Morgan - The naked truth: a memoir

ALSO BY LESLIE MORGAN

Crazy Love

The Baby Chase: How Surrogacy Is Transforming the American Family

Mommy Wars: Stay-at-Home and Career Moms Face Off on Their Choices, Their Lives, Their Families

Simon & Schuster

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New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2019 by Leslie Morgan

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition May 2019

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Interior design by Lewelin Polanco

Jacket design and Illustration by Zoe Norvell

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Morgan, Leslie, 1965- author.

Title: The naked truth : a memoir / by Leslie Morgan.

Description: First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster, [2019]

Identifiers: LCCN 2019000817| ISBN 9781501174100 | ISBN 9781501174117 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Morgan, Leslie, 1965Sexual behavior. | Divorced womenUnited StatesBiography. | Divorced womenSexual behaviorUnited States. | Man-woman relationshipsUnited States.

Classification: LCC HQ811.5 .M67 2019 | DDC 306.70973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019000817

ISBN 978-1-5011-7410-0

ISBN 978-1-5011-7411-7 (ebook)

to the men who made me scream and the women who let me cry

A t forty-nine, I got divorced after twenty years of marriage and motherhood.

I had work I loved. My delectable, seditious teenagers had more than silenced my biological clock (trust me). I had enough money stashed away not to worry about it much.

Even though Id been married for most of my adult life, I had doubts about the viability of romantic relationships. Betrayal and neglect in my marriage had shattered my sexual self-esteem. I came up with the idea of having five lovers for a year. I was clueless about which ones, if any, Id keep for good.

This is the story of what I learned along the way about love, sex, men, and myself.

Amazing to me even now, the events described in this book are real. A few important characters have been omitted and some have been combined, and some chronologies have been condensed and reworked for compressions sake. I re-created the dialogue as accurately as I can recall it. All names, as well as several geographic, chronological, and identifying details, have been changed.

I drove along the sweltering Pennsylvania highway like a demon, hoping to make it to the Philadelphia Airport in time. My flight took off in less than an hour, but suddenly, stopped cars littered the road like confetti. A summer traffic jam caused, I kid you not, by drivers slowing down to look at a couple walking two Jack Russell terriers. To have any chance of making my flight, I had to keep swerving my dented black minivan around idiotic drivers who did not have a plane to catch. And whose cars presumably had air-conditioning that still worked.

Despite the traffic and the heat, my heart felt light with joy, because for the first time in nearly twenty years, I was on a trip by myself, with no one in the car to fight with me. After ending an abusive marriage in my twenties, Id just gotten divorced again. All I wanted now was to hang out with my two teenaged kids and our pets. Although it had been three years since Id had sex, my wildest dream was to never get into a car, or sleep in a bed, with any man, ever again.

I pulled the van into the airport lot and parked in the first open space I found. I ran through security, my Rollaboard stuffed with books rattling behind me, checking the time on my iPhone as I went. I clattered past a Hudson News store and didnt recognize myself in the plate glass window. I had on a stretchy black top and my favorite Lucky jeans. Not surprisingly, my forty-nine-year-old reflection looked stressed, my forehead wrinkled, as if I were a once-sexy T-shirt that had become faded and crumpled after being washed too often.

But somehow, I also looked thinner, younger, prettier, more myself than Id looked in ten years. Id gotten my hair streaked blonde and was wearing lipstick again on a daily basis for the first time in two decades. Im never going to look like Gisele Bndchen, but Id lost about twenty pounds since the split, via what my girlfriend KC called the divorce diet. All that anxiety about custody, legal bills, health insurance, and the leak in the bathroom ceiling had a silver lining after all: smaller jeans.

When I got to the gate for the flight to Long Island, in addition to sporting a layer of sweat, I was hyperventilating. I had ten minutes to spare until takeoff. I pulled the chrome handle on the industrial gray door leading to the jetway. It was locked .

Fuck! I yelled at the door. Double fuck!

The frosted-hair clerk at the gate spoke without looking up from her mauve fingernails flitting across the computer keyboard.

Flights delayed. Thunderstorms.

I looked quizzically at the jets parked outside the window behind her. The sky was blue and cloudless.

Feeling paradoxically pissed off and relieved, I whirled around, looking for an outlet to charge my phone, or at least an empty chair to collapse in after my Olympic sprint. To my horror, as if in slow motion, my purse knocked over someones coffee on the high top charging station behind me. Black liquid poured over the table. I watched as it slowly dripped onto the industrial airport carpeting.

Oh my God, Im so sorry! Let me buy you another cup...

My voice trailed off as I registered the man whose drink Id knocked over.

Holy shit.

The drinks owner was, quite possibly, the best-looking man Id ever seen. Cropped dark hair. Deep blue eyes. Two decades younger than me. A chill zigzagged through me as my eyes met his.

To my surprise, instead of being annoyed, he offered me a lazy smile. His eyes held mine, replacing my shiver with the warm cloak of a cashmere sweater. No man had smiled at me like that in years. Entire decades had passed during which I thought a man would never look at me like that again.

You dont need to buy me another coffee, he protested, mildly, faint smile lines creasing his tanned cheeks.

The man had to be in his late twenties or early thirties. He looked like an executive dressed for business-casual Friday, a blue button-down shirt tucked into dark Levis. However, his hands were bare and brown, rough and calloused, and he wore scuffed construction boots, as if he worked outdoors.

Please? I feel terrible.

Did I sound like the mom who wanted to make everyones skinned knee better? I tried talking again, willing myself to say something normal, clever even.

Are you also on the flight to Long Island?

Not the wittiest repartee, I know. But it worked, because it kept the conversation flowing.

Yeah, I take it all the time for work. Mr. Blue Eyes sighed. Im based in Richmond, so I change planes here. This afternoon flight is always delayed.

He had a lovely baritone voice. Hed be good on the radio. Or a sex chat line. How would it feel to be naked in front of him? Why was I thinking about taking off my clothes in the middle of an airport? With a stranger half my age? When I never wanted to have sex again as long as I lived?