“Men wear pink these days.”

Adele scowled and shook her head. “Well, someone needs to tell them that they shouldn’t.”

“I wouldn’t date a guy in pink.” Maddie took a drink, then added, “I don’t want a man that in touch with his feminine side.”

“Quinn would never wear pink,” Lucy pointed out, and before Clare could argue further, she dropped the irrefutable proof. “Lonny cares way too much about his cuticles.”

That was true. He was obsessive about neat cuticles and perfectly trimmed nails. Clare’s hand fell to the lap of her green peasant skirt. “I just thought he was a metrosexual.”

Maddie shook her head. “Is there really such a thing as a metrosexual?”

“Or,” Adele inquired, “is that just another term for men on the down-low?”

“Men on the what-low?”

“I saw it on Oprah last year. Men on the down-low are homosexual men who pass themselves off as straight.”

“Why would anyone do that?”

“I imagine it’s easier to fit into society. Or perhaps they want children. Who knows?” Adele shrugged. “I don’t care about Lonny. I care about you, and you should have told us yesterday instead of holding it all inside.”

“I didn’t want to ruin Lucy’s day.”

“You wouldn’t have ruined it,” Lucy assured her with a shake of her head, her blond ponytail brushing the collar of her blue shirt. “I did wonder if something might be up when you all went missing for a while. Then when Adele and Maddie appeared again, you weren’t with them.”

“I drank a bit too much,” Clare confessed, and was relieved when no one brought up her episode at the karaoke machine belting out “Fat Bottomed Girls” or any other embarrassing moments of the previous evening.

For a second she debated whether to tell her friends about Sebastian, but in the end she didn’t. There were just some humiliating moments a girl should keep to herself. Getting drunk and slutty at her age was one of them. You told me I was the best sex you’d ever had in your life, he’d said, and laughed as he dropped his towel. You couldn’t get enough. Yeah, some things were most definitely best taken to the grave.

“Men are so evil,” she said, thinking of Sebastian’s laughter. If there was one thing Clare hated, it was being laughed at; especially by a man. More specifically, by Sebastian Vaughan. “It’s like they can see when we’re at our lowest, our most vulnerable, then they circle and wait until just the right moment to take advantage of us.”

“That’s true. Serial killers can size up the most vulnerable in a matter of seconds,” Maddie added, causing her friends to groan inwardly. Because Maddie wrote true crime novels, she interviewed sociopaths for a living and had written about some of the most violent crimes throughout history. As a result, she tended to have a warped view of mankind and hadn’t dated in about four years. “It becomes second nature.”

“Did I tell you about my date last week?” Adele asked in an effort to change the subject before Maddie got started. Adele wrote and published science fiction and tended to date very strange men. “He’s a bartender at a little place in Hyde Park.” She laughed. “Get this, he told me that he is William Wallace reincarnated.”

“Uh-huh.” Maddie took a drink of her coffee. “Why is it that everyone who has ever claimed to be reincarnated is the reincarnation of someone famous? It’s always Joan of Arc or Christopher Columbus or Billy the Kid. It’s never some peasant girl with rotted teeth or the sailor who cleaned Chris’s chamberpot.”

“Maybe only famous people get to be reincarnated,” Lucy provided.

Maddie made a rude snorting sound. “More likely it’s all crap.”

Clare suspected the latter, and asked what she thought was the first of two pertinent questions. “Does this bartender look like Mel Gibson?”

Adele shook her head. “Afraid not.”

Now the second question, which was more important than the first. “You don’t believe him, do you?” Because sometimes she had to wonder if Adele believed what she wrote.

“Nah.” Adele shook her head, and her mass of long blond curls brushed her back. “I questioned him and he knew nothing of John Blair.”

“Who?”

“Wallace’s friend and chaplain. I had to research William Wallace for the Scottish time travel I did last year. The bartender was just trying to trick me into bed.”

“Dog.”

“Jerk.”

“Did it work?”

“No. I’m not that easily tricked these days.”

Clare thought of Lonny. She wished she could say the same. “Why do men try and trick us?” Then she answered her own questions. “Because they’re all liars and cheats.” She looked at the faces of her friends and quickly added, “Oh, sorry, Lucy. All men except for Quinn.”

