The Permanence of Pain Read online

  The Permanence of Pain

  DESIREE LAFAWN

  The Permanence of Pain

  DESIREE LAFAWN

  Copyright © 2017 Desiree Lafawn

  First electronic publication January 2018

  United States of America

  This book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Desiree Lafawn

  www.desireelafawn.com

  Cover Design: Tracie Douglas of Dark Water Covers

  Editing: Tammy Farrell

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was cold as hell in the office when I found out that Richard had been cheating on me. And with my best friend, no less. I remember the temperature clearly because I was wearing the ratty old cardigan that I kept draped over the office chair for just such occasions. It was big and boxy and ugly as sin, the kind of sweater that can only be worn at work when you don’t give a crap what you look like. A perfect sweater to be wearing when your world crashes down around your ears.

  I didn’t think anything of it when my email popped up on the lower right corner of my computer screen. Cindy Cain’s name blinked a new message box, and I mouse clicked on it, naturally, without even pausing. Cindy was a close friend and we randomly emailed throughout the day, most days. Jokes, gossip, and memes we found on the internet. It may have been a waste of time to some people, but working in the industry I did, I took those distractions where I could.

  I told people I worked in wholesale sales, that I sold party supplies. In reality, it was the sex toy and adult novelty industry. I sold fake dicks and sexy party tricks.

  Not like on a street corner or anything, but my company was the largest wholesaler in the industry. We sold to adult stores and over eighteen party stores, and there was a lot of money in it. Everything above board and legal, if not a little embarrassing to put on a business card. It might have been difficult to introduce myself by my profession, but I wasn’t above selling sex toys and bondage kits to make a living.

  There was a shit ton of profit margin in glass dicks. Who knew?

  I met Cindy at an industry trade show in Cleveland close to two years ago. She came into my booth to ask about our raunchy greeting card display, and the possibility of carrying a line of them in one or more of her four stores. I was relieved to not have to talk about vibrators for five seconds and gladly engaged her in conversation. I found out her business was located about twenty miles away from my corporate office, and the rest, as they say, was history.

  Two women working in an industry predominantly run by males, which was about all we had in common. She was forty, five years older than me, with a loud voice and a tendency to tell dirty jokes and use excessive cuss words in everyday conversation. She wore tops cut low and heels stacked high, and she knew everyone in the business. She was a boss lady and she took shit from no one.

  I was a mousy haired thirty-something who didn’t like to make waves, who wore oversized sweaters, and kept a space heater under my desk. I wore sensible shoes and had a snack drawer that looked like a ten-year-old’s pillowcase at the end of Halloween night. What helped me, in my line of work, was that I had the voice of a sex phone operator, and people liked listening to me talk on the phone. Pair that with an extensive knowledge of our business catalog and solid sales background, and I was a key sales leader at my company. I just wasn't popular in the way that some other women were.

  Cindy didn’t care about any of those things, so we had a pretty good relationship. She was one of my top customers, and I took care of her. That was our professional life. In our personal life we hung out on occasion, she had been to my house for dinner, and we had girls’ nights out every couple of months. When I introduced her to my boyfriend a year prior, she hired Richard to be her store manager. We weren’t the very best of friends, but we were close. Hell, she’d been inside my home.

  And apparently—my boyfriend of four years had been inside of her.

  I don’t know how long I stared at the information in the email. They weren’t pictures, but screenshots of text messages and emails between the two of them. My eyes skimmed over an endless list of messages between the two. Meetups when Richard would normally be working. Cute couples talk—or what I would assume was cute couples talk, but Richard certainly didn’t talk to me like that. Discussions of what would happen if I ever found out, but how would I find out unless someone told me?

  And the sexting. Cindy had included copies of their sexual conversations. Time and date stamped, even. Did it make it better or worse that I could tell by the time register that when he had been texting her about what he wanted to do with her and a pair of nipple clamps, he had been lying in bed next to me? That message was from last night. I wasn’t even asleep yet and I thought he was playing Candy Crush. Fucker.

  I barely registered the rest of the email. There was some garbage about how sorry Cindy was, about how she had real feelings for Richard and she didn’t want to hurt our friendship, but she thought I deserved to know.

  What I got from that was, she was tired of hiding it, she had every intention of keeping Richard, and she sent me all the “proof” so that I would understand just how deep their relationship went.

  That was some sadistic shit she was pulling in that email, and even in my emotionally numb state, I could see right through it. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t even form coherent thoughts I was so thoroughly turned inside out from that one email from my supposed friend.

  Betrayal.

  Which one hurt worse? That my boyfriend of four years had been sleeping with his boss, that I had introduced him to? Or that he had been sleeping with my friend and she thought nothing of it, only telling me about it because she wanted to take their relationship to the next level?

  I don’t know how long I was sitting there before a voice prodded into my clouded thoughts.

  “Regina. Hey! You okay?”

