Total pages in book: 225
Estimated words: 218500 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1093(@200wpm)___ 874(@250wpm)___ 728(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 218500 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1093(@200wpm)___ 874(@250wpm)___ 728(@300wpm)
I’m gonna have fun tonight. Celebrate life with my friends. Tonight, I’m just Chloe.
Not Adam’s caregiver.
Alannah reads my smile, gives me one back, and tugs on my hand, shaking her ass all the way to the dance floor. Our three friends are already there, dancing together.
Alannah, though perpetually single, is the default person I would talk to about this. She adores Adam. She’s proven again tonight that she’s a great sounding board. Though I’ve been clammed up about all of it until now, she’s been here for me throughout this ordeal. Making me go to mani-pedi appointments so that I have some self-care time, too. Calling me or showing up when she hasn’t heard from me. Bringing me a fancy coffee. Dropping a care package on the doorstep when she knows I’m overwhelmed.
And another good thing about Alannah – she tells it like it is.
She won’t hold back the truth if you get a bad haircut. She’ll commiserate with you, fake-plotting the demise of the bitch that cut your hair. She’ll then buy you hair clips and headbands or help you find a style for it so you can live with it while it grows out.
If you ask her if your jeans make your ass look big, she won’t lie about that either. Be ready for the truth when you ask Alannah Fisher for an opinion.
But her friendship is loving and supportive, too. If she can’t stand the guy you’re dating, she’ll tell you the truth in a gentle way you can stomach.
If you’re being a whiny bitch for too long, you’ll know it. Everyone needs a friend like Alannah. She’s ambitious, caring, motivating, and honest. She’s excelling in her field as a professional arbitrator as well as a social media influencer on the side with her “single, successful, and sultry” makeup tutorials channel. She’s great at motivating people to go after what they want in life.
I’m stoked that her career is accelerating. She’s worked her butt off for it and I’m glad I came out with her to celebrate her achievements tonight. To reciprocate friendship and be here for her.
Also, to let my hair down a little. Move my body a lot. Let myself feel a little sexy with my extra effort on my makeup, taking down my dark, shoulder-length hair that’s been in a ponytail or messy bun pretty much every day since Adam’s accident. Dusting off my curling iron and using it. Wearing a cute little black dress that I bought just before the accident and hadn’t had a chance to wear.
Of course Alannah thinks I should take Adam up on his offer. He had to know she would when he suggested I talk to her about it. She’s not the type to turn down a license for some fun.
I don’t know if I will do it. I don’t know if I can. If it’d be fun for me or if I’d feel like a cheating whore. If I did use it, how could I stand at an altar making promises to Adam in front of everyone we love knowing I’m lying my face off about promising fidelity?
I am the monogamous type. I don’t know if I can have sex with someone without feelings involved; I’ve never tried. I’m thirty years old and I’ve had sex with a grand total of six men in my life, including Adam. Feelings were involved each time.
All I know tonight is that the cocktails are tasting good, I don’t have to drive home, and I don’t have to even go home. I don’t have to let Adam see me get sloshed. I don’t have to hold back so that he doesn’t see me get what he calls “sloppy drunk”.
Tonight is a night with no decorum required.
I learned the hard way in our early days of dating that instead of thinking it’s adorable, looking after me, taking the opportunity for extra-dirty sex like his predecessor did, he gets disappointed in me. Embarrassed. I get lectures about it. My own dad never lectured me about booze the way Adam does. My parents don’t really lecture me period. They’ve always let me go my own way. That’s a nice way of saying I was always pretty invisible to them.
But Adam is Mister Responsible. Mister Decorum. He messaged me after I left to suggest I stay at Alannah’s all weekend. And I suspect it’s because he hopes she’ll talk me into things tonight and then I’ll do something about it tomorrow night. Since he won’t even see me until Sunday, I can get as loopy as I want tonight.
And I’ve decided I will.
No, it’s definitely not in me to just have sex with a stranger tonight, to switch gears from being in a committed relationship, spending eighteen months with one man, almost a year engaged to him, and seven months caring for him after his whole life got swept up into a tornado to simply falling onto a stranger’s dick my first time on a girls’ night out. Not who I am.