My Bare Lady (Scorned Women's Society #1)

by Piper Sheldon

Jack moved backward toward the exit. I was forced to follow him. “Look around you, man. There’s not a single brother in this room,” he said with his lips hardly moving. As he spoke I was surprised to find he was right. Aside from the entertainment—which varied in all ethnicities and combinations of skin and hair color—the room consisted of mostly white, middle- to upper-class males. I frowned. I hadn’t noticed. But there were often things I didn’t notice that Jack did, that he later pointed out to me. Another unspoken bias in American culture.

The idea that people could be treated so casually as objects had always boggled my mind. Who decided who was of value and who was expendable?

“And then this armadillo went chasing after him…It was the wildest thing I’d ever seen.” Suzie could hardly speak she was laughing so hard, and Jack was silent with laughter, hunched over holding his gut. “He kept running and running…this wild animal was running straight at him…we all just watched because, to be honest, he’s kind of a jerk cop sometimes.” “An armadillo?” Jack shook his head, wiping his eyes. “Yeah, someone told him they had leprosy or something.”

If you want to be better, you’ll make yourself better. Otherwise, you’ll find excuses to fail.”

“At some point, you have to decide to stop letting other people define you and decide what you want to be for yourself.”

“Just because everybody says things about you, doesn’t make them true. You get to decide who you are.”

Everybody should be treated with a minimal amount of respect and consideration.