He grinned, clearly about to say something outrageous. “In your ex-wife’s stingy, slutty pu**y, is the subtle point I’m trying to portray.”
The stunned look on my face seemed to prompt him to add, “You lost your belief in romantic love after twenty years in that bitch’s used up snatch.”
“That is so f**ked up,” I gasped.
I couldn’t stop shaking my head and laughing.
The man had no filter, either to his twisted brain or his outrageous mouth.
“Turner, you’ve got Pepper on line one!” Candy shouted from the other room.
He rolled his eyes. “You want to talk about f**ked up. Here’s some f**ked up. Pepper is an old assistant, calls me at least once a week, to tell me that I lost out when I ended things with her. I shit you not, she’d lecture me for hours, every week, if I let her. Watch this.”
He put the phone to his ear, listened for a few beats, then said, “Candy could use some of your advice. Want to talk to her?” He put his hand over the mouthpiece, yelling, “Candy! Pepper on line one for you!”
Candy let out an undignified screech in the other room. “You f**ker!” she shouted, but then, mere seconds later, I could hear her talking on the phone to what I could only assume was Pepper.
Turner was grinning. “Works every time. Women love to turn on each other.”
“Pepper? Why’s she called Pepper?” I asked.
“Trust me on this: You don’t want to know.”
I did trust him on that. Ironically, I’d come to trust him about a good number of things.
Turner had turned out to be a good friend to me, and he was always a great distraction, but as soon as I was alone again, I went back to obsessing about Iris.
How could you be in love with a person you didn’t really know? Someone that had fed you nothing but lies?
Someone you knew with certainty you couldn’t trust?
I was of two minds on the subject, one telling me you couldn’t, or at the very least, that it was an idiotic thing to do.
The other was unmindful of logic, uncaring of consequences, so long as I could have the thing I needed.
The woman I needed.
And this train of thought was beyond useless, because in the end, everything was out of my control, including my own heart.
CHAPTER TWO
FIVE WEEKS LATER
I was just getting home from the gym when I got an unexpected call from the photographer, Lourdes. I didn’t have anything scheduled with her, so I knew it was a social call.
We chatted amiably for a bit, and I found myself asking her out for a cup of coffee the next day. The question just sort of came out, and she accepted, her tone warm and friendly.
After I hung up, I wondered what the hell was wrong with me.
But I didn’t cancel, and I found myself meeting her the next afternoon.
We talked for hours.
We had so much in common. On paper, we’d be perfect together.
Also, she was a knockout in every sense of the word. Just stunning.
She had natural, tan golden skin and dark, mysterious eyes that were alluring and exotic. I remembered her mentioning something to me a while back about being half Spanish, half French, and she favored the former, looks-wise.
She had a slight accent that I couldn’t quite place, and that she said was mixed, because she’d done so much traveling and living abroad. It gave everything she said a sultry vibe.
She was a year older than I was, but her face was unlined. She was one of those ageless women that drove other women crazy.
Needless to say, Tammy had always hated when I did photo shoots with her.
She wore a white sundress with a wide collar and flirty hem that showed off her tan cle**age and legs to perfection.
She was a gym devotee, like myself, and it showed in every lithe, toned inch of her. She didn’t overdo it, though, managing to keep her feminine curves, along with the muscles.
We even used the same gym, though she went at night, and I preferred the morning. We talked about working out together sometime, but both of us knew that if we did, it wouldn’t be a regular occurrence.
You didn’t mess with someone’s workout schedule.
The very idea was sacrilege, we joked.
I’d been a developing a real, honest to God adult crush on her before Iris had come along and scrambled all sense out of my brain.
Now I found that, no matter how good Lourdes and I were on paper, I just couldn’t see myself getting romantically involved with anyone any time in the near future.
Regardless of the absence of its desire, my heart was already involved elsewhere.
“How are your boys?” I asked her.
She had two sons, the oldest twenty, the youngest eighteen. They were her pride and joy, and she smiled fondly at the question.
“Very good, in general. Both are attending UNLV, though my youngest, Gustave, isn’t sure what he wants to study. That’s normal, though, right, for a freshman?”
I wasn’t the one to ask about that, as I’d known that I wanted to be an author since I was six years old, but I figured she wanted a general answer, as opposed to a specific one. “Completely normal, I’m sure. Are they talking to their dad yet?”
She’d shared with me before that her sons hadn’t spoken to their father since she’d separated from him, well over a year ago.
She bit her lip and shook her head. “No. They’re holding firm. Both of them swear they never want to see him again. I’m not sure what to do about it. I can’t stand my ex-husband, but I’ve never spoken a bad word about him to them. Not one harsh word. In fact, they only heard why we were getting divorced because of him, and he told them about it because he was trying to turn them against me. My oldest, Rafael, beat the shit out of him for it.”