“So, so good,” he whispered. He moved me gently on the surface of the water like a paper boat, as I subsided.

“But … it’s not over, is it?” I asked, my thighs quivering, my legs now straddling his waist.

Nearer to the shore, I slid my legs off him, my feet finding stones to stabilize me in the shallower part of the river. I stood waist-deep as the water fell down my breasts in rivulets, my nipples still hard. I pushed the hair off my face, feeling dizzy, exhausted, satisfied.

“This is as far as I get to take you on this step, Dauphine. I don’t want to, but I have to give you back.”

He walked towards the pebbly beach where we had entered the river. Near our clothes was a pile of bright white towels. He released my hand and climbed the bank, the water shining off his back. Then he turned to pull me onto the grass. I shivered as he plucked a towel from the pile and swaddled me, pressing me to him, squeezing warmth back into my body, rubbing my arms hard.

“I feel so … I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything. The pleasure was all mine.” He turned to dry himself off.

I pulled the towel tightly around me, watching as he tugged his jeans over his muscled thighs and pulled on a crisp white T-shirt, which clung to his damp torso. He stepped towards me again, this time placing his big hands on either side of my face, pulling me into a lingering kiss.

When he pulled away, he said, “I mean it. The pleasure was mine, Dauphine.”

After planting a final kiss in the middle of my forehead, he walked backwards for a few steps. Then he turned to head towards the plantation, finally disappearing around an ivy-covered corner.

I wanted to scream a thank you for leaving me so beautifully shipwrecked. But the words were still underwater with parts of the old me, the parts that were afraid of surrendering, of wanting this, of simply receiving pleasure and trusting it was possible. Instead, I laughed out loud again, this time thinking, I did it. Something happened and I let it!

I turned to my dress and pulled it up over my damp, quivering legs. Smoothing it down over my hips, I felt something in my pocket and took it out. A small purple box. Inside, nestled in a cotton cloud, was a gold charm, pale and rough-edged. I picked it up. It had a Roman numeral on one side—I— and the word Surrender engraved on the other side. My heart leapt as I took the charm out of its nest, squeezing it tight in my palm. It felt like a warm, flat stone. It was mine. I secured it to my chain, the one I’d been wearing for three weeks.

I made my way slowly up the sloping hill towards the waiting car. As I passed a high stone wall covered with bougainvillea, I caressed the tiny pink petals. You did it. You gave up control. Now it’s time to take the rest of the Steps, however tentative, towards your new life—and away from those voices, away from that heartbreak, away from your sad past.

1

CASSIE

THREE THOUGHTS OCCURRED to me that morning while stretching awake across my bed in Marigny.

One, it had been six weeks since that incredible night with Will.

Two, I had fallen asleep with my S.E.C.R.E.T. bracelet on again, which hadn’t been a problem when it had only one or two charms on it. But there were ten now, so the gold pressed into the tender flesh of my wrists, leaving marks.

And three, it was my birthday. My cat, Dixie, blinked at me from the foot of the bed. I reached down and pulled her into an embrace, where she purred herself back to sleep, a skill I wish I had.

“I am thirty-six years old today, Dixie,” I said, scratching her ears.

Another year had snuck up on me like a bratty prankster. I hadn’t been paying attention to time passing until after my night with Will. It had been six weeks, and time had begun to slow. Some days ached past, work at the Café Rose being both a major comfort and the salt in the very wound I needed to heal. How could I get over Will when I saw him every day? How could I continue acting like nothing had happened between us the night I’d danced in Les Filles de Frenchmen Revue and we’d kissed our way back to the Café, up the stairs to that dusty room, where he tore off my burlesque outfit and tossed me backwards on a mattress lit by moonlight? Though he didn’t know it, I had chosen him that night as my final fantasy. He knew only how badly I wanted him.

For me the lines between fact and fantasy had dissolved and he became real to me. His skin felt like home. We kissed like we’d been doing it for decades. We fit, our bodies perfectly molded for the things we did to each other naturally, wordlessly. It was beyond fantasy. And to think that all this time he had been right under my nose and I hadn’t seen him, couldn’t see him. But after a year of S.E.C.R.E.T., after a year of pushing myself past self-imposed boundaries, I had unleashed something very real inside of myself. And when Will told me he and Tracina had broken up, I felt the universe finally aligning in my favor. The morning after our magical night, I thought Will was my reward for coming back to life.

I was wrong.

More than any other memory from that night, it’s Tracina’s face that haunts me—ashen yet hopeful, her steady voice delivering the kind of hard facts that kill fantasies. She told me she was pregnant with Will’s baby, and that he was thrilled when he found out.

What do you do with that very real information just when you think you’ve found the love of your life? You feel the final bubble burst around your fantasy and you walk away. That’s what I did. All the way across the city to the Coach House, where Matilda dried my tears. There she reminded me that embedded in every fantasy is reality.

“People love the fantasy,” she said. “But they ignore the facts to their detriment. And there’s a price to pay when you do that. Always.”

Fact number one: Will and I were finally together.

Fact number two: I was quite possibly in love with him.

Fact number three: His ex-girlfriend was pregnant.

Fact number four: When she told him, they got back together.

Fact number five: Will and I cannot be together.

Because Will was my boss, I had planned to quit my job right away, but Matilda urged me never to let heartbreak get in the way of very practical concerns, like work, paying rent, being responsible and fulfilling obligations.

