Underneath It All by Margo Candela Read Free Book Online Page B

She asked me, me, for blow job tips.” Natasha puts a hand to her padded breast. “Me of all people.”
    “She did not!” Mrs. Mayor might have no problem with culturally insensitive questions and assumptions or inspecting my guinea-pig bikini waxes, but she’s never gotten that personal. “What did you tell her?”
    “I told her I was a good Catholic girl saving myself for marriage.” Natasha purses her lips and gets back to work on my face.
    “You and me both, sister ... Still, where does she get off asking me about Mexican art? I’ve never implied I know anything about art, Mexican or otherwise.”
    “Honey, don’t you know yet? We’re here to function as emissaries and the tellers of secret wisdoms from our respective tribes. If you were black, she’d ask you how to pick a good watermelon.” She shrugs her massive shoulders nonchalantly.
    “Natasha!” I’m shocked that she has the guts to say what I’ve always thought, but never wanted to admit to. No matter how easily I can move between my personas of Jacqs and Jacquelyn, I’m still an anomaly, and the most innocuous events will remind me of that. “It still doesn’t make it right.”
    “No, it doesn’t, but that’s the way it is. If you want to dance with the piper, you gotta dance to his—or, in this case, her—tune.”
    “Speaking of which, how’s your man doing?” Natasha’s husband is a dancer with some elaborate gay revue.
    “Doing everyone within dick range, from what I can tell.” Natasha fusses with my hair. “You’ve got great hair, honey. Thank your mother for me. I found some blond pubes in his Calvin Klein. And not my shade of blond.”
    “What are you doing inspecting his underwear?” I pull my head away. Sure I had my share of suspicions about boyfriends and my ex-husband but I never resorted to digging through the hamper for evidence.
    “Jacqs, for such a smart girl you are a stupid woman,” she says as she plants a kiss on the top of my head.
    “Maybe they just got there by accident.” Yep, I think those seven words pretty much confirm my stupidity.
    “Yeah, he accidentally rubbed his crotch against some skinnier, younger, more energetic version of me.” She checks herself out in the mirror and sighs.
    “Jesus wouldn’t do that.” I swear that’s his name and his bit involves a white robe and golden halo. He goes by the Spanish pronunciation of his name, as in HeySeuss, but it doesn’t make anything he does any less shocking to his mostly Anglo audience. “He loves you.”
    “How can he not? I’m fabulous,” Natasha says without her normal verve. “This marriage thing is a bitch. No wonder you bailed.”
    “My circumstances were a little more boring than yours.” To say the least.
    “Boring, that’s me! I’m a boring, old, fat married lady.” With one final sweep of the brush, Natasha steps back. “I’ve never been happier or more miserable.”
    “Have you considered therapy?” I like Jesus. I just wish he wasn’t such a slut.
    “Therapy, feng shui, acupuncture, couples massage. You name it, we’ve done it.” She leans in and hugs me hard, all 200-plus pounds of her. “You’re the last romantic, Jacqs.”
    “That’s me, a romantic.”

14
    Nate
    I lock my office door and click open a web browser to an anonymizer site. Never can be too careful when one is slightly stalking an ex-husband over the Internet.
    Nate is a creature of habit and it’s made it very easy to keep track of him, though he did smarten up and change his e-mail passwords shortly after he rightly suspected I was peeking into his accounts. I don’t know why he bothered; he lays his whole life out in his blog for the world to read. Why anybody besides me would read it is beyond me, but Nate always thought very highly of himself.
    Mostly his entries deal with his job, traveling for his job, movies he’s seen and food he’s eaten. He also frequents a handful of message boards that I don’t bother to search more than