“Hey,” Lucy said, and held up one hand, “Quinn isn’t quite perfect. And believe me, he wasn’t anywhere near perfect when I first met him.” She paused and a smile crept across her lips. “Well, except in the bedroom.”

“All this time,” Clare said with a shake of her head, “I thought Lonny had a really low libido, and he let me think it. I thought I wasn’t attractive enough for him, and he let me think that too. How could I have fallen in love with him? There has to be something wrong with me.”

“No, Clare,” Adele assured her. “You’re perfect just the way you are.”

“Yes.”

“It was him. Not you. And someday,” added Lucy the newlywed, “you’re going to find a great guy. Like one of those heroes you write about.”

But even after hours of reassurance, Clare still couldn’t quite believe that there wasn’t something wrong with her. Something that made her choose men like Lonny who could never love her fully.

After her friends left, she walked through her house and couldn’t recall a time when she’d felt so alone. Lonny certainly hadn’t been the only man in her life, but he had been the only man she’d moved into her home.

She walked into her bedroom and stopped in front of the dresser she’d shared with Lonny. She bit her bottom lip and crossed her arms over her heart. His things were gone, leaving half of the mahogany top bare. His cologne and personal grooming brushes. His photo of her and Cindy, and the shallow bowl he’d kept for Chap Stick and stray buttons. All gone.

Her vision blurred but she refused to cry, fearing that once she started, she would not stop. The house was so utterly quiet, the only sound that of the air-conditioning blowing from the vents. No sound of her little dog as she barked at the neighborhood cats or of her fiancé as he worked on his latest craft.

She opened a drawer that had kept his neatly folded trouser socks. The drawer was empty, and she took a few steps back and sat on the edge of the bed. Overhead, a lacy canopy cut shadowy patterns across her arms and the lap of her green skirt. In the past twenty-four hours she’d experienced every emotion. Hurt. Anger. Sorrow. Confusion and loss. Then panic and horror. At the moment she was numb and so tired she could probably sleep for the coming week. She’d like that. Sleep until the pain went away.

When she’d returned home that morning from the Double Tree, Lonny had been waiting for her. He’d begged her to forgive him.

“It was just that once,” he said. “It won’t happen again. We can’t throw away what we have because I messed up. It didn’t mean anything. It was just sex.”

When it came to relationships, Clare had never understood the whole concept of meaningless sex. If a person wasn’t involved with someone, that was different, but she didn’t understand how a man could be in love with a woman and yet have sex with someone else. Oh, she understood desire and attraction. But she just couldn’t comprehend how a person, gay or straight, could hurt the one they professed to love for sex that meant nothing.

“We can work through this. I swear it just happened that once,” Lonny said, as if he repeated it enough, she’d believe him. “I love our life.”

Yes, he loved their life. He just hadn’t loved her. There had been a time in her life when she actually might have listened. It wouldn’t have changed the outcome, but she would have thought she had to listen. When she might have tried to believe him, or think she needed to understand him, but not today. She was through being the queen of denial. Through investing so much of her life with men who couldn’t thoroughly invest theirs.

“You lied to me, and you used me in order to live that lie,” she’d told him. “I won’t live your lie anymore.”

When he realized he wasn’t going to change her mind, he’d behaved like a typical man and got nasty. “If you’d been more adventurous, I wouldn’t have had to look outside the relationship.”

The more Clare thought about it, the more she was certain it had been the same excuse her third boyfriend had used when she’d caught him with the stripper. Instead of acting ashamed, he had invited her to join them.

Clare didn’t think it was outrageous or selfish for her to want to be enough for the man she loved. No third parties. No whips and chains, and no scary devices.

No, Lonny wasn’t the first man in her life to break her heart. He was just the latest. There had been her first love, Allen. Then Josh, a drummer in a bad band. There’d been Sam, a base jumper and extreme mountain biker, followed by Rod, the lawyer, and Zack the felon. Each subsequent boyfriend had been different from the last, but in the end, whether she broke it off or they had, none of the relationships ever lasted.

She wrote of love. Big, sweeping, larger-than-life love stories. But she was such an utter failure when it came to love in her real life. How could she write about it? Know it and feel it, yet get it so wrong? Time and again?

What was wrong with her?

Were her friends right? Had she known on some subconscious level that Lonny was gay? Had she known even as she’d made excuses for him? Even as she’d accepted his excuse for his lack of sexual interest? Even as she’d blamed herself?