Walk On The Wild Side Read Free

called, her gaze pinned on Molly.
    She heard his muffled reply coming from the direction of the bedroom.
    “Can you please come to the kitchen?”
    The summons was followed by heavy footsteps against hardwood floors, and before she was ready—could she ever be ready? Molly was met by the sight of her fiancé, wearing only a pair of ratty cargo shorts, his thick, light brown hair sticking up on end like he’d been rubbing it against a pillow all afternoon.
    “What is it, babe?” He said with a yawn, turning towards the woman, only to freeze as he caught sight of Molly, standing there, canvas bags of groceries clutched in a death grip.
    Any farfetched hope she might have had that there was some explanation, that this wasn’t exactly what it looked like, disappeared with the first flash of shock, followed immediately by guilt, that appeared in Josh’s brown eyes.
    “Babe, I can explain—“
    He was talking to the other woman, not her, Molly realized, as the sinking feeling in her stomach grew so strong she felt like it was going to turn her inside out.
    “Really? You can explain to your new wife that you have a fiancée too?”
    Molly’s cold fingers released their death grip on the grocery bags. They hit the floor with a thud, their contents spilling across the tile of Josh’s kitchen floor.
    Her head screamed at her to run, but her feet remained rooted in place, as though her body didn’t want to compute, didn’t want to accept the message her brain was processing.
    Wife.
    He had a wife.
    “Listen,” she heard Josh’s voice over the roaring of blood in her brain, over the sound of the other woman’s increasingly angry voice. “It will be fine, I promise,” Josh said, soothingly—soothing her. “Just let me take care of this.”
    Take care of this. The words echoed in Molly’s brain as Josh wrapped his hand around her arm and pulled her to the door. Take care of this, like she was an old couch that needed to be removed to make room for a new one, she thought as she let him guide her to entryway, where he gathered up her purse, and then onto the front steps.
    “Wh-when, what, h-how—" Molly sputtered when Josh pulled the door closed behind them.
    “I met Shayna at a conference last spring, and we hit it off.” Josh said in a voice so deadpan she knew he’d been rehearsing this speech for a while.
    “How long have you been fucking her?” Molly spat out, her entire body shaking with rage and confusion.
    Josh rubbed the back of his neck, his every cell radiating the fact that he’d rather be anywhere in the world other than answering to his girlfriend of over a decade and fiancée of five years. “Does it matter?” he said lamely.
    Molly planted both hands against his bare chest and shoved him. Though Josh had several inches and at least fifty pounds on her, rage infused the push with enough force to knock him on his ass onto the brick stoop in front of his house.
    “Take it easy!”
    “Take it easy? Take it easy?!” Molly shouted and resisted the urge to follow her shove with a kick to the nuts with her booted foot. She didn’t think Josh would go after her for assault, but she never thought he’d marry someone else either. “You leave town for a week and come back married and I’m supposed to take it easy?’
    “It’s not like we planned to get married,” he said as he pushed slowly to his feet.
    “Oh, that makes it so much better!”
    “It’s just, we were in Vegas, and we’ve got this great connection, and we thought, why not.”
    “Why not!” Molly echoed, a hysterical sound, half laugh, half cry erupting into the cool fall evening. “I mean, it’s not like you have someone waiting back home for you, someone who’s been with you for over a decade, waiting five goddamn years for you to pick a wedding date!”
    “Come on Molly, we’ve been growing apart for a long time. You have to admit it.”"No I don’t! I don’t have to admit anything. I haven’t been growing apart.”