The Anti-hero (The Goode Brothers)

My dreams are filled with that word—atonement. Ringing through my sleeping mind. I just imagine myself full of rage and power, like a mastermind enacting some act of retribution for what’s been done, not only to me but also to Adam. The details are fuzzy, but I can tell that it feels good.

Roscoe wakes me up sometime around eight the next morning, actually in my bed too, which is strange. For a while, I just lie in bed and try to think about nothing, especially ignoring the fact that I cheated on Brett last night.

I should probably feel bad about that. I should…but I don’t. Not after the way he brushed me aside at the club, putting his VIPs before me. Leaving me to tend to a battered Adam in the parking lot. What the hell did he expect?

I guess that was my way of revenge, although it didn’t really affect Brett at all.

Before any guilt has the chance to creep in, I climb out of bed and shuffle into the kitchen.

As I’m making my coffee and feeding Roscoe, I keep replaying the events of last night in my mind. Everything from the argument with Brett in the office to the cartilage of Adam’s nose snapping back into place under my fingers.

And, of course, the quick fuck over the back of my couch. That’s the moment my mind keeps getting stuck on. It was easily the most satisfying sex I’ve had in a long time. Just thinking about the way he flipped a switch has my thighs clenching together with warmth.

In the span of two weeks, I met him, shared a spark for a brief moment, fought with him, and fucked him.

He was betrayed. I was betrayed. And neither of us can do a damn thing about it.

After my coffee is made, I set it on the cherry-red-and-chrome table I picked up in a flea market when I moved to the city. While I carry Roscoe down the fire escape, I wonder if Adam was silently judging the eclectic taste of my apartment. Not a single thing matches, and I’m not sure if no style choice is a style choice in itself. But I keep it clean, and I value every single mismatched inch of the menagerie that is my home.

I imagine he lives in a cookie-cutter model home full of things that hold no value other than what some designer paid for them at the home goods store. Not that I’m knocking him for it. I’m sure his home is nice.

After Roscoe does his business, I take him back upstairs and put him in front of his food bowl while I scroll through my phone and drink my coffee. It doesn’t take long before I’m putting Adam’s full name in the Google search bar and deep diving into the results.

Why? I don’t know. I have no intention of ever seeing him again. But curiosity is a tempting bitch sometimes.

It turns out the whole Goode family has a squeaky-clean reputation. Melanie Goode might as well be president of the privileged white Christian wife club. She’s chaired tons of foundations and charities, and even though she’s in her fifties, she barely looks a day over thirty.

Adam has three brothers—Lucas, Caleb, and Isaac. All as attractive and prominent. Lucas is a professor at the university. Caleb owns his own law firm.

The only one who doesn’t pop up much is Isaac. From what I can tell, he stopped showing up in family photos about eight years ago.

And at the head of the table—Truett.

It makes me wonder how much his family really knows about him. Does Melanie know her husband pays for sex at the club nearly every night of the week, often with a different girl each time? Do his sons know that he has been known to snort a line of blow on the very table he was caught licking pussy at last night?

Probably not.

I wish they did. I wish I could unveil every dirty secret that club keeps, and not because they shouldn’t be allowed to have a discreet place to fuck, but because men like Truett Goode abuse that right. He uses his platform to preach about all of the dangers of the very things he partakes in nightly. It’s the most hypocritical thing I’ve ever heard. And Brett lets him.

The club could be so much better. Instead of catering to rich men who manipulate the rest of us to hold their secrets, it could be a club for real people. No patronizing assholes or a toxic male-dominated environment.

It’s a pipe dream.

I’ll never be able to knock Brett and Truett down from their thrones. As long as Truett and his squeaky-clean, all-American family maintain that pure and holy reputation, Brett has all the power. If he didn’t hold Truett’s secrets in the palm of his hand, that entire club and its filthy VIP membership would crumble to pieces.

I’m deep in thought, my mind starting to buzz with some far-off notion, when a hard knock at the door yanks me from my concentration and Roscoe starts yipping his head off.

“It’s me,” Gladys calls from outside the front door. “I need your help fixing the TV again. I think someone taped over Days of Our Lives.”

With a chuckle, I stand up from the chair and open the front door. Gladys is standing on my welcome mat with a despondent look on her face. With long gray hair and a tie-dye T-shirt, Gladys is exactly what you’d expect a sixty-nine-year-old hippie to look like.

