“Lara Losers was definitely not a loser, no matter how much people made fun of her for her name or for being a woman, let alone a conventionally beautiful one. She was a winner through and through. In that first hour meeting her, I learned that she had dominated her internship at one of the biggest real estate agencies in the city. There were vicious rumors that she slept her way to the position. These are lies, meant to slander my wife. But, even if she had, it didn’t demean her in any way to me. She proved her merit when she showed me her portfolio of one hundred high-class sales… all within the past year!”
Lara flipped through the first half of the papers. Her name showed up at least once on every single one of them.
“What. The. Fuck.”
She reached back in and pulled out more papers.“For our wedding, Lara wanted to have only three bridesmaids, which pleased my mother greatly, since I have exactly three brothers, and if I insisted on ‘looking like a man’, by hell, my mother would get her heterosexual wedding aesthetic to show her friends.
However, the drama that erupted because I chose two friends over two of my brothers almost caused us to elope in Vegas. I brought it up more than once. It would have been easy enough to do… hop a plane and get married at the nearest Elvis Station. Yet I knew how much a family affair meant to my wife, and convinced her to take on two more bridesmaids. She ended up picking a pair of cousins she hadn’t talked to since she was nineteen. I think they thought they had stepped into Cinderella’s castle on our wedding day. I couldn’t blame them. I thought she looked like a princess as well.”
Lara fell to her knees in front of the open drawer. There were more pages – pages upon pages – with Kennedy’s meticulous handwriting scribbling her thoughts on her wife, marriage, and even bits and pieces about her career and home life.“The first thing she told me when I asked her to be my girlfriend was that she didn’t want to have children. Was I okay with that? Would I pressure her in ten years to give me an heir? You must understand, if you’re not in our society, it can be confusing… but women don’t have a lot of freedom regarding children. It’s mandatory in many of the more conservative families to have an heir, preferably two. You know the saying – an heir and a spare. Lara was upfront, saying motherhood wasn’t for her. Until then, I had been on the fence about children, assuming that my wife would make the final decision. Well, she did, didn’t she? I wouldn’t take a gaggle of perfect children in exchange for my wife.”
More words. More praise. Tiny criticisms, like how she often spat her toothpaste into the sink and didn’t wash it down all the way. Or how she mumbled in her sleep, usually about the most nonsensical things. “She can be harsh to our staff sometimes, but she’s also very generous come Christmas and birthdays, or because something made her think of someone working in our house or office. Lara simply expects excellence from everyonearound her. If any of our staff thinks she’s tough on them, imagine how she is on me! If I screw something up, I hear about it for months, sometimes years. She wants me to improve myself. In turn, I challenge her as well.”
Sometimes, things were crossed out. Other times, there were tiny notes in the margins, usually in Chloe’s curly handwriting.“You’re so sweet, Ms. Anderssen.” “I’m not sure Mrs. Anderssen would like the word ‘beastly’ in reference to her flirting…” “Do you have a picture to go with this passage? I think the audience would like a visual reference. I know I do!”
“Lara!”
Papers crumpled in her hands as Lara turned, heart thumping wildly in her chest.
“Kennedy!”
There she stood, in her office doorway, suit jacket tossed over her arm. The look she gave her wife was both one of shock and horror. “What are you doing in my private drawer?”
Lara dropped what she held, but the damage was already done. She and her wife kept few secrets between them, but one thing they acknowledged was private correspondence and spaces. They didn’t go through each other’s mail, electronic or physical. They didn’t intrude on meetings unless previously given permission. And they sure as hell stayed out of each other’s locked drawers. Lara had violated more than her wife’s trust by rooting through her locked desk drawer.
“I had to know what was going on!” Already she was on the defensive, determined to clear her besmirched name before her partner even had the chance to besmirch it. “Things had been so shady around here… you and Chloe…”
“What about me and Chloe?”
She saw the look on Kennedy’s face. She knew instantly what Lara had suspected, and it was more than betrayal coloring hercheekbones. Lara bent over the yellow stationery scattered on the floor… and cried.
They were tears of relief and fear. Relief that her paranoia was just that, and her spouse was not cheating on her. But the fear. The fear!I fucked up badly!Now Kennedy knew how crazy she was. Not only had she suspected something as heinous as infidelity, but she had rooted through her private stashes in search of something against her. Had the tables been turned? Lara would have never forgiven her.
Kennedy stayed far away from her for a minute. Lara could not see her face through her shameful tears, but she could feel her aura from so far away. “How could you, Lara?” She wasn’t angry. She was sad. The woman she had written so highly of in these papers was sobbing on her office floor after being caught like Chloe was.
“Lara.” That stern voice was not sexual. Rarely did Lara hear this side of her and not be the submissive end to her domination. No, this was matrimonial, sure, but for all the wrong reasons. “I am not sleeping with our maid.”
“I know!” she cried through her sobs, each one more heinous than the last. They wracked her body… a body purging itself of the negativity, the paranoia, and her will to destroy a marriage that seemed too good to be true for so long. And yet here she was, destroying the best thing that had ever happened to her. “I’m sorry.”
Sorry would never be enough for her unwarranted suspicions. Of course, Kennedy had not cheated on her. Why would she? Was she really so dumb, so foolhardy as to believe this woman who let her get away with murder would be any less than faithful to a fault? For fuck’s sake, they were swingers! If she were happy, why would she cheat? What sort of disgusting half-truths had Lara swallowed over the years? Did she really have so little faith in her marriage?
I didn’t confront her about the maid because deep down, I knew it was baseless.Like her therapist told her, she had only been concerned with dismantling her own marriage, finding every little fault as an excuse to get a divorce. Except to what end? Did she really need Kennedy to prove her love to her every ten years? Would she still be playing this game at eighty?
“I can’t believe you went through my things.” Kennedy came to her, swiftly, her polished leather shoes appearing beside Lara’s huddling, shaking body.
“I had to know…” It was all she could say. “I had to know what you were up to. Everyone was being so secretive, I couldn’t take it anymore!”
“You didn’t even ask me?”
“How could I have…” What? Trusted her? Lara cut off that thought before she completely embarrassed herself even further. “I wanted to see it for myself. Kennedy…” She held up the tattered papers. “What is this?”
She bent down, hands snatching the papers away and putting them back in neat order. “A manuscript.” The papers slid back into her desk drawer, where she plucked out one of the bound proofs and held it above her wife’s head. “I wrote a book. A memoir.”
“What?”
Her tears had abated. Now she saw her spouse through puffy eyes. She saw someone disappointed with herself, her wife, and whatever this project was that she held in her hands. “It was going to be a surprise, Bunny.” It surprised Lara to hear her nickname. “I was going to show you this proof while we were on our honeymoon. It’s being published in a couple of months.”
Lara couldn’t believe her ears. “A memoir?” She didn’t even know Kennedy wrote outside of legal documents and the occasional note to somebody. She had their personal assistant atwork transcribe most of her letters. “Since when have you been writing a memoir?”
