Homewrecker (Novel Sample)

Different Day

"Tomo..." Arabecka rolled her face away from the cat's paws and sighed, opening her eyes to another day. She'd been having a cozy dream. She'd been in a green field, under a blue sky, at the end of a rainbow with a shovel in her hand.

Tufts of cat hair drifted in the sunlit air like small clouds. Her alarm hadn't gone off, she realized. By the blinding brightness of the room, she'd say it was after ten. Hopefully, her children would have made themselves breakfast and gone off to school, but she was too much of a realist to hold on to that pipe-dream for longer than a second. Willow was on her period and Jay... Well, Jay was Jay.

She found her phone in the tangle of sheets and saw that her alarm had gone off. Repeatedly. But what had happened was, she'd left her earphones connected and the alarm had rung through that instead. Even as she held her phone in her hand, one of her back-up alarms was going off silently. "Goddammit," she grunted, spotting her giant earphones at the foot of the bed.

Tomo-Tomo, the old Maine coon formerly known as Sir Thomas, nipped gently at her toes and she scooped him into her lap, giving him his daily morning rub. She ran her fingers through the thick fur on his belly and chuckled at his weak attempts to escape her clutches. After a minute or two of baby talk, she let him escape and he dashed through the door, tail held high and flashing his ass at her.

It was only when the last bit of Tomo's black fur settled on the crisp white sheets that she realized her husband had not come home last night. His side of their King size bed was perfectly wrinkle-free. As it had been for a very long while.

He'd been home the night before, but only for an hour or so, to shower and change before heading out again. The night before that, he'd gotten an important call from his coach and rushed out. Before that, there'd been a party. The week before that, his father had been sick...

Slowly, a pattern of absences strung themselves together in her mind. Joshua had been absent for so long, the natural wildlife was adjusting.

There was no love lost between Joshua and Tomo-Tomo. The cat had learned Joshua's habits and rotated himself to suit so they'd never have to share a room, but he'd come in today for a cuddle because he knew it was safe.

Okay, she thought, noted.

She dragged herself out of bed. If she'd been the type to have any kind of good luck, one of her floor supervisors or more industrious instructors would have covered her classes at the gym. That was how most businesses ran in most parts of the world. But with her luck, there'd be disgruntled clients picketing her in the parking lot for their money back.

"Saints and angels," she grumbled, shuffling her feet into her fuzzy bedroom slippers, "preserve us." She pulled a robe around her body and shook herself awake. Coffee. Everything would be better once she had her coffee.

She shuffled through the hallways and bristled at the rap music blasting from her son's room.

Teach a bitch how to lick it good

I know better, they get wetter

When you find 'em in the hood...

She'd warned him at least a hundred times about that kind of music in the house. According to Joshua, Jay was going through a natural teen phase. According to her own eyes and ears, Jay was turning into a disrespectful, disobedient punk. There were other words for it, but he was still her son. Technically.

He'd never been in a hood in his life. Of all the things to rap about...

Arabecka stopped outside his door and steeled herself for the confrontation she knew was coming. These days, she couldn't get two sentences in without it turning into a blowout. She knocked and noted that her fingers were bare. Her wedding band had slipped off at the gym, months ago, almost a year, and she'd never quite gotten around to searching for it. Or having it replaced. At the time, she'd expected Joshua to notice and make a fuss, but then she'd put it out of her mind and it had never come up.