CHAPTER 1
Rhett
No one ever got rich and famous with the name, Rhett Dyck.
It was the one and only, the very same name that kids bugged him unmercifully about in high school. Wet Dyck. That’s what they used to call him. Wet Dyck this and Wet Dyck that. When are you going to get your dick wet, Wet Dyck?
Rhett never wanted to be famous. He never really wanted to be rich either. It was never on his to-do list as a young person- go to college and get a degree in Computer Science that was it. The part about making a truck ton of money selling computer software… that came as a bonus.
The kind that came unexpectedly at the incredibly young age of twenty-four. By the time he was twenty-five, he’d changed his name to Rhett Smith, because it was safe and easy and boring and so damn plain it nearly gave his mother an aneurysm when he told her what he’d done. As a single mother who raised him alone after his shit for brains father went to jail and never decided to send so much as a birthday card in all of his life, which really was all of Rhett’s life since his old man got put away just after he was born, his mother was incredibly offended that her family name wasn’t good enough for him.
He’d spent years trying to make her understand. She still didn’t.
Kind of like she’d never understood what he saw in Sarah Berns. She was the kind of woman people liked to deem a trophy wife. Virtually unskilled though she had a degree. She hadn’t worked since she moved in with him and he footed the bill for a comfortable life. She was blonde and beautiful and that was why the twenty-five-year-old version of himself fell in love with her. It was why the thirty-two-year-old version proposed marriage when she threatened to leave him. It was why she moved in, why he paid for expensive clothes and spa visits. He didn’t want to lose her. Losing her would have meant the end of the world.
He always thought so, anyway.
But he never expected what would happen next when he walked by the room in the church where his bride-to-be was getting dressed. He intended to give her yet another expensive gift, a necklace that set him back eight thousand, but which was really just a drop in the bucket since he wanted to spoil the woman he loved. At least, he had intended to spoil her until he heard her telling her best friend that she was just marrying him for the money, that she didn’t love him, that he had a small dick and couldn’t fuck worth shit, nothing like Bob.
Bob, of all names!
He’d turned right back around and walked his ass back through the hallway he’d just taken.
Rhett took a hard left at the end of the hall. He was somewhere lost in the church’s basement, which scared the hell out of him, considering it was one of those huge old monoliths, over a hundred years old. The darkness and dank smell of dust and a century of religious creepiness assaulted him. He bent over at the waist, gasping for breath. His chest squeezed hard like he’d just been kicked by a freaking damn horse. A horse named Sarah Berns.
The image of his fiancée fucking a guy named Bob behind his back was too much. Bob. Such a fucking regular name. She didn’t even have the balls to fuck someone exotic sounding like Pierre or Alexandro. No, it had to be fucking, Bob. Which was probably short for Robert, which sounded like an eighty-year-old fucking man.
So, Rhett’s sex life with Sarah wasn’t that exciting- it was ordinary at best. They’d been together for seven freaking years. Who had stellar sex after seven years?
He’d made up for it in the way he could. Given Sarah everything she fucking wanted. Always.
His throat closed up. Something acrid and bitter burned at the back and he didn’t realize until it was too late that he was going to puke. He could thank the image of Sarah, spread eagle on their bed, Bob’s eighty-year-old shriveled sack and white pubes in the background.
He heaved until his stomach freaking hurt. It was all twisted up wrong like it would never be right again. His mouth tasted absolutely putrid no matter how many times he spat. He hadn’t eaten much this morning. Had been way too nervous. He’d had a shot of whiskey for courage, okay, maybe closer to three since he’d drank it straight from the bottle in the limo on the way to church. And now, it burned far worse coming up.
Somewhere above him, the monolith of an organ began to play. Who the hell got married in a church anymore? He felt like some unwanted monster, twisted and deformed, hiding out in the underbelly of society while the world went on around him, too ugly to ever be a real part of society.