A Lover's Secret by Bethany Bloom Read Free Book Online

church?”
    “Yeah. I know.”
    “So what did Jake do?”
    Kelly stared at her. “Well, according to him, he laughed and
then he covered his eyes with his hands, and he took off his suit jacket and he
gave it to her. And then…” She paused and bugged her eyes out at Jess. “He told
her to respect herself.”
    Monica must have been humiliated. Beyond humiliated. But
that really was something.
    “Jess, seriously, how long has it been since you’ve wished
some guy would tell Monica that? I haven’t known her as long as you, but I’ve
wished it since I met her.”
    Jess couldn’t help laughing. Kelly placed her hands on
Jess’s shoulders and pantomimed shaking her. “Just have dinner with the man,
for the love of all that is good and decent.”
    “Well,” Jess said, drawing the word out. “I do think he has
a girlfriend.”
    “I don’t know anything about that.” Kelly folded her arms
once again. “I’m not asking you to sleep with him. Just go have a cup of
coffee. It would be your wedding present to me. That’s all I want.”
    Jess didn’t answer.
    “He’s staying at the Ritz.” Kelly’s voice took on a singsong
tone. “He’s probably lon-e-ly…”
    “He isn’t staying with his family?”
    “No. I guess his family sort of vanished from town. Shortly
after graduation. So, it’s just him here now. See, he’s sure to be lonely. In
need of some companionship.”
    How could she tell Kelly the real reason she didn’t want to
go out with Jake Lassiter? The truth was, she had never been with a man, and,
at the age of twenty-six, as the mystique built, so did the shame, and the
fear. The fear of being exposed. The fear of not knowing what to do. It was
embarrassing, sure, but the idea of being so intimate with a man, of being
naked, of showing him all of her, inside and out, it terrified her. And
for a man whose life was all about “fast and free.” A man who could laugh at
her and then write all about her and her….foibles in his next book. Oh mercy,
no.
    Besides, most of what she knew about love and sex she had
learned from Monica and from television, and so she knew that men wanted one
thing, and it was a thing she knew nothing about. The older she got, the more
she feared that if she unleashed that side of her, there would be no going
back. She would be unzipped. And she’d have an even harder time getting these
images out of her head. These images that kept popping into her mind,
uninvited, and with even greater frequency since she’d heard the words “Jake
Lassiter” once again.
    She remembered, then, something Andrew had told his friend
in high school. His friend was confiding in them and asking if he should lose
his virginity to his girlfriend, and seventeen-year-old Andrew had said, “Well,
let me just warn you that, once you do it, you’re going to want to do it a lot.
An awful lot.”
    They had all laughed then, but now it was nine years later,
and it wasn’t so funny. Jess still knew nothing about sex, and she still
avoided anything that gave her a hint of sexuality. She avoided anything lurid
or lusty. She even stayed away from romance novels and R-rated movies because
the love scenes created a twisting intensity in the base of her. They made her
breathless and then she didn’t know what to do with herself.
    She voiced none of these thoughts, but still Kelly stared at
her. Then Kelly blinked hard and said, “Oh Jess, I guess what everyone says
about you is true. You are sort of weird.”
    ***
    Weird Jess. What would Jake Lassiter want with Weird Jess?
Maybe she had always been Weird Jess. She thought of the men who had been
interested in her, the ones she had more or less ignored. The perfectly nice
men she had left, confused, wondering what they had done wrong.
    She had to get out there. Out of the church and away from
the toasts and the couples with their faces pressed against one another, their
bodies swaying on the dance floor. All the…togetherness. She pushed her way