When those strangers walked into the Jubilee restaurant, Trudy Johnson was twenty-two years old and she had not had sex in five years. Her horniness was closing in on her every thought. It was making her edgy, irritable. But she had made herself a promise. She had decided to forgo the physical for a while. She was in recovery.
Trudy had the kind of body that caused no end of trouble. Her mother had the same one. Her sister Tammy had it. And her little niece, Mercy, would likely have it one day, too, God help her. The kind of body that grew up too soon, that alienated you from your later-blooming classmates. That attracted the attention of the wrong men. Or maybe it made men act wrong. It made them call you a goddess but treat you like trash. Impregnate you and evaporate. The Johnson family had, at this point, three generations of females living in their house and zero generations of men.
She had the kind of body that, if you lived in it long enough, confused you about love. It could lead you to believe that any man who really cared for you would not want to have sex with you. Because he would be able to see that sex was not your only purpose. That you had other things to offer. So far, she had not met such a man.
Except once, in a way.
Once she had met a man who was not the least bit interested in having sex with her. Maybe because he saw people naked every day, all bodies — even hers — had lost their magic. Dr. Noel Cameron had saved her life once. No questions asked. Every time she saw him in town, he nodded at her, then looked away. The sun always seemed to be behind him, shining all around his big head.
That was it: one shining exception to the rule. One good man. The rest, Trudy was pretty sure, were complete bastards.