Whatever It Takes

Whatever It Takes

L Maretta

Maretta Publishing (2013)

Rating: ****

Gavin Fitzgerald is the perfect husband. His wife, Emma, was always able to brag to her friends about how caring, loving, helpful, and successful he was. Having been married five years, they have just put the finishing touches on their dream home and are ready to start a family. Everything seems ideal until one day Gavin confesses to Emma that he was unfaithful, turning their entire relationship from perfect to a total disaster. Suddenly Emma's carefully controlled world is chaotic and her future uncertain as she struggles to determine if she is able to forgive Gavin or have the strength to move on.

Whatever It Takes

L. Maretta

 Copyright © 2013 by L. Maretta

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without the express permission from the author.  Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation with the author’s rights. 

Published June 2013

Book cover design by Aimee Bell, Author Design Studio,
www.authordesignstudio.com

This is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination.  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

1

Emma

Present Day

I'd been staring at the blue, rippling water for so long my eyes were stinging.  The discomfort should have prompted me to blink and look away, and yet I couldn't.  I just kept staring as if all of the answers to the questions in my head were going to emerge from the chlorinated pool.  I was fully aware of the company around me but only vaguely registered the noises; the laughing voices of our guests milling about, the stereo playing classic rock, the opening of beer bottles, and the sizzle of the burgers, chicken, and ribs being grilled.  It wasn’t until my best friend, Yvonne, had her fingers in front of my nose that I came out of my reverie.

Snap, snap, snap.

“Yo!  Em, you awake?”

“Hmm?”  I quickly turned my gaze towards her, blinking the dryness out of my eyes.

She laughed and blew out a puff of smoke from her Marlboro.  With her chestnut hair, dark skin, and mediterranean features, she looked like she could be posing for a cigarette magazine ad.

“Did you hear a word I said?” she asked me.

“Sorry,” was all I could say to her.

She took another pull from her cigarette and asked me the question I was dreading someone would ask me at some point today.  “You okay?”

I plastered a porcelain smile on my face.  “Yeah, I’m great.  I was just daydreaming.  What did you say?”

“I said that if you weren’t my best friend I’d be insanely jealous of you and therefore, of course, hate you.  Look at all this, girl!”  She waved her hand, gesturing to my backyard and all that was going on in it.

I understood what she was referring to.   Finally, after months of planning and working, my husband and I had given our dream home the only thing it needed: a fantastic oasis for entertaining guests during the summer months.  The large Grecian pool was finished with blue diamond brite making the water the color of the caribbean.   The patio was covered in brick pavers, all different shades of reds, and had chaise lounges littered around for sunbathing.  One end boasted a large seating area with a cushioned loveseat and gliders circling a fire pit, while the other held a long, wooden high top table with seating for twelve.  All of that, plus the thick, cushy grass and exotic plants surrounding it all would make you feel like you were staying at an exclusive resort.

“All of this,” Yvonne continued, waving her arm around in a wide circle, “and
that
,” her finger pointed at something over my shoulder, “I almost do hate you, you bitch.”

I smiled at her term of endearment for me and then looked over to my right to where she was pointing.  My husband.

Gavin was standing at the grill, Corona in hand, chatting with one of his coworkers- Dave I think-  while carefully eyeing the meat.  Gavin would consider it a tragedy if anything on his grill burned. 

“How on this green Earth you managed to find a man who has a great job, cooks, helps you with cleaning and laundry,
and
is that good looking, I’ll never know.”  Yvonne huffed and mashed her cigarette out in the ashtray. 

I had kept my eyes on my husband throughout her rant and even now, I couldn’t disagree with her.  Gavin did have a good job and he worked hard at it.  He was a genius at handling money, our own and other people’s, and it was because of that that we had what we did.

He was an amazing cook, something his late mother always took much pride in, for he had learned everything from her, and no matter how long of a day he had, he never complained about cooking most of the meals we shared.  Not that I was a bad cook or anything.  He just did it better.

I was the one who was much better at keeping a cleaned and organized home, but, just like Yvonne said, he pulled his own weight when it came to housekeeping.  He rinsed the sink when he shaved, hung his bathroom towels to dry, and rarely left his dirty socks on our bedroom floor.

As if that wasn’t enough to earn him husband of the year, Gavin was incredibly good looking

to boot.  He was just over six feet tall, with dark brown hair that he wore just long enough for me to run my fingers through it, but not so long that it looked like he was trying to be a thirty-three-year-old member of a boy band.  His skin was a perfect mixture of his Italian-Irish blood; a light olive tone, that just got a hint darker when he spent enough time in the sun.  Covered in sunblock, of course.  He was half Irish after all. 

He inherited his eyes from his father- a father he never had the chance to know, for he died while Gavin was an infant - and they were eyes that made me gasp the first time I looked into them.  Hazel, they were sometimes more brown, sometimes more green, depending on the light and they almost seemed to glow.  Yes, up until last night I would have enthusiastically agreed with Yvonne, that I had a husband other women should be jealous of.

