The Art of French Kissing Read Free

“But where will I go?” I asked in a small voice, hating how desperate and unsure I sounded.
    Brett shrugged. “I don’t know. Your sister’s?”
    I shook my head once, quickly, pressing my lips tightly together. No way. I couldn’t stand the thought of having to slink up to Jeannie’s door and admit that I’d lost Brett. Eight years my senior, she was married to the passive, mousy Robert, and they had a three-year-old son who was the most spoiled child I’d ever seen. I couldn’t bear to think what she’d smugly say about Brett leaving me.
Failure
, she would call it.
Another failure for Emma Sullivan.
    “Well, I don’t know, Emma,” Brett said, sounding exasperated. He raked a hand distractedly through his hair, which was starting to grow too long.
He needs a haircut
, I thought abstractly for a millisecond, before I realized that it would no longer be my responsibility to remind him of such things. “You could go stay with one of your friends,” he said. “Lesley or Anne or Amanda or someone.”
    Hearing their names—the names of three of the girls who were meant to be my bridesmaids—sent a jolt through me.
    Brett blinked at me a few times and looked away. “Obviously you understand why you need to move out.”
    I felt sick. I couldn’t believe he was doing this.
    “Because it’s
your
place,” I said through gritted teeth. I could feel my eyes narrow. It had been a point of contention between us for the past year. Brett, with his bigger salary, had made the down payment on our MetroWest Orlando house. Each month, we split the mortgage payment, but Brett was the only one with his name on the deed. The few times I’d complained that the arrangement didn’t seem fair to me—after all, I was paying half the mortgage but earning no equity—Brett had smiled and reminded me that once we were married, all of our assets would be shared anyhow, so what was the point in worrying about something so inconsequential now?
    It had all sounded so reasonable at the time.
    “Right,” Brett responded, not even having the decency to look embarrassed. “We’ll figure something out about the mortgage, Em. I’m sure I owe you some money since you’ve made some contributions over the last year. I’ll talk to my father and see what we can do.”
    I gaped some more.
Contributions?
    “Anyhow, I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Brett continued. “This is really hard for me, too, you know. But in all honesty, it’s not you. It’s me. I’m sorry.”
    I almost laughed. Really. And perhaps I would have if I wasn’t currently absorbed in fantasizing about stabbing him with the knife I’d used to cut the bread.
    “You’ll be okay?” Brett asked after a moment of silence.
    “I’ll be fine,” I mumbled, suddenly furious that he would even ask, as if he cared at all.
    I hadn’t known what else to do the next morning when I awoke alone in an empty, king-size bed that was no longer half mine. I was numb; I felt like I was in the middle of a bad dream.
    So I did what I did every morning: I got up, I showered, I blew my hair dry, I put on my makeup, I picked out a sensible outfit, and I went to work. At least there was solace in routine.
    The offices of Boy Bandz Records were in a converted old train station in downtown Orlando, just a block from Brett’s law firm. Sometimes we would run into each other on Church Street as he went to get lunch at Kres with a colleague or I went to pick up a greasy slice of pizza from Lorenzo’s. I prayed that I wouldn’t run into him today. I didn’t think I could handle it.
    I sat down at my desk just before eight thirty and stared numbly at my computer screen. It was as if I had lost all ability to function. I had a million things to do today—a press release about the 407 boys, a CD mailing for O-Girlz (the girl band our company’s president, boy-band impresario Max Hedgefield, had just launched), several media calls to return—but I couldn’t imagine doing something as banal