Read The Wives of Beverly Row 1: Lust Has a New Address for Free Online Page B

deserved.”
    “That’s exactly the way Jake is,” Zola said. “He says his affairs mean nothing. He says I’m the only woman he comes back to, time after time. He says he loves me but that he can’t help what he does. He says it’s a sex addiction.”
    “I’ve heard that before,” Ariel said.
    “It’s very difficult to live with,” Zola said. “I mean, I try not to blame him for it because it’s a real addiction and he can’t help it, but then, it’s just so bad . You know? He doesn’t even hide it from me. I’m afraid to go anywhere near his computer or his phone because I know I’ll find conversations he’s having with other women. Women he wants to meet up with for sex.”
    “That’s really hard,” Ariel said.
    “Or men. As often as not he’s having conversations with their husbands.”
    “Their husbands?” Ariel said in surprise.
    Zola shrugged. “That’s the world we live in.”
    Ariel was dumbfounded. She’d never heard of anything like it in her life. She looked around at the other three women but none of them seemed that taken by the news.
    “He speaks with their husbands?”
    Zola waved her hand like she didn’t want to talk about it. “That’s a thing now,” she said. “Men set up encounters for their wives. I think it’s sick.”
    “They set up encounters for other men to sleep with their wives?”
    “Yes. It’s a thing on the Internet. Jake is really in to it.”
    “Am I the only one who’s never heard of this?” Ariel said.
    The other three shrugged.
    “I’ve heard of it,” Trudy said. “If my ex had ever offered that, I’d have been all over it!”
    “Trudy!” Veronica said.
    “What? I would have. You try being married to a man who’s almost thirty years older than you.”
    “How did you finally break up with your husband?” Zola said to Ariel.
    Ariel sat back in her seat. The waitress came with another round of cocktails. Ariel downed her drink and ordered another. She felt she needed it.
    “Well,” she started. “For me, a lot of things happened at once. I’d tried everything with Gabe. We’d gone through counseling. I went to support groups for women with cheating spouses. We’d even tried explaining his behavior as an illness or an addiction. And a big part of me believed it was an illness. I knew he loved me. I knew he loved Becky. And I knew too that he just couldn’t stop himself from cheating on us. He just physically couldn’t stop. No matter how much hurt it caused.”
    “That’s exactly how it is with Jake,” Zola said.
    “And we’d go through periods where things were so good between us. We really were a good match in a lot of ways.”
    “Which just made it harder to end things, right?” Zola said.
    “Yes. It did. But Zola, after a few years of therapy sessions and group counseling and support meetings, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I was constantly asking myself what the point of it all was. Why did I have to have a support group just so that I could survive my marriage? A healthy marriage shouldn’t require a support group and a therapist. I know sex addiction is a thing people have, an illness, but for me, I just couldn’t stomach it any more. At a certain point, I just came to the realization that addiction and behavior, illness and decision, they become indistinguishable. You are your decisions . The problems Gabe and I were having were the result of decisions he was making on a daily basis. I couldn’t just remove his responsibility from the equation by calling his behavior an addiction. It was still his behavior. Those were his decisions. And I didn’t want to be married to the man that made those decisions any more.”
    “So you split up?”
    “Well, it was at the same time that the IRS sent me a tax bill for over a million dollars. I got an accountant to look into it and it seemed Gabe’s sex addiction wasn’t the only thing that was wrong with our marriage. He was also hiding over six million dollars from