Happy Endings

Everybody wants to know if Sienna Brooks gives happy endings. Nobody ever asks if she's getting one.

She learned the trade at Jade Garden Wellness, in a strip mall on Buford Highway between a nail salon and a phone store, where Miss Pat ran everything off a clipboard she never wrote on and where rooms three and four belonged to Dominique. Nobody ever said what rooms three and four were. They didn't have to. Sienna was nineteen, and one look from Miss Pat told her what nobody was saying.

What Dominique taught her stayed with her: make them say it out loud, in their own voice, and then you decide.

Then her mother died and left her eighteen thousand dollars and nine words in her own handwriting. Go somewhere you've never been. Then go somewhere else. Nine words from a woman who never left the state she was born in. There was also a man, and a house in Smyrna with money already down on it, and a room in that house he called the nursery, out loud, to his cousin, standing right in front of her.

She bought a one-way ticket out of Atlanta. A return ticket would give somebody something to hold her to.

Bali. Bangkok. Cape Town. Dubai. Santorini. Paris. Rio. Zanzibar. A folding table through airports, her own sheets because she won't use anybody else's, paperwork she learns to read all the way to the bottom before she signs, and men who think they invented the question. A photographer who shoots her hands and not her face. A man in Bangkok who answers questions with better questions. A scientist in Cape Town who looks at her instead of over her. And a man in a Santorini taverna who stayed when everybody else left, and who will not ask her twice.

Sienna can misread a man. She can sign the wrong terms. That does not make her answer anybody else's to give. When it's no, she means it. When it's yes, it's because she wants it.

But letting somebody expect her somewhere is another kind of risk.

A story across eight countries, about a woman who knows how to leave and is learning the difference between a chair you're put in and a chair somebody leaves empty for you.

HAPPY ENDINGS is an adult erotic romance with explicit scenes. A standalone story. Adults only.