EnjoytheShow by Erika Almond

Chapter One
     
    I was glad I’d told him to leave. As I stood down the road
from my cottage, on the corner where town began, I heard myself say again what
I’d told him. Get. Get your shit, get out of my house and get out of my
life. That was exactly what should’ve been said to a cheating weasel and if
there was any relief to be had from the heat of our argument or the blistering
midday sun, it was that I’d said exactly what I wanted to say. I wasn’t
standing here wishing I’d said it.
    But now I was on the street in the sizzling early afternoon
glare with nowhere to go. He was back at our place— my place—packing his
crap, and I wasn’t about to hang around watching him, not after he told me he’d
been with her. Was the sun really beating down on me that hard or was I just mad
as blazes? Not only at him, or that sophisticated bitch from the real estate
office, with her fitted suits and pricy-smelling perfume and her hair always
blown out just so. She was exactly the kind of woman he’d always said he was
glad I wasn’t.
    She was supposed to show us houses to move into together.
When I got behind with work because he was dragging ass about every single
place, he started checking out the places without me. Looking back, the signs
had been there, him going off with her alone, drawing it all out. Nah,
Josie, this one’s not worth your time. I’ll keep looking. If I see a place
that’s right for us, I’ll call you to come on over. I never got that call.
He’d probably been fucking her brains out in every dream kitchen I hadn’t
gotten to see. No, I wasn’t as hellfire mad at either of them as I was at
myself, for being too love-drunk to see clearly.
    Truth be told, I didn’t leave him to pack on his own because
my pride had been sucker-punched, or so I could make a dramatic exit after a
good and well-delivered f-you line. I left to keep myself from going to bed
with him. Now, if a friend told me she was afraid of fucking the boyfriend
who’d just said he’d cheated on her, I’d have thought she was either stupid
beyond reason or completely cock-whipped. Like I was. Sometimes I think it was
the sex that kept me with him, because he wasn’t exactly what you’d call a
brilliant conversationalist or a winner in his chosen field, whatever that
might be this week. He was entirely cute, he was kind to puppies and what he
really had going for him was a look in his eyes that said he could make me feel
things I’d only read about. When he gave me that look, and when he walked over
with the swagger of a man who’s packing heat and knows how to warm a girl…
Well, I couldn’t trust myself, not even after being burned crisp at the edges.
    So yeah, I had to get out of my sweet little
single-girl-again cottage before I tried to get in one last fuck with the man
who’d just fucked me over.
    I reached back and pulled my long hair, which felt heavy
with the heat, off my neck. As I wove thick handfuls in a loose braid, finely
scripted words flashed at me from my inner forearm. To thine own self be
true. I knew I’d had that tattooed there for a reason. I’d felt the words
in my skin right before I told him and his tight jeans and his let me fuck
you senseless eyes to go to hell.
    Okay, right on and you go girl and all that, but I couldn’t
stand here on this corner all the hot day long until the bastard was done and
gone. I flapped the skirt of my green sundress, needing a breeze. Damn, what
now? Not “what now” like, without him in my future, because I’d been fine
before him and I’d be fine without him. I loved him, I won’t lie about that,
but now I hated him so much I couldn’t even bring myself to say his name in my
head. No, what I meant was, what would I do now with the three or so hours it
would take that fool to get his things together and get them out of my place?
    I couldn’t go to my folks’. An afternoon of Momma shaking
her head, clucking and saying Josie, I told you he was all kinds of