Between the Sheets Read Online Free Page A

cold and prickly surface.
    “Bitch.”
    It wasn’t until lunch on Thursday that Shelby had a chance to look at the identity projects the fifth-grade class had made. Sitting in the Bishop Elementary teachers’ lounge with another cup of coffee and a terribly unsatisfying salad that she’d given up on, she pulled the packets from her bag.
    Jeremy had drawn a very, very good stegosaurus. His detail, particularly with the colored pencils, was really improving. Jessica had drawn a picture of herself praying and what she hoped was Jesus standing over her shoulder.
    “Oh, hey, it’s Art day.”
    Oh God, it’s Joe .
    Sixth-grade teacher Joe Phillips stepped into the small lounge and it got even smaller. It seemed to shrink to the head of a pin, and she didn’t know what to do with her arms and legs. It felt like she had extra, as if she’d turned into an octopus upon his arrival. She sat up, crossed her legs, and then uncrossed them and when he wasn’t looking, made sure all her hair was back in its ponytail and she didn’t have any food on the front of her sweater.
    She was worse than a teenage girl. And utterly powerless to help herself.
    Other women knew how to do this. How to like a man, how to know if he liked her. And then, in some kind of magical alchemy, take all that interest and turn it into something. A date. A passionate make-out session in a broom closet. Anything.
    But somehow, she had missed those lessons. When other girls were pulled aside and taught how to put on mascara, or figured out how to flirt, or how to be confident around a man she wanted to like her, she’d been busy praying.
    Busy begging forgiveness for sins she didn’t even know how to commit.
    There’d been a man at her Teachers of Arts and Sciences Conference last summer—an Ag teacher from the other side of the state whom she thought she’d been flirting with at the conference for two years. For two years she’d been drinking white wine spritzers in the hotel bar with other teachers, waiting, hoping for him to make a move. Any kind of move.
    But he never did.
    So last summer she’d worked up the courage to take matters into her own hands and when the moment arose, she planned to ask him up to her room—she’d even brought a thong! A thong .
    He brought pictures of his new wife. Their wedding in the Ozarks.
    Oh, how foolish she’d felt in that thong. How stupid. And how furious.
    As a child, in the face of her father’s violent disapproval, she’d created this identity, this cold distance between herself and other people’s opinions, in an act of defiant self-protection. Dad couldn’t hurt her if she pretended not to care. Pretended she didn’t need affection or approval.
    And then no one could hurt her if she pretended she was above the messy needs and wants of the humanheart if she just buried what she wanted so deep they couldn’t see it—so deep that she even forgot it.
    It had been an abused and scared kid’s way of coping.
    And as a woman, she didn’t know how to change it.
    She’d smiled at the conference bar, toasted the newlyweds, all while tucking away those things she wanted, cramming them into an already full box buried deep inside of her.
    Driving home from that conference in an uncomfortable thong, she’d stopped to help a man on the side of the highway whose car had broken down. And that man, in the five-minute encounter, had said something sleazy, something about how good she looked bent over a car, and that overfull box of thwarted desires cracked right open. So she kissed him, let him put his hand up her skirt.
    That man ended up being Dean Jennings, the CEO of the Maybream Cracker Company, who was coming to town for a contest being run by the America Today morning show, and when she saw him again a few days later Shelby lost her mind. That was all she could attribute it to; she flat out had a mental breakdown, because she jeopardized everything so she could engage in one of the worst affairs in human