Free One Night in A Bar by Louisa Masters

you?”
    “I know you’re still angry with him, but I think we all agree that this is important.” Around Jess, four other heads began bobbing up and down. Whatever was causing Jess’ bout of temporary insanity was obviously contagious. “You really need to hear this—need to listen to what he’s got to say.”
    “Fuck that!” Frankie spat. “I don’t need to do anything of the sort. I don’t owe him anything.”
    “Please, just listen.”
    “I won’t.” Frankie forced her shaky legs to propel her forwards into the room, hand outstretched for the offending item, even though the last thing she wanted to do was make contact with anything that the bastard had touched. “Give it here. I’ll shred and burn it myself.”
    She couldn’t believe it when Jess pulled the paper back out of reach. “That’s exactly what he says you’ll do,” her friend said with a sad little smile, then her eyes dropped to the sheet and without further hesitation she began to read aloud. “ My Dear Francesca …”
    The sound of her full name hit Frankie like a blow to the belly, the impact stopping her dead in her tracks and nearly bending her double. Mark was the only person who ever used it. Frankie belonged to everyone, he’d always said. Francesca was just his. Special.
    Yeah, right. She pushed the memory aside. He’d gone and shown her exactly how special she’d been, hadn’t he?
    “Don’t do this, Jess,” she warned, her voice as shaky as her knees as she started forward again, needing to get that letter out of here before it led them all to a place of recriminations and regret.
    “ I hope, before you burn, shred or otherwise destroy this letter, that you will at least read some of it and know that I write these words for you and not as a salve to my own conscience. ”
    The words in question— his words—snaked out of Jess’ mouth to wrap around Frankie like a rope, tying her to the spot.
    “ As much as I wish for it, I know I can’t ask for your forgiveness. How could I expect it from you when I can’t even give it to myself? I understand only too well that the damage my actions have caused to you, to me, to us, is irreparable, and that if I were to apologise a thousand times it would never come close to being enough. ”
    “Jess, stop.” Frankie gasped, unable to draw a full breath as the verbal lasso continued to tighten, constricting her chest to the point of pain. Her friend winced at the raw sound of her tone but didn’t look up, didn’t stop.
    “ The facts are simple, irrefutable. You trusted me and I betrayed you. You loved me and I hurt you. I’d undo that in a heartbeat if I could, but we both know that changing the past is impossible. The important thing now is that you understand that my infidelity was no reflection on you, on what we had between us. It was never about me looking for something else, something more. How could it be, when you were already everything I ever wanted? What it was, Francesca, was just a horrible, careless moment of madness. A terrible, stupid mistake. ”
    An image of Mark popped unbidden into Frankie’s mind, showing him naked on a bed, his strong, athletic body pinning a smaller female frame to the mattress with the fast, powerful thrusts of his hips, his blond head lowered, his lips murmuring a stream of honeyed words. It was a scenario she was so intimately and frequently acquainted with that in an instant her body was responding, nipples tightening against the remembered rasp of chest hair, juices seeping between her legs to lubricate the passage of that solid, driving shaft. Only this time the woman beneath her husband wasn’t her.
    Gulping for air, she shoved the distressing picture aside amid a wave of light-headedness and nausea. But it was her body’s physical arousal that made her truly sick to her stomach—the evidence that her flesh could still crave what her battered emotions rejected and her intellect despised.
    “ I need you to know that, to