"If you pass the test it will not be casual s*x, but if you don't, it may be too much to ask you to take three men as your lovers for one week." Nothing she could have said would have shocked me more. "Uh, is there anything...strange about them?" "Strange?" "Look, I've been celibate for three f**king years. I'm climbing the walls. You're telling me I can have three lovers for a week and if it doesn't go well, I won't remember them nor feel guilty. If it does go well, they're stuck with me and I with them. So, unless they're really eighty-year old yetis, I'm not so sure what the problem is." She blinked. "This is usually the hardest one for anyone testing. It was hard for me." "Still have your three?" She nodded, a slightly dreamy look in her eyes. "Two, actually." "Well then, when do I meet them?" "If you're ready, now." I took a deep breath and grabbed Diego's collar as he drew close. "Ok, go."
Chapter 1 001
I have the kind of life no one believes, because pretty much everything I've lived through Dickens once wrote and soap operas like to use once a month.
Taken one instance at a time it might be believed across multiple lives: if you had a friend who discovered the mother they hated wasn't their real one after her death, and another friend was tragically forced into prison to protect herself even as the victim of a crime, you might believe both women's stories, right? Well, both things happened to me when a young age and are just two footnotes in a life that should have belonged to a dozen people, not one woman.
The result is by age thirty I was tired. Bone-deep tired of living. Please don't confuse that with being suicidal, I was hardly that. If I wanted to die life gave me more than a few opportunities to do so and each time I fought like hell to stay. Why? I suppose answering that question had become the focus of my "retirement." Most people want the meaning of life, yet I just wanted a reason to live.
I'd come to think of the past year since turning thirty as the twilight of retirement. I gave up the games I played. I stopped working hard for money at a cost to all else, stopped looking for love or a good time with multiple faces. I got rid of the people who called themselves my friends but really were drama queens and suicide kings seeking an audience, and pared down to a handful of people I felt I could trust.
The result? I was bored, alone most of the time, and had little company beyond my thoughts and my trusted dog Diego. Sure, people who haven't gone through that will tell you it gives you perspective. It just bored me to tears. Hell, there's a reason why rich people go to Nepalese retreats to meditate and think things over...have you ever seen the staff at those joints? And hell, you have some bald dude in orange telling you how to think, how to meditate and ruminate. I just have a dog who wants little in life beyond eating my hand lotion.
At some point I became a grand statue, like that baboon-looking thing in Daley Plaza Picasso bizarrely claimed was a woman. Something amazingly and terrifyingly beautiful to behold, anchored to the ground with rusting bolts. Like the baboon, the locals ignore me, the tourists didn't know about me, and only a few old souls who truly understood took notice, but they tended to come and go in constant motion.
Trust me, it's less fun to be a work of public art than a human.
I suppose after such a static year I was using my time to figure out how to tear up the bolts and go somewhere where statues became human. Swimming my way back to life, I guess, but I couldn't go into the pond I'd dwelled in before. That's the price of a break, you can't ever go back. Blink and the race is over, new one's beginning.
My life had taken a strange turn and I ended up living in a small two bedroom house by myself for free, the only bill I paid was the Internet. Great, sure, but strange enough to always keep me wondering and slightly agoraphobic. It rose because I was between landlords, the old ones having sold the house I occupied and the new ones MIA. Any knock on the door could have foretold doom to this idyllic situation, so I learned to fear the sound.
One day in February, when the ground was covered with ice and grey slush, and the air alternated between the ghostly promise of warmth and icy frost, a dreaded knock came. My heart pounded and I tried to remind myself no matter which villain of my past or unknown of my future it was, I could handle them. I had a black belt, I was tall and sturdy, and I had made a life out of fighting my way through greater odds to no aim in particular.
Armed to do so once again, I did my best to ignore that it was just after noon and I still wore pajamas. I'd begun to treat every new meeting as a battle, and when in doubt, confuse your enemies.
The woman at my back door was tall, slim, gorgeous. She looked young at first glance, older at second, and when she smiled she was both. Her hair was long and dark blonde, and she was dressed in an expensive cashmere coat and shiny heeled winter boats magically free of salt, slush, and snow.
"Hello, Anna."
It's never good when someone uses my legal name. Everyone friendly uses my nickname, Groucho. Stupid, I know, but I was both a grump and a Marx brother fan, and the nickname had stuck since high school. Only debt collectors used what's on the driver's license.
"Yes?"
"I'm Alessandra Joeson. May I come in?"
"Why?" I asked automatically. There was something familiar about her in a distant way, but no good ever came of inviting strangers into my home.
"It's rather cold out here, I'd like to warm up."
"Tell me why you came, then we'll see." I folded my arms and tried to look imposing, but in her bare feet she was my height, and her heels added almost four inches.
"I'm here about your mother."
"Which one?" I felt a tick in my left eye. Twenty-five years ago the mother who raised me, the one I'd thought for thirty years was my mother, had died. Just one year ago a strange woman called and explained she was my real mother. It was complicated, and nothing ever came of it. Both were open wounds, and neither one appealed to me as a topic of discussion with a stranger.
"Pardon me?"
"The dead one or the one who abandoned me?"
Her hard green gaze softened. "I'd really rather speak of this inside."
"Yeah? Well, I don't. State your business or go."
She recognized the challenge and met it, something few people ever tried with me. "Your birth mother is why I am here. She's dead."
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