AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She winces. “You the fiancé?”
“No,” I snap. “The fiancé is a man.”
The blonde whips around to stare daggers at Bee, who’s looking pretty chill for a woman who’s just been caught cheating. “A man? Seriously?”
Bee shrugs, plucks her silk robe off the floor, and gets to her feet. “Time for you to go, babe. Slumber party’s over.”
The blonde scowls in my direction, but she doesn’t argue. She picks up her things, dresses quickly, and heads towards the foyer. Bee doesn’t even watch her go. She cinches up her robe and saunters over to the bar.
“Want a drink?” she asks me casually.
“A drink?” I exclaim. “A drink?!”
She smacks her forehead with her palm. “Oh, right. You’re pregnant. I keep forgetting.”
“Bee!” I say, trying my level best not to judge. “What are you doing? This isn’t like you!”
She pours herself some gin and throws me an amused look. “What do you know about what I’m like? You don’t know me. Not really.”
I can’t say that doesn’t sting a little. But it’s also very obviously true. “I… You… I don’t get it. You and Dmitri… you have such a great relationship.”
“We do,” she admits freely, taking a sip of her cocktail.
I shake my head, confused by my own emotions. Fucked up as it is, I do have feelings for Dmitri. And even though seeing Bee and him together hurts like hell sometimes, I don’t want to see him wronged.
“Bee, he loves you so much. I can’t believe you would do this to him!”
“Wren—”
“Cheating is one of the worst things you can do to someone. Trust me, I’ve seen more cheating in my life than I care to admit. My father did it to my mother and it destroyed her.”
Bee balks, her drink-holding hand frozen in midair. “Are you judging me?”
I swallow my indignation and draw myself up tall. “No. I have no right to judge you. God knows I’ve got enough skeletons in my own closet.” She squints at me questioningly and I feel compelled to go on. “Long story short, I was involved with this man. This older man. He…” I wince as those old feelings come rushing back, no dimmer for the time that’s passed since they first consumed me. “He told me he was divorced but, as it turns out… he wasn’t.”
“Shiiit.” Bee leans a hip against the wall and crosses her arms. “Go on. I’m on the edge of my seat.”
“He had a wife, two kids, a mansion in the valley that he told me she got in the divorce. It was all lies. Well, not all lies. There was a mansion in the valley—but it’s where they lived together, as a family.”
The predawn gloom keeps me from puzzling out just what the emotion rippling across Bee’s face might be. “Did you love him?”
“I… I don’t know. I thought I did.”
She nods. “I love Dmitri, Wren, I really do. But I’m not ‘in love’ with him. Never have been. Never will be.” That familiar, mischievous grin spreads across her face, albeit a bit shyly, as she adds, “He’s got a bit too much Y chromosome for my liking.”
I hesitate as it all snaps into focus. Like an optical illusion, where you’ve seen the whole picture the whole time, but you couldn’t see the hidden image until someone told you where to look.
“You like women,” I breathe out. It sounds stupid as soon as I say it, but it’s undeniably the truth.
Bee abandons her drained tumbler altogether and picks up the whole bottle instead. “Bingo,” she says. “For the record, I wanted to tell you all this ages ago.”
Goosebumps erupt all over my skin. “Tell me what, exactly? What’s going on here?”
“I’m gay, Wren. Dmitri was the first person I came out to. I was twelve; he was a little older. These scars on my back? They’re a result of my ‘conversion therapy,’ courtesy of my sadistic fuck of a father.”
My eyes pop out of their sockets. “Oh my God… He whipped you to turn you straight?”
“Bingo once again. But as you just saw, it didn’t work. I’d rather staple my nipples to my stomach than go near a penis.”
