AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She looked down skeptically at the phone. “Something like that,” she said. “You’re right. I’m overthinking this. We’re business partners together…who just happened to have sex last night. What’s the big deal?”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
She texted him back,Yes, sir.Then she blushed and immediately regretted typing that. An image popped into her mind of her bent over his lap, bare-assed, and him with a paddle in his hand.
“You okay?” asked Stoney and she smiled, stuffing her phone into her jacket pocket.
“I’m fine. Let’s go.”
The rest of Stella’s day was comprised of her looking for work mostly. She applied to a few jobs earlier in that week and not a single one had gotten back to her. Sure, she was doing this thing with Richard, but after last night, she had no idea how long that was going to last or whether or not he would find a way not to pay her. If there was anything that she learned from being married and divorced, it was that nothing in life was guaranteed.
When she got home, her phone started ringing. It was an unknown number. At first, she wasn’t going to answer it, but then she thought that it might be someone looking to bring her in for an interview, so she picked up.
“Hello?”
“Hey, babe. Long time no talk to.”
She bristled. The sound of Curtis’ voice brought a round of instant nausea to her stomach.
“Why are you calling me?” she asked. “Didn’t you get the message that I don’t want to talk to you in our divorce hearing?”
Curtis chuckled. “Don’t be like that. Just because we’re divorced, it doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.”
“That’s exactly what it means,” she said. “I want you to leave me alone. We don’t have anything else to talk about anymore.”
He sighed and said, “I don’t know why you keep insisting that we don’t have anything between us anymore. You know we do. You know there’s only one person for me in this world and that’s you.”
“That might be the saddest thing you ever said to me.” She walked into her kitchen, thinking about making some tea while she looked for work.
“How’s the job hunt going?” he asked. “I heard through the grapevine that you’ve been applying all over town for work.”
She froze, the old sickening feeling of him watching her from somewhere she couldn’t see coming over her. He liked to do things like that when they were married. She put the kettle on the stove and turned it on, trying not to think that way. They were divorced, after all, and that meant that he could no longer do anything to her. She was a separate entity from him altogether.
“What do you expect, Curtis?” she said to him. “Thanks to your sabotage--”
“Sabotage? I was just trying to make sure you stayed within the contract of our marriage vows. To honor and obey? Remember that? I needed you to stay home and be the background to my foreground. Had you just done that--”
“Stop,” she said, a flash of anger boiling through her. “You’re not going to blame me for what you did, Curtis. God, what is wrong with you? I didn’t deserve what you did to me. I still don’t deserve it.”
“Hey, hey. I haven’t done anything to you…yet,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean? Is that a threat? Because if it is, I will gladly get a restraining order.”
“That’s not necessary, Stella. Look, all I want to do is talk this out. That’s the one thing that we didn’t do when all this was going on. I mean, if we could just sit down and talk about it all, I know that we could work things out.”
“No, we can’t,” she said. “We can’t work anything out ever again.” She could feel herself starting to get lightheaded. He had a way of making her so angry that she felt the effects in her body. Lightheadedness and nausea were the most common things and sometimes she felt like she couldn’t breathe. She stopped talking, taking in a deep breath before continuing.
“Leave me alone, Curtis,” she said, finally. “Don’t call me again. In fact, forget that I even exist because I’m going to do my best to forget all about you.”
She hung up, then blocked his number. As much as she couldn’t afford to miss any more phone calls, she was going to have to keep from answering calls from numbers she didn’t recognize if Curtis was going to start calling her randomly this way.
As she made her tea, she had the errant thought of calling Stoney and asking him to fulfill his dream of punching Curtis in the face for her. She knew better though. If she thought for one second that seeing her brother beating on Curtis would change anything, she’d have done it a long time ago.
Stoney wasn’t intimidating in appearance, really. He was only about five foot six and while he was fairly muscular, he was hardly Arnold Schwarzenegger. The worst thing about him was that he was more bite than bark, which was good sometimes, but most of the time it just ended up landing him in trouble, and at the end of the day, Curtis wasn’t worth it.
With her tea, she sat down at the kitchen table, laptop in front of her as she went over the list of possible jobs on the job-seeking website that she’d been looking on. Something had to give eventually. She just had to keep trying.
She filled out the application for at least five jobs before closing her laptop and giving it a rest. The next step was going to be just going out and finding signs that reported that they were hiring. She got dressed in a nice sundress and set out in her car, driving around to local businesses to apply.
