Cheaters Anonymous by Lacey Silks

me.” I took another sip. “By the way, I’m not inexperienced, so your dirty talk doesn’t have the same effect on me it could have had years ago.” Yes, this was a lie, because all Scar had to do was look at me for me to begin panting.
    “I’m telling you how it is, and you seem to pique my curiosity each time you speak.”
    When I looked at Scar, I saw that young boy I remembered. The one with that glimmer in his eyes moments before his lips touched my skin. Arousal rained down on my body just thinking about it. No matter how many men I slept with, Scar was always the one who had gotten away. Not that I wanted him – well, I did, but not that way – not like any other man. And definitely more than once.
    “Okay, enough about your need to get into my panties. So are we really going to try this friend thing? Because if you want me to put all the cards on the table...”
    ...or just flip me over on it...
    “...I’m not good at being friends with men.”
    Yes, I was being a hypocrite.
    His scarred lip lifted. “Yeah, we are. As long as I’m the only male friend you have, we’ll be fine. There’s no way I’m letting you go.”
    Wait, what did he mean by that? The simple statement meant much more to me than it should have.
    “Tell me about this club. You don’t dance?”
    “Rarely.”
    “Then last weekend, at the hospital. Was that part of your performance? And what about the paint?”
    “No, that wasn’t part of the show. It was a stupid dare.”
    “You know, I can still smell paint on you.”
    He smiled. Something new crossed his face: a pride I’d never seen before. And then it all faded. The mature look suited him. It was honest, caring, and so damn sexy, I felt some sort of a weird dance happening inside me – and I couldn’t even control it.
    “Jules, are you okay? I mean, you’re not dating, you don’t fuck. What happened?”
    “Yeah, I’m okay… now. I wasn’t before, but I’m getting better. I was in a bad place for a long time, but I got help. You know, there’s this place I know that could help you understand your father as well.”
    “I understand why he cheated. It was in his nature. It’s human nature.”
    “Maybe you could forgive him and move on.”
    “Already moved on.”
    Doubting him, I reached inside my purse and handed him a card. “It’s an open group. You don’t need to be a cheater to attend, but talking to people who face similar problems can help. There’s no judgment.”
    He slid the candle from the center of the table closer to the edge.
    “Cheaters Anonymous?”
    “It’s much more than that. It’s about infidelity, intimacy, needs we sometimes can’t understand and…” I paused. “Sex addiction.”
    Scar froze. He looked at me as if he was trying to see inside my soul, and honestly, I really thought he saw through me. As I shifted, wondering whether I had told him more than he was ready to hear, his jaw tensed, sharpening at its corners. “Oh, Jules. Now I wish I’d called.”
    “It’s not your fault.” I shook my head, holding back the weird tingling in my throat.
    I didn’t mean for him to take new blame on himself. I was the reason it had all started. I had decided to sleep around – no one made the choice for me. And everything rolled downhill from there. The great thing about being in medical school was easy access to STD clinics. Chris, my current co-worker, volunteered there, and I guess my regular visits put up a red flag for her. She was the first person I opened up to about my problems. With her guidance I moved to New York. There was a job opening at the hospital she was moving to. I thought it was the best idea ever; after all, I would be in a new city full of men I hadn’t fucked. Little did I know Chris had an agenda of her own, and she slowly introduced the idea of joining Cheaters Anonymous. But it wasn’t until I ended up at a hospital half alive that I acknowledged I had a problem. My mother had already moved back to New