  “Huh?” I was too stunned to make more than one word come out of my mouth. TJ could have been calling me for ten minutes for all I knew. My assistant was a nice enough kid, but he had a tendency to talk a lot, so I’d learned to mostly tune him out.

  “I said, are you ok? When you type you sound like someone writing an angry letter to customer service. You suddenly stopped moving and have just been staring at your monitor for a while. By the way, your phone rang three times so I grabbed the line. You acted like you didn’t even hear it.”

  I tried to respond to him, I really did, but the lump in my throat was too big to swallow down, and I knew that if I so much as moved my eyeballs to the side to even look at him, the tears hovering there would spill over, and there would be no stopping them. What I really wanted was for TJ and his twenty-four year old happy go lucky self to just g
ive me five damn minutes to get my shit together, but I wouldn’t be so lucky.

  In seconds his face popped in front of mine as he leaned over the side of my chair to get my attention. Bright green eyes shining with concern and a mop of sandy brown hair that looked appropriately messy for his age, he smiled at me when I met his gaze.

  “Regeeeena. You okay? For real?”

  “Nope.” Crap. I still wasn’t capable of a sentence, and I had no control over the trembling of my voice.

  Curious, TJ turned his attention to my computer monitor, he was assuming, I’m sure, that there was an email from a client that got an incorrect shipment or something. Those kinds of things happened, and while they were never fun, we still had to deal with them. I should have stopped him, it was none of his business, and it was humiliating for me to have someone else peer into something of mine so personal and painful, but I still couldn’t talk, and my arms didn’t want to move from the armrest of my office chair.

  I was a zombie.

  It didn’t take TJ long at all to scan the contents of the email. I don’t know, maybe he didn’t finish it. Maybe he skipped over the parts where Cindy texted Richard about how much she loved it when he took her from behind and maybe if I was working late they could meet up again before I got home. Or maybe he just didn’t need to read the whole thing to get the gist of the situation. Whatever the reason, seconds later he wrapped me up in an awkward hug, squeezed tightly, and whispered in my ear, “Boss lady, I’m so sorry.”

  It was almost touching, being hugged by my much younger assistant, but I was sitting in my chair, and he was hunched over awkwardly in front of me, and if the whole thing hadn’t been so damn tragic I might have started laughing. Instead, the tears started falling and I couldn’t stop them. I cried into the flannel shirt sleeves of my assistant, who was over ten years my junior, breathing in the smell of menthol cigarettes and axe body spray, while lamenting my shattered relationship.

  I thought it couldn’t get worse, but I was quickly learning I could be wrong about a lot of things.

  “Hey, Reg-eye-na!”

  I didn’t answer to that name. I never did, but today, of all days, I could not—would not even give Matthew Jeremiah the time of day. God, I hated that man. He was the epitome of douche bag. You couldn’t even tell him to go to hell, he already had an engraved invitation from Satan himself. That guy loved to get under people’s skin, and saying my name to make it rhyme with vagina was just one of the ways he loved to needle me. He’d had it out for me as soon as my sales numbers started trumping his in the company. That was three years ago—he’d been as much of an asshole as he could be ever since. If we didn’t have such a weak ass HR department, and by department I mean, generic complaint form to be filled out and filed in the shredder, then I would have said something. Since conflict resolution wasn’t a real strong point at Slow Grind Inc., I just dealt with him by ignoring him. And topping his sales figures.

  Ignoring him wasn’t going to work this time, apparently, because he just came farther into the office and walked right up to where TJ was standing next to me. TJ dropped the hug as soon as Jeremiah had walked into the room. But Jeremiah acted like he hadn’t seen anything, or at least ignored the mood as he came up next to us and peered over my shoulder at my computer. I hurried to minimize my email on the screen; I did not need to give this guy any info on my personal life.

  “What the hell, Jeremiah? Personal space much?”

  “There’s no such thing as personal space at the Grind,” he replied to TJ’s outrage at the intrusion. “Also, what is wrong with Regina, her face is all spotty. She looks like she’s been crying.” Jeremiah wrinkled his nose in disgust at the thought that someone could be feeling actual emotions. Jeremiah wouldn’t know a feeling if it stabbed him in the nuts, he would probably just fall to the ground laughing. Jeremiah thought everything was funny, especially if no one else did.

  I really just wanted him out of my face, and if emotions grossed him out, then I had ammo to have him running from the room.

  “If you must know, Jeremiah, I’ve just found out by email that Richard has been cheating on me.” My voice didn’t tremble at all and the tears had dried up, probably because I was talking to Jeremiah, and just having him in my office made me irritated enough to momentarily ignore my shattered heart. I would take it personally later, when I confronted Richard at home, and not now, in front of my coworkers. Right now it was just a story in an email, it could be real later, in private.

  “Oh yeah? So you finally figured that out, then? Thank God, those two were annoying as hell with their secrets.”

  What now? A heavy weight slammed into my chest at the thought of anyone else knowing, especially Jeremiah, that the man I had been with for the last four years was sleeping with my client. I had thought that hearing my drama would make him leave, but he seemed completely unsurprised by the information, and hearing that statement coming from his lips so casually twisted my insides almost more than Cindy’s email.