She’s as blunt and bold as she is kind and peaceful.

With a shake of my head, I smile while grabbing my keys from the table. “I told you. No one can tape over it. It saves digitally. There are no tapes.”

“Then where the hell is it?” she snaps.

Roscoe scurries down the stairs ahead of us as we make our way to the Laundromat. When we enter, I notice a few regulars in the front. People come in almost daily to either do laundry or just enjoy the free TV and AC. I’ve never seen Gladys turn away a single person in the ten years I’ve been here.

Roscoe greets the regulars as I send them a quick hello and take the remote from the counter. I don’t bother showing Gladys how to find her recorded episodes anymore. I’ve done it enough to know she’s never going to get it. But as long as she doesn’t learn, then it means she needs me. And I’ll admit—it’s nice to be needed.

“So, who was that guy you brought home last night? He’s not still up there, is he?”

My eyes nearly bug out of my face. “It was no one!” I answer far too excitedly.

“He didn’t look like no one. He looked like the kind of man who owns a car and treats his girlfriends nice.”

Gladys hates Brett. Hates him so much I’ve been too scared to even bring him around. I should be more excited to tell her he’s probably, maybe, definitely out of the picture. But I already know the told you so lecture I’m going to get from that.

So we just skim over it and head directly into who’s the new guy talk.

“He got into a fight at the club, and I was just helping him out. Were you spying on me?”

“I spy on everyone who comes into my Laundromat at three in the morning. So, what’s his name?”

I roll my eyes as I lean on the counter. “Adam.”

“He sounds nice.”

A laugh bursts out of me. “Did you miss the part where I said he got into a fight at the club? He was literally bleeding.”

“Was he beating up Brett?”

“Gladys,” I reply, leveling her with my gaze. “No. He was not beating up Brett.”

“Too bad.”

At some point, I need to tell Gladys that I’m no longer working at the club, which means my income is sort of gone. I don’t, of course. Not yet, at least.

I’ll find something else by the time rent is due.

“The girls are excited about book club next Saturday,” she says as she taps her well-worn copy of the smutty romance of the month on the countertop.

“I can’t wait to hear what Mary thinks about the scene on the raft,” I reply with a giggle.

Gladys cracks up as she replies, “That was my favorite part!”

About six months ago, a few of Gladys’s friends and I started a romance book club.

But not just any romance books.

Old mass-market paperback romances with Fabio on the cover that have titles like Romancing the Rogue and Ravished by the Highlander. It’s honestly more fun than I ever expected it to be.

Especially in the first month when the devoutly religious florist next door had to say the phrase throbbing member out loud and ended up in such a fit of giggles, she wound up on the floor. We still call that meeting “Mary’s Awakening.”

“I can’t wait,” I reply.

My phone vibrates in my back pocket, so I fish it out and see Brett’s name on the screen. My eyes narrow as I stare down at his message.

Why haven’t you texted me?

With a huff, I roll my eyes. Then I quickly type out my reply.

Why haven’t you texted me?

Because I knew you were all pissy. Are you in a better mood yet?

Un-fucking-believable.

I want to type out a million different things to him, but after breaking up and getting back together so many times in the past few years, I’m officially numb to it all. I’d like to fight with him or tell him all the ways he hurt me, but there’s no point.

Instead, I just respond with:

Enough. It’s over. Best of luck with the club. I’m moving on.

It feels so final and my finger hovers over the send button for a very long time. When I glance up and see Gladys watching me, I wait for her to give me an encouraging nod before I finally tap the screen.

It doesn’t hurt. It probably should. Brett and I were little more than fuck buddies and friends the past three years, but I just always assumed that’s what a comfortable relationship was. Someone you could laugh with and screw from time to time.

But he never appreciated me or made me feel seen. Brett invested nothing in our relationship, and the standard for him to please me was so low it might as well have been underground.

For him, I was a convenience.

For me, he was my world.

An imbalance I felt every single day of our relationship, so much so that I became starved for his attention and would devour every tiny crumb of it.

“You’re free, sweetie.”

I don’t even realize I’m crying until I feel Gladys wrap her arms around me and hold me against her chest. I breathe in her familiar patchouli fragrance as I fume internally.

I’ve said all I could say and I’ve fought all I could fight.

And she’s right. Now I’m free.