“Don’t give men that much power, Cassie. Get on with the task of living. You’ve had a lot of practice this past year.”

I was such a tear-stained mess that morning. I wasn’t certain whether joining S.E.C.R.E.T. was the right decision. But at least I was making a decision. That was new for me. Prior to S.E.C.R.E.T., I always went with the most powerful force governing my life at any given time, usually my late husband Scott’s. He had brought us to New Orleans almost eight years ago, but his drinking erased any notion that we’d made a fresh start. We were separated when he died in a car wreck; he was sober at the time, but still a broken man. I was broken as well. And for five years after, I worked hard and slept fitfully, falling into a pattern of isolation and self-pity, until one day I found a diary detailing one woman’s journey through a mysterious set of steps that seemed to have a lot to do with sex—a journey that was transformative, to say the least.

Then I met Matilda Greene, the woman who became my Guide. She said she had come to the Café Rose for the diary her friend had dropped, but really she came for me, to introduce me to S.E.C.R.E.T., an underground group dedicated to helping women liberate themselves sexually, by granting them sexual fantasies of their choice. Joining the group, letting these women arrange fantasies for me, and finding the courage to go through with them, she said, would pull me out of my malaise. She told me she’d help me, guide me and support me. Finally, after a week of turning the idea over in my head, I said yes. It was a reluctant yes, but it was a yes nonetheless. After which my life changed completely.

Over the course of a year, I had done fantastical things with unbelievably attractive men, things I would never have thought possible. I let a gorgeous masseur pleasure me without asking for a thing in return. I met a sexy British man in a dark bar who secretly brought me to orgasm in the middle of a boisterous jazz show. I was taken by surprise, in many ways, by a tattooed bad-boy chef, who stole a bit of my heart while ravaging me on a prep table in the Café’s kitchen. I learned to give the most mind-blowing orgasm to a famous hip hop artist, who enthusiastically returned the favor, the memory of which still makes me tingle when I hear his songs on the radio. I took a helicopter to a yacht, then went overboard in a storm with the most handsome man I had ever laid eyes on. Not only did he rescue me, but his whole (incredible) body restored my faith in mine. Then the Bayou Billionaire himself, Pierre Castille, took me in the back of a limousine, after making me feel like the most beautiful girl at the ball. I skied the risky black diamond runs with Theo, the adorable Frenchman who pushed my sexual limits further than anyone had before. Then I went into sensory overload with a man I could only feel, not see, during a night that was blindingly sexy in more ways than one.

Then came my final fantasy, when I chose my beloved Will. I chose Will over S.E.C.R.E.T. and couldn’t have had a happier night, or a more glorious morning after.

Now, six weeks later, there was no Will waking me up on my birthday with a thousand kisses. Instead, he was probably sleeping soundly next to Tracina, maybe even spooning her, his arms wrapped around her growing belly. She was just shy of three months pregnant, but yesterday afternoon she suddenly began lumbering around the Café like she was about to give birth at any moment. She kept one hand in the middle of her back while pouring refills, groaning and stretching between serving tables. She hadn’t cut down on her shifts yet; she wasn’t at the point of asking for help. Still, I wasn’t the only one rolling my eyes at her exaggerated discomfort. Dell wiped down tables while I refilled the salt and pepper shakers. When Tracina made a show of bending down to pick up a dishrag, Dell let out a long, slow whistle.

“That girl’s making an Academy Award–winning performance out of a regular baby growing in her. I had overdue twins and it wasn’t such a burden.”

We watched Tracina meander from the kitchen to her customers to the cash register, making everyone around her look like they were in fast-forward. She even made Dell—at age sixty—look spry. During a lull, she lumbered over to where Dell and I were clearing a large table. Her belly barely protruded through her tight T-shirt.

“Oh, let me help, Dell,” Tracina said, waving her away from a tray of half-filled ketchup bottles. “My legs are sore. You take the next tables. I don’t mind losing the tips. I just don’t want to push things while I can still work. ’Cause soon I’ll be all ‘feet up watching TV,’ right?”

“Why thank you, Tracina,” Dell said, hoisting herself off the chair. “Nothing like the pregnant one giving the old one more to do.”

“I’m just saying …” Tracina began, but Dell threw up a hand and followed the bell to the kitchen to fetch ready plates.

After the lunch rush, almost on cue, the hammering began. Will needed to make more money from the Café and the only way to do that was to expand to fine dining upstairs. After finally securing the proper permits and a business improvement loan, Will had started renovating. And now, with the baby on the way, the work was more urgent. The loan covered materials, but not much extra labor, so Will was doing the renovations himself, one wall, one window, one beam at a time.

In those six weeks since Will and I had been together, I had done everything in my power to avoid small talk with Tracina, because it felt littered with landmines of truth. So I avoided Will and work topics as best I could, switching to Dell, or the baby, or gossip on the street. I still couldn’t tell how much she knew about what had happened that night between Will and me. Everyone at the Blue Nile saw us leave together, and half of Frenchmen Street saw us kiss, so she knew something had occurred. And even though she hadn’t participated in the burlesque show on account of the pregnancy, she had hung out afterwards with Angela and Kit, both of whom were S.E.C.R.E.T. members, and both of whom danced in the Revue. Now, sitting side by side at the big round table, we gave each other matching high-eyebrowed, tight-lipped smiles.