Gavin turned away from his precious grill for a second then and our eyes met for the first time that day. He gave me a sad smile and I tried to swallow the rather large lump that had formed in my throat the night before for the millionth time that afternoon.  Before the tears that were collecting in the corners of my eyes could fall, I turned quickly back to Yvonne.

Porcelain smile back in place I laughed.  “You’ll find someone just as great as him.  Just keep your standards high.  He’s out there, Yvonne.”

“Or,” she huffed, pulling out another Marlboro to light, “we could just get Gavin cloned.  I think we have a better chance of doing that than I do of finding someone as amazing as he is.”

Oh Yvonne, I thought.  If you only knew.

For a split second the words sat on the tip of my lips, begging to be said out loud to the woman singing my husband’s praises.  But I didn’t release them.  I couldn’t.  Not yet.

Instead, I nodded towards the cigarette in her hand and asked her if I could bum one.

Yvonne’s eyes turned saucer-like.   I’d occasionally take a drag from one of her’s here or there, but I hadn’t actually smoked a cigarette, certainly not in Gavin’s presence, in years.

Yvonne dramatically focused her gaze back over my shoulder, at my husband, and then back to me. 

“He’ll lose his shit!” she hissed through her teeth.

“Nah,” I replied, very nonchalantly, and helped myself to her pack sitting on the table.  “I’m enjoying myself and having margaritas.  He won’t mind if I have one just today.” 

I took a sip of my neglected cocktail and silently toasted myself for controlling my tongue.  What I had wanted to tell Yvonne was that I didn’t give a flying fuck what Gavin thought of my smoking and if he so much as scowled at me for choosing today to permit myself this little bit of comfort I’d gladly put the cigarette out on his eyeball.

Smoking was my only vice when I was in college.  I wasn’t much of a drinker, other than a social cocktail once in awhile, and I didn’t touch drugs.  I didn’t twirl my hair or bite my nails, but I loved cigarettes.  It was unhealthy, of course I knew that, and I had always said I’d quit one day, so when Gavin and I had starting dating and he made it clear a few weeks into our relationship that he absolutely loathed smoking, I gave it up.  I was already head over heels about him and it seemed like as good a time as any to quit.  That had been almost seven years ago and other than the few rare steals from Yvonne’s, I hadn’t touched a cigarette since.

Yvonne’s eyes narrowed accusingly at me as I inhaled the smoke with a satisfied sigh.  Who was I kidding?  Yvonne could see right through me.  She knew something was up.  But before she had a chance to ask me again if I was okay, Gavin called out that the food was ready. 

Cheers rang out among our guests and I took the opportunity to leave Yvonne and, sadly, the barely smoked cigarette, and make my way over to retrieve platters of food from next to the grill.  Trying my damndest not to make eye contact with Gavin again, I stepped beside him to pick up a tray of burgers and he put his hand gently between my shoulder blades and moved his thumb up and down on my bare back.  It was a small sign of affection, one that Gavin did often, that would usually earn him a smile and a small kiss on the lips, but this time it made my stomach roll and my teeth clench.  I stepped away from his touch and mumbled something about getting salads from the fridge.  Quickly placing the tray on the buffet table we had set up, I entered the sliding glass doors and walked through our living room and into the kitchen.  Thankfully, it was empty, and I leaned over the sink, gripping the granite edges of the counter.  I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, waiting for the nausea to pass and thought back to the night before when Gavin, the love of my life, husband of the year, had brought my perfect world crashing to the ground.

2

The night before

I was well aware that Gavin wasn’t entirely listening to everything I was saying.  It didn’t really matter, though, I was only prattling on about preparations for our party tomorrow, which I already knew were taken care of.  But my OCD had kicked in and what I was rehashing for the hundredth time that week was more for my own benefit than his.  And so I continued on about how I should wait until the morning to dress the pasta salad I had made this afternoon, while I scraped the remains of our dinner into the garbage disposal at the sink.

“I hope my Aunt doesn’t doesn’t bring that awful ambrosia she made at Easter,” I continued, rinsing a dish and handing it over for Gavin to dry.  “Why you had to fawn all over that shit when everyone knew it was, in fact, shit, I have no idea.  You won her over years ago, babe, you don’t have to keep kissing her ass.”

I was teasing and I was sure Gavin knew it but when I looked over to smile at him I noticed his eyes were stony as he kept drying the already dry dish in his hands.

“Hey.”  I elbowed him to get his attention.  “What’s wrong?”

He tried to smile at me then faltered.  He shook his head and I couldn’t tell if it was to deny something was wrong or to clear it but then he put the dish in his hands down and walked over to the kitchen table.  He practically collapsed into a chair and put his face in his hands, elbows resting on his knees.

I quickly shut off the water and went to him, drying my hands on a towel before dropping to my knees in front of him.

“Babe, what’s wrong?”  My voice shook as I spoke.  Whatever it was, it had to be bad.  I hadn’t seen Gavin like this since he found out his mother was sick three years ago.

He sat there, saying nothing for what felt like forever, while horrible things were going through my head.  Did someone die?  Did he lose his job?  I was going to go crazy if he didn’t answer me soon but I didn’t want to push.

“Gav, look at me,” I told him, prying his hands away from his face.