Oh, oh, oh, yay, yay, yah, yah. The sound of someone doing the dance of having caught up! 😉

All of the stories are linked. Some are better as standalones than others. If you’ve missed any and want to read them, you can catch up here.

Oh, Jealousy

“I seriously hate her,” Angie thinks as she drags an oleander toward the front of the nursery.

“Do you need some help?” Charlie yells.

“No,” Angie says, although she does, but she’d never let him know.

How could Josie just gallivant off to the coast and leave them like this? Okay, it was just for three days, but really?

Angie drags the pink oleander the last few feet and then leans over with her hands on her thighs and gasps for air. She never has to do this in the shop. Carting a flower arrangement from the cooler never taxes her like this. Thank god.

She stares at the oleander. It’s poisonous, she knows. Maybe she could just poison Josie and be done with her. And then what? She shakes her head at the fact that the thought had even occurred to her. And then she thinks: I’m jealous. Crap. Jealous.

She’d felt that way when Josie had been dating Marcus. Marcus. Oh, he’d been fine, and she really liked looking at him. When he’d looked back at her with as much lust as she’d examined him, it had all seemed okay, necessary even. If he looked at Angie like that, he couldn’t really love Josie and so she was helping her sister. Maybe her logic had been skewed, warped, wrong, but at the moment, had it mattered?

Angie’s husband had left her not long before. Abandoned was the word she didn’t use but was accurate. “You’re too controlling,” Curt had said. There’d been an adjective before “controlling,” which was harsh and not worth repeating and one she mostly forgot.

And Marcus had been there, muscular, willing and warm. He’d nourished her in ways she hadn’t been in years. In those hours of sweaty passion she’d forgotten, ignored, that Marcus was not hers to have but her sister’s. Somehow, she forgot until hours and hours and hours passed and life was a beautiful ambrosia of satisfaction.

As sweat beats off her brow now, she thinks about her sister, somewhere on the coast with Russ. And she thinks about Russ. She’s always liked him.

Yeah, she’d like him fine. Maybe it was time for her to have a vacation.

end

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A song via the title?

how to care for oleanders