The Day We Got Our Marriage License, His Childhood Friend Claimed I’d Been Sleeping Around for Years

Tina stared at me in disbelief. She stumbled back two steps, then threw herself into Sam’s arms and burst into tears.

He comforted her softly, but when he looked at me, his eyes were full of disgust.

Turning around, Tina let tears stream down her face. “Xena, I wanted to keep this secret for you. But how can you still refuse to admit what you’ve done?”

She wiped away her tears, then looked at Sam and said in a firm voice, “I honestly thought Xena would change, which is why I never told you before. Every time she said she was going on a business trip, she was actually checking into hotels with different men. I have all the receipts.”

The next second, Tina pulled a thick stack of receipts out of her purse and handed them to him.

Every single one of them had my name on it.

I froze in shock. I hadn’t stayed at a hotel in ages, so where had Tina gotten those receipts?

Sam flipped through them one by one, his expression growing darker with every page.

Then, without warning, he flung the whole stack at my face and demanded to know how many times I had cheated on him.

I bent down, picked up a few of the receipts, and looked them over carefully. The dates and hotel names were all there in black and white. Each one even listed how many condoms had been used.

A sick feeling rose in me. Had someone been using my identity to rent hotel rooms?

Forcing myself to stay calm, I flatly denied that the receipts were real.

I said immediately that someone had to be impersonating me, and I demanded that we call the police and get it investigated.

But Sam refused to believe a word I said. Instead, he pointed at my chest and sneered that the evidence was already right in front of him, so what else was there to explain?

His voice was full of contempt. “If you hadn’t been messing around with other men, would they be hanging like that? Like a damn cow’s?”

The second I heard that word, my whole body went rigid. All the awful memories from middle school came rushing back.

Because I had developed earlier than the other girls, the boys at school used to mock me with that exact nickname.

Back then, Sam had even gotten into fights with them over it. He wouldn’t let anyone laugh at me.

But now, when he said it, he sounded no different from those boys back then, full of the same contempt and disdain.

Everyone there followed the direction of his finger and looked at my chest. Voices of envy and disgust rose one after another around the room.

A few women in the crowd who had bodies like mine immediately drew suspicious looks from their own boyfriends, who lowered their voices and asked if they had slept with other men too.

Instead of realizing their boyfriends were in the wrong, or questioning anything Tina was saying, they joined the crowd in blaming me.

They acted as if my supposedly messy private life was the reason they were being dragged into it.

And Tina chose that exact moment to start spouting fake “medical facts,” trying to pin the label of promiscuous on me for good.

She didn’t care in the least whether women built like me would be rejected by their boyfriends or disgust everyone around them.

She even used herself as an example, telling the men there that the smaller a woman’s chest was, the “cleaner” she was.