Entry-Level Mistress - By Sabrina Darby Page 0,59

filled with creating art, the evenings were filled with ping-pong, singing, drinking, and games.

I loved it.

I hated it.

Surprisingly it was easier during the day. I immersed myself in work, taking a deep satisfaction in being back in the thick of it. Though I’d taken two months off, I’d learned so much about life, had gained so much perspective, that it affected my mythology project in a good way. I could see that this series would be altogether more mature than anything I had done so far.

At night, however, the conversation ventured into places I didn’t want to go. Especially when a new resident arrived, one who read the gossip pages.

“So,” the woman, a short story writer, asked, drawing out the vowels slowly. “Daniel Hartmann?”

That caught everyone’s attention at dinner. Especially the screenwriter, Don, who had apparently decided I was the perfect person on which to practice his flirting skills.

I needed to say something that satisfied their curiosity yet brooked no other questions. I tried to imagine what Daniel would have said if he were there.

“He’s a very attractive man,” I finally said, making it sound like an intimate confession. Then I flashed my “actress” smile, with what I hoped was a side of “Don’t you wish you were me?”

Unfortunately, my confession seemed to make Don even more interested.

I was tempted. Or rather, I might have been tempted to do something completely stupid just to finally get Daniel out of my head, except I knew it wouldn’t work.

I’d come to terms with the fact that Daniel would haunt my dreams no matter how wrong, in the best of circumstances, a continued relationship with be. I simply hoped that one day I’d wake up and realize that, like a bad cold, those thoughts were gone.

If people would let me.

Leanna consistently reminded me of the chance Daniel would be a more permanent presence in my life. But I refused to believe it, refused to know, even as one week turned into three. I was stressed, depressed and my life had been full of changes. There were any number of reasons my period could be late.

My mother as well seemed to have gotten the memo that Daniel Hartmann should be mentioned at all costs. Every telephone conversation devolved, with my mom digging for more information as if she needed desperately to hear the intimate details of my sex life just to feel close to me. At the same time, she didn’t hide that she felt I was making all the same mistakes she had made. My father, however, didn’t mention Daniel and perhaps that was only because there was just so much one could say in emails and voice mail messages. I still couldn’t forgive him. For lying to me, for doing something he had to lie about in the first place. There was really only one person responsible for the mess that had been my early teens and that was my father.

And yet, I still felt guilty about how my affair had affected him. I couldn’t even gather the energy to be angry with Daniel anymore, because none of this could have happened if I hadn’t been an immature, irresponsible idiot.

Who might be pregnant.

Finally, one day I went into town with some of the other residents and came back with a two-pack of pregnancy tests.

I stood there with the box, still in its cellophane wrapping, clutched in one hand and the telephone in the other. Because there was one other person whose actions had deeply affected my childhood.

“Mom, why didn’t you tell dad when you found out you were pregnant?”

It was a conversation we’d had before but I was no longer listening as a child blaming my mother. Now I simply wanted to understand. I wanted advice, in case I tore those wrappers open and my world fell apart.

“Sweetheart, I told you. He’d broken my heart. It was one thing to be devastated but another to find out I was pregnant. I didn’t want him to think it was some ploy to get him back, to get him to marry me. And worse, I didn’t know what I’d do if he told me to … get rid of it. Of you. And then … then he was dating someone else, and that was that.”

“Would you do it again, knowing how upset dad was?”

Silence answered my question. I almost hung up the phone, terrified that my mother was reading between the lines.

“Is there something you want to tell me, Emily?”

No. There wasn’t anything I