladder and elbowing me in the ribs.
“Marigold, mama is begging you to stop pressing on my gut right now, please. I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Are you going to wet the bed?” she asked, sounding gleeful at the idea.
“I might if you don’t get off of me.” I turned, wishing a glass of water would magically appear on my nightstand. There was nothing there, because I had taken a car service home from the party and passed out face-first in my bed, having only managed to get my shoes off. I shifted lower under the covers so Marigold wouldn’t notice I was still wearing my jeans and shirt from the night before.
I wasn’t used to going out, or doing anything that didn’t involve work, school, or my kids. I groaned again as I remembered what else I wasn’t used to doing.
Kissing a man.
Cash and I had made out in a dark room.
Our hands had been all over each other.
I had ground myself onto his very hard cock.
My face was hot. My mouth was dry. My vagina felt like it had a pulse.
This was bad. This was so bad.
I’d agreed to go to Mexico with Cash Young.
Where he’d promised to fuck me.
I’d been so close to having an orgasm with his hand down my pants. It had taken mere minutes for him to take me from a kiss to rocking onto his touch.
This was what happened when you let a single mom out of the house. Moms gone wild. Suddenly my years of celibacy had caught up with me and, fueled by espresso martinis, I had become Sexy Sera. I vaguely remembered Sexy Sera. I had missed the hell out of her. But I hadn’t been completely prepared for her to reemerge with a vengeance. I had thought we’d reintroduce her to the world slowly, one flirty look at a time.
Instead, she’d been all in.
We’d been one door handle jiggle away from having sex, and with zero hesitation I had hit the buy button on what was probably some insanely expensive luxury vacation with a man seven years younger than me.
“Mar, I’m serious, you need to move.” I smoothed her wild tangle of blonde curls back off of her face, then tapped her butt. “Let me up.”
It had been a miracle that my oldest, Ava, had decided to stay home on New Year’s Eve. Normally she would have been at some kind of large sleepover but she had asked if her friend Grace could spend the night, saying they wanted to avoid drama. I’d said yes if she would watch Marigold and text me if Johnny, who was twelve, did anything other than play video games.
So I’d gone to Toni and Miles’s party and begged Cash for more.
Which, I felt like I should regret, but quite honestly, did not.
My regret was that I hadn’t gotten the “more.”
Marigold shifted and I decided the hell with it and just got out of bed in my clothes. Maybe she wouldn’t notice. I was running out of time to shower before I needed to be at my bakery, Sugar Lips. I hauled myself out of bed, shoved my phone in my back pocket, and got out of bed, tripping over my heels from the night before. I caught myself on my dresser and found myself looking right at my wedding photo from thirteen years earlier. I looked insanely young and sweetly in love.
I eyed my husband John in his tux in the photo and mentally warned him not to judge me. He was the one who had died and left me with two mortgages, three kids, and a car with over two hundred thousand miles on it. I had every right to want to get nailed by a hot, young, huge professional football player.
Someone was in our one and only bathroom. I knocked. “I need to get in the shower.”
There was a noncommittal response and what sounded like a video playing on a phone. Great. I shuffled to the kitchen to start my coffee. The timer on the machine had broken ages ago and now required I hit the button and pray to the coffee gods that it would actually start.
I sighed when I saw that the kids had left a multitude of dirty dishes in the sink and a bunch of microwave food boxes scattered on the counter. They’d left the chip bag open too, rendering the half-eaten contents inside stale. I could feel a “money doesn’t grow on trees” speech welling up inside me.
Ignoring the dishes, I flipped on the sink faucet and filled a glass with tap water. I drank it all down in two chugs.
“Why is it so cold in here?” Marigold asked, jumping up and down in her pajamas. “I’m freezing! Brr.” Then she launched into a Frozen song at the top of her lungs.
Now that she mentioned it, the kitchen felt like an ice box. I hadn’t immediately noticed because I was sweating out vodka and had the female equivalent of blue balls. I suddenly had a bad feeling. Either I had forgotten to pay my bill or the thirty-year-old furnace had decided to usher in the new year with a giant middle finger to me.
After I slapped the thermostat repeatedly, kicked the furnace twice, and got dust up my nose and into my lungs, I sighed. I called my sister Helena. “Can Chad look at my furnace?”
“My husband doesn’t know anything about furnaces. He sells cars. Neither do I in case you were wondering. What’s going on?”
“I have no heat and it’s thirty degrees outside.”
