Page 2 of The Game Plan

“Sienna, you and I haven’t had sex in weeks. You’re always working away or tired or just so on. I find you⁠—”

Whoa, hold up, is he making his infidelity a me problem?

“Exhausting. There, I said it. You’re a perfectionist, a workaholic, a fucking control freak and I needed a release.”

Is he for real?

“Well then, I’m sorry I stopped the party before you came inside our nineteen-year-old secretary, Carl.” Ten years my junior, twenty-one years younger than you, I think but don’t say.

“She was twenty last week.”

I scoff. “A technicality, which is incredibly not the point here. As for me being a control freak and a workaholic, that’s because I’m working to grow our business.”

“Mine, technically.”

I gasp. “Yours? I’m an employee for visa purposes only. We both know I co-own and manage this company.”

“We don’t need to discuss that right now,” he says. “The most important thing to discuss here is Marcela and me.”

“Marcela and you?”

He rakes a hand through his short hair. “She makes me feel good, Sienna.”

“I’m sure she does, while she’s riding your dick.” I let out such a bitter cackle I barely recognize it. “Is this your midlife crisis, Carl? Your reaction to turning forty?”

“No.” He’s genuinely affronted. Laughably so.

“Most people get a fancy car or splurge on a new hobby.”

“And maybe I will do that for my fortieth but Marcela isn’t new.”

I blink, startled into silence. “How many times?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long?”

I swear to God there’s a brief smirk on his face before he has the decency to remove it. “A while.”

* * *

I don’t let one tear fall in front of Carl as I pack up a suitcase and roll it to the elevator, pressing the button for the sixth floor, then getting out in front of my friends’ apartment in the same building.

I knock on the door and know as soon as Mitch answers that I look as ghastly as I feel.

“Sienna?” He looks at my suitcase. “What happened?”

Lauren, his wife, appears behind him as I say, “Carl has been banging our secretary.” I raise trembling fingers and, making shaky inverted commas, add, “For some time.”

I’m swept inside and sandwiched between two pairs of arms. Mitch is the Vice President of Communications for professional ice hockey team, the New York Dragons, here on Long Island. We’ve known each other since he taught a guest lecture for my Communications class at NYU nine years ago. He’s introduced me to some of the Dragons’ players I’ve provided bespoke PR to in recent years, for the company Carl claims is his.

Talk about having your cake and eating it, literally.

But it’s Lauren, his partner of more than twenty years and one of my few good friends, who ushers me into the lounge, directing Mitch to, “Put her luggage in the spare room and bring us girls some wine, please, honey.”

In this relationship, Mitch is the money and Lauren is everything else. They don’t have kids, by choice, though their little French bulldogs, Ice and Fire, start bucking my legs as I try to walk to their lounge and its view of the nearby park. The same view Carl and I have three floors lower down. Or did have.

“Ice, Fire, go find your pillows,” Lauren says, shooing the dogs, as I mentally add, and hump those instead.