Sweet Dreams (Vegas Dreams Book 1) Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events or locales or to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  First edition: March 2016

  Copyright © 2016 by Cheryl Bradshaw

  Cover Design Copyright 2016 © Indie Designz

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any print or electronic form without the written consent of the author.

  VEGAS DREAMS NOVELLA SERIES BY CHERYL BRADSHAW:

  Sweet Dreams – Rae’s Story (Book 1)

  COMING SOON:

  Shattered Dreams – Sasha’s Story (Book 2, May)

  Stolen Dreams – Callie’s Story (Book 3, July)

  Summer Dreams – Kenna’s Story (Book 4, September)

  My name is Rae, and this is my story.

  My quest to find true love all started with online dating. I know. I know. Sure, dating over the Internet via one’s phone was no longer as taboo as it used to be, but still ... swipe left, swipe right ... hope for a miracle with a guy trying to get to know me inside the confines of a chat box?

  Finding a man these days sure wasn’t what it used to be.

  At this point, I didn’t have much choice. I’d never been married. Never even been close to being married. All my clocks were ticking. Waiting for a man to spontaneously appear before me hadn’t happened yet, and at twenty-seven, I wasn’t getting any younger. Something had to change.

  All of my friends were married, unhappily, for one reason or the other, but not a one was satisfied. Not a single one! During our weekly “vent” sessions, also known as dinner, sexual intimacy with their husbands was described by my friends in a variety of ways: dull, painful, boring, and my personal favorite ... lasting too long.

  Too long?

  If I found a good guy with a heartbeat who was willing to be with me forever, it couldn’t last long enough.

  To date, my longest relationship topped out at six months, and that was when I was in college. His name was Brian. And at that experimental age, the sex wasn’t worth writing home about. We only had boom boom time—as he liked to call it—one way and in one location, which was his old, spring-worn twin bed. There was no foreplay, and absolutely no college experimenting took place.

  Once, after growing weary of the same old, same old, I’d uncorked my nerve and suggested something new. Not outrageous, just a step in the “amp it up” direction. I turned the shower on, and when the bathroom had achieved a smoldering level of sexy steaminess one sees in the movies, I appeared in Brian’s room wrapped in nothing but a short white towel. I’d twisted the top edge a few times and plunged it into my cleavage, hoping my efforts would achieve the desired effect.

  When Brian finally tore his eyes away from the book he was reading after I’d cleared my throat not once, but two times, I donned my best sultry smile and beckoned him closer with my finger. To my surprise, and horror, he cocked his head to the side, lifting an eyebrow, and twisting his mouth as if to say: What the hell are you doing? He then flat-out refused, saying sex in the shower was overrated. He admitted he’d tried it with his last girlfriend. He hadn’t liked it. He saw no reason to try it again. It was wet and slippery, and he couldn’t “feel” anything. He further suggested I shower by myself, promising to be in bed waiting for me when I was done, where I once again would pretend like I truly enjoyed lovemaking from a single position.

  What a square.

  I’d been rejected by a boy who should have been in the sexual prime of his life, but instead of seeing it for what it was at the time—his problem—I’d convinced myself that it was mine. What was wrong with me? Was I too fat? Was my long, dark brown, perfectly wavy hair a turn-off? Or maybe it was my hazel, oversized, turtle eyes. Maybe I was repulsive in ways I hadn’t even imagined, and the only way he could have sex with me was under the covers, at night, with the lights out, on a shoddy bed.

  Standing there before Brian that night, scantily clad and feeling like last night’s stale leftovers, I realized something: the time had come for me to find out what a real relationship felt like with a real guy—a guy who was actually into me. And one thing was certain: Mr. Square wasn’t my ticket to ride. I hurled the towel to the ground, allowing Brian to take a nice, long look, a look that was his last.

  “Rae? Did you hear what I just said?”

  I broke free from the college memory and glanced at Sasha, who eyeballed me as if to say, Well ...?

  Over the last several minutes, I’d watched her mouth move in rapid succession, but as for what she’d been saying, admittedly, I hadn’t the slightest clue. I stood, tossed my Hermes handbag over my shoulder, and tried to think of something nice to say before I made my quick exit.

  “Where are you going?” Sasha asked. “You just got here. What about your dinner?”

  I glanced at my partially eaten Oriental salad and looked around the table. Sasha, Kenna, and Callie’s steely glares, crossed arms, and tilted heads expressed their feelings about my sudden need to leave early. I pushed the chair in, tried to avoid eye contact. “I’ll stay longer next time. Promise. I just have a lot going on today.”

  “What’s gotten into you over the last several months?” Sasha asked. “You seem so ... different.”

  “I feel different.”

  “Mind telling us why?”

  “We’ll have to save that conversation for another night. I’m sorry, guys. Truly, I am. I have a date tonight, and I’ve got to go. Next week, dinner is on me, okay?”

  “But this is girls’ night,” Sasha said. “There are no guys on girls’ night.”

  “Only because you’re all married,” I said. “If you were single, it would be different. Trust me.”

  “You always have a date lately,” Kenna said. “I can’t even remember what a date feels like anymore.”

