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Roni laughs. “He doesn’t want to listen to us talk about him.”
“I take it things went well?”
“Um, yeah, you could say that.”
“And you’re okay?”
Gage wasn’t the only one in our side-by-side rental houses having sex for the first time after their loss.
“I’m surprisingly okay, but I suppose that’s because Derek and I waited until I felt ready. Even though part of me is aching for other reasons. Patrick is very much on my mind, as always.”
“I understand. He’s part of everything, even your relationship with Derek.”
“Yes, he is, and I’m so glad to be with people who understand how strange it all is.”
“Thank goodness for the Wild Widows.”
“I say that every day.”
Hallie, Joy and Kinsley join us on the sofa.
“Are we talking about how Roni feels after having sex with Derek for the first time?” Joy asks, sparking laughter.
“What would we do without you, Joy, to cut through the bullshit?” Hallie asks.
“You’d all be floundering around like fools, wanting to know the deets, but too afraid to ask,” Joy says. “That’s why you need Mama Joy around. Tell us everything and leave nothing out.”
Roni giggles at the intense look Joy gives her. “It was great—and heartbreaking at the same time.” She shrugs. “You know what I mean.”
“We do.” Kinsley lost her husband to pancreatic cancer and is raising their two kids on her own now. “I haven’t gotten there yet, but I hope maybe someday I will.”
“You will, Kins,” I assure her. “Of course you will.”
“I’m not sure I want to. The thought of starting over again with someone new is just so… exhausting.”
“It is when it’s not the right person,” Hallie said.
“Have you been holding out on us, girl?” Joy asks.
“No, no,” Hallie says, laughing. “I just remember all the dating I did before I met Gwen and how different it was from the start with her.”
“I know what you mean,” Kinsley says. “It was like that when I met Rory, too. Instantly different.”
“Whereas I couldn’t stand Mike when I first met him,” I confess.
“Seriously?” Hallie asks. “I’ve never heard you say that before.”
“He was an obnoxious jerk. Later, I found out it was because he liked me and was so nervous, he acted like an idiot.” I smile as I recall another long-ago beach weekend with friends. “Fortunately, he got it together and showed me his true self before I could run from him screaming.”
“That’s so sweet,” Kinsley says. “That he was so nervous, he lost his shit.”
“I found out later that our friends had told him they wanted to fix him up with me, and when he saw me for the first time, he always said he fell instantly in love and then nearly ruined it completely.”
“I love that,” Roni says with a sigh.
“I was his first real girlfriend,” I tell them. “I had to teach him everything. From when to bring flowers to a woman—not only after a fight—to the difference between sex and romance to where the clitoris is located. You name it, I taught him, and he was a very willing student.”
The girls lose it laughing at the wordclitoris, and my heart aches for him as I recall those long-ago days and nights with Mike. He’d had sex before me, but I taught him the difference between basic sex and great sex. However, I’ve never had as many orgasms in my life as I did last night, but I can’t tell them that. I won’t tell anyone that. And I’ll never tell them about the heartbreak Mike later brought to our fledgling marriage when he decided to test his newfound knowledge on someone else. I try not to think about that dark time in our otherwise happy life together, or the excruciating effort it took to put our relationship back together.
