White Picket Fences

“The golfer?” he asked. Zack didn’t follow the game, but the Sharp woman was a local and had been in the news a lot lately.

Dawn nodded.

“But…”

Zack swallowed. Suddenly wanted to be anywhere but here. Anywhere but in this house—their house.

As the air grew almost too thick to breathe, Zack refused to utter the words screaming inside him. They were so incomprehensible he couldn’t even say them.

Dawn finally turned toward him.

“But she’s a woman.” The words came, anyway. Zack wanted to snatch them back.

More so when he saw the pathetic glow in his wife’s eyes as she nodded again.

CHAPTER TWO

ZACK TOOK ANOTHER SIP of beer, tried to clear his head, to send himself on another path. But the words and pictures just kept coming.

“But she’s a woman.” He’d said the words so innocently, as though his wife didn’t know damn well what she was asking him to accept. Even now, after almost a year, he still couldn’t believe that his wife had left him for a woman. That the woman he’d slept with for six years was more attracted to her own sex than she was to him.

He finished his beer in one long gulp and opened another.

In spite of making every effort not to fall in to the trap, he was back there again, seeing that glow in her eyes…

HE REELED BACK, feeling as though he’d been sucker punched. He had been sucker punched.

“I’m so sorry,” Dawn said, her voice barely audible as her tears started to fall in earnest. “You don’t know how hard I’ve fought this, but I just can’t fight anymore.”

There were a million things he didn’t say. Accusations. Questions. Zack couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even think clearly enough to string coherent thoughts together. He could only stand there and stare at his sweet feminine wife. And wait.

Wait for her to do something. To take back the things she’d just said. Things that were too terrible to bear.

“Last night Barbara asked me to move in with her, and I can’t tell her no, Zack. I want to be with her, to share her life more than anything I’ve ever wanted before. Suddenly things feel right—peaceful. When I’m with her, I feel…complete.”

It just kept getting worse. “How long have you been seeing her?”

“A while.”

“How long?” He was sure it didn’t matter, but he had to focus on something before he crawled right out of his skin.

“I met her last year at the Phoenix Open.”

She’d been there as a company sponsor, schmoozing in a VIP booth.

“You’ve been seeing her for more than a year?” He thought of all the nights he’d made love to her in the past fourteen months.

“For a long time we were just friends.”

“Define ‘long time.”’

“I don’t know. Six months, maybe.”

Which left eight unaccounted for. He nodded, clenching his jaw so hard it ached.

“Then, one night after we’d gone to a movie, she asked me if I wanted to stop by her place for a drink….”

“I don’t want to hear this.” He ordered himself to vacate the premises, but his damn feet wouldn’t move. There was going to be a punch line here somewhere. He just had to wait for it.

“She came out to me that night…”

“What does that mean?” The words were clipped, but they were the best he could do.

“She told me she was interested in having a relationship with me and asked me if that was something I would consider.”

“Friendship wasn’t relationship enough?” he muttered sarcastically. His world was out of control and he couldn’t seem to stop it from spinning faster and faster.

“I know this is hard for you to understand—”

“Damn straight it’s hard,” he interrupted. “Try impossible.”

Dawn sank down onto their bed, and as much as he wanted to hate her, Zack had to admire the way she was sticking this out. Trying to do the decent thing by him. Some distant part of Zack even appreciated the attention she was giving him.

“I’m in love with her,” she said, shaking her head helplessly.

“We’re talking about a woman here!”

“I know.” Her face lined with confusion, she sounded as though she was finding it as difficult to make sense of all this as he was. Except that she’d apparently had a lot longer to get used to the idea. Eight months, to be exact.

Zack turned away. He couldn’t even look at the bed he’d shared with her during the past eight months. Couldn’t think of all the times he’d made love to her.

Oh, God. He felt sicker than ever. Had she been thinking of another woman whenever he’d…

“How does a woman suddenly decide she wants another woman?” he demanded, feeling frustrated. Hurt.

“I suspected I might be a lesbian even before we got married.”

“You had relationships with other women way back then?” He swung around to pin her with an accusing glare. How in hell could he not have known?

“No.” She shook her head, withstood his look. “I could never quite acknowledge that there were just times when I’d feel something—or more importantly, wouldn’t feel something.”

That punched him in the gut. “You were faking the whole time you were with me?”

“No!” She stood, approached him, stopping only when he started to back away from her. “That’s just it. When I met you, when you touched me, I felt real desire for a man for the first time in my life. I can’t tell you how relieved I was.”

Zack held out a hand to her. “Then…”

She shook her head, forestalling his words. “It didn’t last,” she said. “Or at least, not strongly enough. I feel things when I’m with Barbara that I’ve never felt before. This is right for me, Zack. I’m one hundred percent sure of it.”