  She groaned as if her life was already over. She wasn’t even thirty.

  “We sit here, week after week, pouring our hearts out to you about our lousy lives,” Sasha said. “You listen, but you never chime in.”

  I shrugged.

  “I’m not married,” I said. “I don’t feel qualified to give you all advice. Besides, you wouldn’t like what I had to say if I did. Venting isn’t the same thing as asking me for my opinion. If you’re looking for unsolicited advice, you’re not going to get it ... not from me.”

  “Come on, Rae,” Sasha said. “You were the only one smart enough to stay single. You say you have this wonderful new guy, yet we know so little about him. Give us something to live for. We’re dying here.”

  “Yeah,” Kenna chimed in. “Let us live vicariously through you—please?”

  Callie, who up until that moment had sat in the corner in silence, rested the fork she was clutching onto her plate and folded her arms. “Rae is too reserved. She’ll never talk to us about her private life, not if it includes a man.”

  Reserved?

  It made me feel rigid and stuffy.

  My eyes shifted from Callie to Sasha to Kenna. Did they all see me this way? Based on the unified looks on their faces, they did.

  I pondered my next move. If I said what I’d been longing to say at every get-together we’d had for the past several months, it would change the way they looked at me. It was a risky move. But these women were supposed to be my confidants, the girls I trusted more than anyone in the world. The four of us had all been friends since grade school. Week after week, they spilled their innermost thoughts, and I’d reciprocated, just not in the way I should have. If they really saw me as reserved, it was time f
or me to make some changes.

  Sasha’s husband was cheating on her—had been for years—and not just with one fleeting woman, but a whole plethora of them. She knew it, yet she pretended she didn’t, even to him.

  Kenna had lost her virginity on her wedding night to her husband Robert, who had also been a virgin. Neither of them had the slightest idea what they should be doing in the bedroom. Exploring their options was out of the question and viewed as too taboo to even mention. So they didn’t. They skirted the subject, sucking all the spontaneity out of sex by an arrangement they’d made after the first week of marriage. When they moved into their love nest together, they placed a pair of candlesticks on opposite ends of the fireplace mantle. Robert’s candlestick was on the left, Kenna’s on the right. If either was feeling a little randy, that person moved the candlestick to the center of the mantle as a kind of nonverbal gesture of his or her intention. If the other person agreed with this idea, then both candlesticks would meet in the middle. When this happened, the two met in the bedroom, the only place they ever had sex together, which, for me, was like a college repeat. They never minced words, always getting right down to the main event, like the act was a routine business transaction. Five or six minutes later, it was all over, and the two returned to life as usual.

  As for Callie, she married Sam at age twenty-one after a brief three-month courtship. Even though the rest of us tried to talk her out of it, there was no swaying her decision at the time. She was sure she’d met the love of her life. The pair eloped via drive-up window in Las Vegas, the city where we all lived, and didn’t bother telling anyone for a week. Now, she was faced with a mounting pile of debt attributed to his late-night gambling addiction—an addiction she never knew he had when they’d met. She regretted using her heart and not her head, but Callie took every decision she made seriously. Even though he didn’t deserve her, she was no quitter.

  Looking at them all now, I decided my plan of friendly attack would be to start with one woman at a time. I pivoted, hovered over Sasha. “How long are you going to wait before you confront Damon about his cheating?”

  She jerked back. “What? Where’s this coming from? We ask you to share one juicy tidbit about your own love life, and we’re back to talking about mine?”

  I crossed my arms in front of me. “Answer the question, Sasha.”

  “I ... I don’t know. It’s complicated.”

  “No, it isn’t. You walk up to him, yank his conservative blue-and-red-striped tie toward you until his circulation has been cut off, and say two little words: IT’S OVER. Of course, if you want to add one expletive or five, I’ll leave it up to you.”

  Callie and Kenna’s bodies slanted forward in one swift motion, their eyes wide. Neither spoke.

  “I don’t think I can,” Sasha muttered. “I don’t know. I mean, I—”

  “Of course you can,” I said. “I’ll help you get rid of the two-timing piece of trash, and then I’ll help you find a man you can rely on. Someone who will meet your needs. All of them.”

  “My needs? I don’t even know what those are anymore.”

  I pulled the chair back out, sat down, and addressed the group. “Week after week, I sit here listening to you all fuss over your imperfect, unfulfilled lives. You’re tired, you’re bored, and yet none of you do anything to change it.”

  “And your life is so much better?” Sasha asked.

  I smiled.

  “It wasn’t. Being single isn’t always fun either. But lately I’ve made it fun. I set boundaries with men, stopped dating the ones who didn’t deserve me. I learned how to get what I want out of life, and you can too. I’m happy. I’m free. And ladies ... I’m determined to live the best life I can, with or without a man.” I focused again on Sasha. “What happened to the fiery redhead I knew back in high school? You couldn’t walk past any guy without him craning his neck to gawk at you. Just because you’ve been married for several years to some preppy, insensitive ass doesn’t mean we can’t breathe life back into you again once you’ve tossed him.”

  Sasha glanced at her plate, then at the floor. “We’ve been together so long; I don’t know how to live without him.”

