Look, Don't Touch

Copyright © 2023 by Drew Jordan All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Cover image by J. Ashley Converse Photography Model Christopher David Cover design by Quirky Circe Contents Prologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 About the Author Also by Drew Jordan Prologue Quinn They say revenge is a dish best served cold. But mine is going to be hot, like my fury. I was born a nice girl to nice parents. Who grew into an average woman from a small town in the Midwest like a thousand other small towns, like a thousand other women who transplanted themselves to New York. Walking around Manhattan, I will never be anything other than background noise. Never the star. That’s why I disguise myself daily, reinvent myself with makeup and costumes. The online living doll. Every day something new. Every day I wipe away the makeup, pop out the contacts, and there I am again staring back in the mirror– I’m Quinn. A very nice girl. Yet I have never felt more utterly nice and naive and typical than when I lock myself into my husband’s home office and pilfer through his things like a thief, looking for evidence of his unfaithfulness. How many other perfectly wonderful women have made this same mad dash, this same frantic, heart-racing, desperate scramble through his drawers, his trash, his laptop, wanting proof. Knowing if you find something, your marriage is over. Knowing if you don’t, it is anyway, because you already know, whether he admits it or not. The truth is seared on your heart, where he branded it there with his averted gaze and his many nights spent away from home. This alone nearly breaks me because even though I am ordinary, Nash made me feel special. Now I no longer am. Nothing special. Just another wife whose husband cheated. A damn cliché. So, I rummage over his desk, fingers trembling, wanting a receipt to a hotel, wanting an email. Anything. But what I get takes me from ordinary to an actual illusion. From a slightly neurotic wife living in a loft apartment in Bushwick with her husband to…nothing. My marriage as I thought it was doesn’t even exist. I stare at the computer screen, opening one tab after another, finding profile after profile after profile, all with Nash’s smiling face beaming back at prospective dates, and I am not a wife. I am nothing to him. He is a stranger and I am his victim. Because Nash is a liar and a con artist. There are hundreds of messages flying between him and others in a kink community, large sums of money transferred in and out of various accounts with so much frequency and randomness, I can see no pattern. There are business dealings I knew nothing about, references to the rent on his apartment in London, which I didn’t know existed. A condo in a high-rise in Miami. A cabin upstate, where he has cords of wood delivered regularly. My fingers click and click and click, shifting through a labyrinth of lies, and I am so distracted and confused I view each piece of information like a stone on a pile of rubble after an earthquake. I lift it frantically, glance, toss it. I’m scrambling for the bottom. For the human being crushed beneath that spontaneously constructed wall of ruin. The shattered and broken remnant of who Nash actually is. Or maybe who I am now. In a hidden drawer under the desk there is a passport with my husband’s face on it, but not Nash Edward Thornton, his name, or so I thought. This says Edward Alton. Then a credit card that says Warren Billings. And a driver’s license for Aristotle Montmartre, with Nash’s expression unsmiling and serious in the photo. I shiver. Aristotle looks dangerous, sinister. And yet… I slept beside Aristotle, though I didn’t know that. On the nights that Nash forces himself to come home, anyway. Which name belongs to Nash? Who is he really? And why, why, why? I am still there when he finds me, sweat running between my breasts, my eyes glazed, breathing shallow. I hear him jimmy the lock and come in. I feel his presence in the doorway as he assesses the situation. He doesn’t speak. I imagine there is nothing to say. “Why?” I beg him, despising the tremble in my voice. I ask the only question that seems to matter at this point. “Why did you marry me? Why would you do this to me?” He dragged me into his imaginary life and I guess, in a way, that does make me special. In the worst possible way. His jaw works and he slides his hand into the pocket of his jeans. His work clothes. Jeans and a flannel, because he told me he is in construction. Which he’s not. Every day he pretends to go to work like he’s Joe Blue Collar, and every fucking day I believe him because who would lie about that? “Because I fell in love with your innocence.” I swallow down the bile that rises in my throat as I realize how I must have looked to him, wide-eyed and naive, fresh off a bus, prime for plucking. I thought I was Cinderella and he had rescued me. I knew he had family money, connections, wealth, and women at his disposal, and he chose me. Little Quinn Rivers, still