  No.

  “What the hell, man, you knew about this?” TJ accused.

  “TJ, it’s industry news. A bunch of people know about it. She was my client before Regina came here and they decided to become vagina buddies or something. You are probably the only one who didn’t know. Well, you and Regina.”

  His laugh was the braying of a donkey, a sound so abrasive and sharp that it pierced the fog in my mind.

  “That’s a new low, Jeremiah,” I ground out from between clenched teeth. “I expect douche behavior from you, I really do, but to know about this. To see me every day in this office and to keep that kind of secret. I can’t even look at you. Get out of my office, just get out.”

  “Why should I say something? It’s none of my business!” Jeremiah didn’t look the least bit perturbed by what he had done, and actually had the gall to look offended that someone thought he was in the wrong. “I minded my own business, it’s not up to me to rat out someone else, especially if it doesn’t involve me.”

  His especially if it doesn’t involve me may as well have been especially if it is about you, instead. I took deep breaths in through my nose and out my mouth to keep the stinging in my eyes from becoming a fresh rain of tears.

  “Get the fuck out Jeremiah!” TJ and I shouted the words at the same time, and Jeremiah shrugged his shoulders like he hadn’t just devastated me, and strolled down the hallway, probably back to the bullpen so he could share the story with the other sales guys. The ones who didn’t get a private office and an assistant because they were too busy slacking off to hit sales goals. The resounding laughter down the hallway confirmed my suspicions.

  More deep breaths in my nose and out my mouth. I would get through this. I would be okay.

  Everything would be okay.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Everything was not ok. It had been three months since Cindy dropped the bomb on me. I had gone home from work and had a massive argument with Richard. He tried to rationalize his actions with typical statements like, “Babe, it just happened, no one planned it.”

  “You don’t even try to be sexy anymore, you just wrap up in those old sweaters, go to work and come home. It’s like you don’t even want me to be attracted to you.”

  “Things were bound to end with us, you weren’t even interested anymore. It really was just a matter of time.”

  I was done listening before he was even done talking. He gathered most of his things and left in a pretty big hurry, probably because I was throwing his belongings out the second-floor window of our house. Oh wait, it was my house, wasn’t it? Yeah, it was. I owned it before we even met, and everything in it belonged to me besides some odds and ends, his clothes, and matchbox car collection. So Richard could fuck right off and grab his superhero boxers and toy cars off the front lawn in front of the neighbors, he wasn’t going to get another tear out of me.

  I watched him grab his shit out of the grass from the upstairs window, load up his car, and drive away. He looked path
etic there on his hands and knees, digging little die-cast cars out of the grass he hadn’t cut in over two weeks because he was a lazy fuck and I had been working long hours and couldn’t do it myself. Oh well, I would pay a neighbor kid to do it. I hope none of those toys get caught up in the lawnmower, I thought to myself.

  The whole situation was surreal. I had never answered Cindy’s email, and I didn’t plan to. She and I were done, there was nothing left to say between the two of us. If Richard could walk on a four-year relationship, then that was fine, too. He could take his part-time working ass right out of my house and over to hers for all I cared. I was a strong, independent woman and I wasn’t going to take shit from any man. At least, that was what I said to the bottle of wine I opened to help me get through the evening after Richard left. I was a strong independent woman until I walked through the empty house and into the bedroom we had shared for the last four years. The bed was still made because I had made it that morning before heading into the office. The pillows on the right side were smashed a little more flat than the ones on the left side, because Richard had to sleep with an old flat down pillow, and he liked to wrap it around his head like some sort of security blanket.

  He hadn’t taken his pillows. It was like he was still there in that room. Short of asking them, there was no way to know if those two had sex in my bed, and there was no way I was going to ask. I couldn’t sleep in that bed again either without knowing. I could barely even look at it. I couldn’t even change my clothes in my bedroom, the memories of all the times I had been naked in there, the times Richard and I had made love, the memories echoed off the walls and washed through me, chasing me from the room.

  I fled downstairs to the couch, curled up in a ball around the three-quarters empty bottle of pinot noir and cried. My favorite painting in the world, Beauty Sleeping, hung on the wall above me as I wept. The painting wasn’t signed, but it was an amazing piece of work that I had gotten shortly after I bought the house. The first piece of art that I picked up because I liked it, not because it was on sale or because other people thought it was good. And now, the beautiful girl lying in her painted bed watched over me as I lost my shit into the beige throw pillows, smearing my supposedly waterproof mascara into the fabric, not caring that it probably wouldn’t wash out. I cried until I gagged and almost vomited, then I got a drink of water and cried some more. I cried myself to sleep on that couch downstairs, and when I woke up the next morning, I pasted my brave face on and went to the office. I only went into the bedroom to grab clothes for the day; my nights were spent on the couch downstairs. Every night for the next three months.