  I reached out, clutching her freckled hand. “Yes, you do. You’ve been doing it for over seven years now. When was the last time Damon was there for you? When was the last time he supported you? Not with money—with his time. Do you even remember?”

  She twitched in her chair, crossing one leg over the other, then uncrossing them, then crossing them back again. She bit the inside of her mouth, something she’d done ever since we were kids whenever her anxiety was coming on.

  “Breathe,” I said. “It’s time you face what’s really happening in your life and in your marriage.”

  “So I tell him to go to hell and you’re going to ... what? Wave a magic wand over my head and change my life forever, give me a do-over so I can go back and start again?”

  “Something like that.” I squeezed her hand. “When you decide you’ve had enough, we’ll get together and make a game plan. You’re a strong woman, Sasha. And you’re a lot stronger without him. You just don’t remember that girl anymore.”

  Sasha shook her head in disbelief. Once the dust settled and she processed what I’d just said, I detected the faintest smile. She looked like a door had just been propped open the tiniest bit and she could peek at all the things waiting in front of it. I wasn’t sure how long it would take for her to finally make a move, but the seed had been planted, and I’d be ready to assist when it did.

  My own transformation in life had commenced several months earlier. I’d arrived home to find Patrick, my live-in boyfriend of three whole months, schtupping Lola, his barely legal secretary. On my sofa. Wearing my lingerie. The framed photograph of us as a couple, the one with our arms gripped around each other that I usually positioned on the middle of the coffee table, had taken a dive, face-planted on the carpet below. I suppose looking at me while fornicating with her was out of the question.

  After one final, strenuous thrust, he glanced up, spotting me in the corner, one hand on my hip, the other using my middle finger to wave hello. He shot off the sofa, glaring at Lola like he’d suddenly developed a severe case of amnesia, and then he said the same lame thing all cheating men say: “Rae, I’m sorry. It’s not what you think.”

  Really?

  I didn’t think anything. Seeing was believing, and I’d seen it all. Why did guys always say they were sorry anyway? What was I supposed to do with that—swallow it and delete it from my memory now that he was experiencing a moment of regret?

  “Say something, hun,” he had said. “Anything. Please.”

  So I did. Two words actually. “Screw” and “you,” followed by a long strand of expletives. I then spun around so fast I almost collided with the sharp, wooden edge of the coffee table. I darted for the door, trying my best to hold my head high. I wanted to feel strong, tough. I deserved better, and I knew it. Instead, I felt like I was the one doing the walk of shame.

  So many years had come and gone since college, and still I hadn’t learned a thing about meaningful relationships.

  One month later after spending too many nights binge-watching all the “Top Picks for Rae” recommendations on Netflix, I decided I needed to do two things: stop feeling sorry for myself and shed a few pounds. I solved both by becoming a member at the local gym. A week later, I’d just passed a whopping fifteen minutes on the treadmill when she walked in. A single flip of her long, Farrah Fawcett bangs and luminous blond hair, and every guy in the room stood at attention, only they weren’t saluting her with their hands.

  Her name was Veronica Fox, and she knew how to straddle a weight machine in such a way that every male in the room looked over when she got on it. She made the rounds and then

  smiled at me as she hopped on the treadmill to my right. The men who had all failed at talking to her looked confused, and all I could do was giggle like a pig-tailed girl in grade school.

&n
bsp; “I’m Veronica,” she said.

  “Rae,” I replied.

  “I’ve seen you in here several times,” she said, “but you never leave the treadmill. You should make the rounds once in a while.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re obviously not here for the workout.”

  “What makes you say—”

  “You never focus on the machine,” she said. “You’re always gawking at all the men around you, and you’re never on the machine very long. You do maybe twenty minutes, never break a sweat, and then head out.”

  I was embarrassed she’d noticed.

  “I’m guessing you’re single?” she continued.

  “I broke up with my boyfriend recently. Why?”

  She set her machine to a level far exceeding mine, and I watched her long, spindly legs sprint with all the grace of an Olympic runner going for the gold. Through staggered breaths, she said, “Unless you change something, you’re going to end up in the same kind of relationship you’ve always been in. You get that, right?”

  “Get what?”

  She didn’t even know me.

  “You won’t find what you’re looking for in here. Other women will, but not you.”

  Did she honestly think no guy at the gym could ever fall for me? Not even one? My jaw fell open, but instead of responding, my mouth felt like it had started harvesting cotton. I hopped off the treadmill and bolted for the door. I’d made it almost all the way to the car and even managed to click the unlock button on my key fob when the sounds of footsteps jogged up behind me.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Hang on.”

  I froze, willing myself not to turn around, and then I did anyway.

  “What I said in there,” she said, “it came out all wrong. I didn’t mean to say you weren’t good enough, I meant to say you were better.”

  I wanted to focus on what she was saying, but I couldn’t. A twenty-something-year-old guy wearing a mostly shredded muscle shirt strutted up to us with his chest pushed out like he was the keeper of all the hens in the henhouse. Veronica realized he’d invaded our personal space and rolled her eyes before he even started talking.