That Morning After from the Phoenix Series

By Janus Gangi

Life was not always kind to Nicky. Raised by a cold mother and a mostly-absent father, she 'escaped' into an abusive marriage from which freedom was not an option. When Fate twists her life's thread again and leaves her without even the marginal protection of married life, she must make it on her own for the first time. An online dating service promises to ease her loneliness, but Nicky gets something she was never expecting ... now she must decide if she's brave enough to give Fate the one-two punch she'd been handed all her life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Janus Gangi
• Release date: May 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301119745

Janus Gangi

Janus Gangi is a native New Yorker and Native American, in which blood has always been a part of her life. After graduating from Flushing High School, where she majored in music, she was a professional singer/songwriter for a short while. She then went on to medical school and became a Hematology Technologist. She worked for a major non-profit organization, where she was involved in distributing the latest AIDS research information to the top doctors in the United States. She then attended Bible School for six years and went on to be ordained and founded a ministry in New York City. In the early nineties, she moved to East Tennessee where she returned to her roots in the Pagan tradition and went back to school. She now holds degrees in Religious Studies and Psychology in addition to her previous ones. She is an avid amateur Egyptologist, and now enjoys her new found love, writing

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THAT MORNING AFTER

(THE PHOENIX SERIES)

By

Janus Gangi

Copyright ©2013 by Janus Gangi

First electronic edition published by Smashwords

Published in the United States of America with international distribution.

Cover Design by Dreams2media

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

DEDICATION:

Kim McNeil, Jojo Allen, Elena Ahmadi Gestoso,

Erin O'Quinn and Damien

with special thanks to Diane Nelson

THAT MORNING AFTER

Life was not always kind to Nicky. Raised by a cold mother and a mostly-absent father, she 'escaped' into an abusive marriage from which freedom was not an option. When Fate twists her life's thread again and leaves her without even the marginal protection of married life, she must make it on her own for the first time. An online dating service promises to ease her loneliness, but Nicky gets something she was never expecting ... now she must decide if she's brave enough to give Fate the one-two punch she'd been handed all her life.

Chapter One

Jesus God Almighty, I feel like shit! Is it morning? I wiped my eyes and stumbled into the kitchen. Thank God I had the presence of mind to fill the coffee pot last night before I went to bed. Pushing the ‘on’ button is about all I can handle right now. The past two years have left me less than half the person I used to be. I used to have dignity.

I used to consider myself someone who could be respected and admired. What the hell happened? He is what happened, and I damn well know it. I have gone from a straight-laced, Bible thumping member of the community to an empty soulless shell…with a very bad hangover. Christ, I have a headache!

It can all be traced back to that day when the little white chat box popped up on my screen. Why I ever answered back is beyond me now. How ominous can a simple ‘hello’ be? Chalk it up to naivety, that’s why the danger was never present. After all, how unsafe could some words flashing across a screen be? At first there was no connection between the little black and white words and the stranger that was typing them at the other end of cyberspace.

They were just words. Questions and answers – like a pop quiz. The only difference was that these questions were specifically designed to bring about a means to an end, my total victimization. I make a very good victim. I made it my life’s work for over forty years.

I sucked in the man department. I couldn’t tell a good man if he was waving his arms in front of my face. Besides, a good man never had any interest in me. Some people are never meant to have a ‘happy ever after.’

Being a victim wasn’t always the way. My life started out with some promise. It was just my Mom and me. She was a middle-class working woman. My Father was in my life, he just didn’t live with us. He couldn’t, no man could; my mother was impossible to live with. My life’s goal was to never be like her. Although, she took her hard-heartedness to the extreme, running as far away from it was probably the reason victimization came so easily to me.

In my Mother’s eyes, she was never wrong, no matter what. Many times she was – loud and wrong – that is. To avoid that, every thought, decision, and motive of mine always came into question, resulting in a total lack of faith in myself, always.

Because of my hatred for her extreme emotionalism, I became an iceberg. Her habitual worrying repulsed me. Most of the time, because I believed it was plastic. The safer and more truthful route was indifference. It suited me well and still does. Then, there was her failed marriage; which I lay the blame squarely on her. That would not happen to mine. Mine would last forever.

Forever, what a joke. That word leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Everything comes to an end. Well, let me rephrase that, most things come to an end. In my determination not to be my mother, I never learned how to let go. I held on tight, even when I knew there was nothing left. Failure was not an option. She was a failure, not me.

Divorce was a dirty word. Besides, the prospect of stepping out on my own terrified me. After all, I was a fuck up. Everyone always made that perfectly clear. And truthfully, I believed them. I now know that you are only a fuck up if you let yourself be one. I did an extraordinarily good job of letting myself be one. So, the very first person to victimize me was me…go figure.

At the first opportunity to escape my mother, I bailed out. There was no constructive planning. I saw freedom, jumped out the window, and plunged straight into hell for the next two decades. While I kept my stone-cold exterior, the turmoil inside me whipped around in little destructive eddies, surfacing as one physical ailment after another. Lost in an abusive marriage and locked in a havoc-wreaked body, I was the epitome of pathetic. I knew this more than anyone else.

What was even more devastating was the damage that my fucked up life was inflicting upon my children. To this day, it has governed their lives. They are adult disaster areas. If FEMA covered personal lives, my kids would be collecting a check!

But like I said, there is no such thing as forever, and the end came crashing like a locomotive head on. In an instant, it was all over. The void was overwhelming. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was so consumed by chaos all of the time, respite was foreign to me. Normalcy was a stranger and peace was uncomfortable.

It’s funny that the one thing I prayed for became my living nightmare. I plunged down a deep, dark tunnel, with the sea of life at the bottom, and I belly flopped. Kicking and thrashing against the waves, I started to sink. I had no other choice than to gasp every bit of air and force myself to keep afloat. I needed to learn how to swim. It was time for reconstruction, retrospection, and reinventing a persona who never truly existed from the beginning. What I needed was a plan, a strategy.

All the hate I’d built up for my mother and husband had festered into a seething monster with a life all of its own. It clouded my perceptions of the world around me. If they were a reflection of what the rest of the planet was like, I wanted no part. In order to survive, I needed to learn how to mix and mingle, become a team player; something foreign to me, team members cared about each other. I trained myself not to care about anyone or anything. After finally opening my eyes for the first time and taking a good look around, the problem was not the rest of the world, it was me.

I was an old rust bucket, discarded years ago in some junkyard. I needed a drastic overhauling, a tune-up, and detailing. It was going to take a while before I was showroom ready. There was no time better than the present to get started; and that’s what I did. A friend of