Lilah zipped her lips, tossed the key over her shoulder, and then crossed her heart.
“All right. Fine. It’s old, old, old news anyway.” Sighing dramatically, she swept her forearm over her eyes, fainting princess style. “I had a broken heart.”
Izzy didn’t laugh. Just now, a broken heart didn’t sound funny at all. It sounded…shattering. Lilah, she noticed, didn’t laugh either. When the laughter she’d expected didn’t materialize, Bridget lowered her arm and stared at them. “God, you guys. It’s okay. I’m over it. Long over it. Look”—she stood and pointed to her chest—“no scars.”
“Did you ever see him again, after you left?”
Bridget sank back into the hot tub. “Nope. Although, it might be worth noting he left first. He was in the JD/MBA program.” She held up three fingers and wiggled them. “Three years. Three years of pretty pillow talk, and practically living together, never leaving each other’s side without swapping spit and saying ‘I love you,’ and feeling like the glowing center of someone else’s universe, and then”—she flicked her wrist as if looking at a watch—“‘Whoa, baby, would you look at the time? I’ve got to graduate and get on with my life. Enjoy your final year of college. Catch you later.’”
Appalled, Izzy put her glass down on the stone edge of the hot tub with a thump. “Are you serious?”
“’Fraid so. I mean, it wasn’t quite that bloodless, but basically, ‘I love you, but I can’t be with you right now. There are things I have to do. Family expectations. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Stay alive. I will find you.’”
“You’re alive,” Lilah pointed out. “Has he tried to find you?”
“No. Well, not really,” she amended. “He reached out when he learned I’d left school, but I blocked him. I was just starting to get my feet under me and stand on my own again. I didn’t need him knocking me down with a text or a call. He was my first, and I’d honestly believed my only and always. I deserved time to recover from that delusion.”
“And you’re recovered now?” Lilah asked.
“Oh, please. Fully. I never think about him anymore, or I would never, except he always sends a card on my birthday. His way of letting me know he’s still out there. I always send it back, unopened.”
Lilah sent Bridget a challenge in the form of a question. “If you’re fully recovered, what would be the harm in reading the card?”
“What’s the point? I don’t need a pen pal. I sure as hell don’t need to allow someone who hurt me a toehold back into my life. Whatever was between us is done. That naive girl I was is gone forever. The clear-eyed woman you see before you is stronger, more self-sufficient, and doesn’t depend on anyone else for her happiness. I enjoy friends. When the opportunity presents, I enjoy sex. I’m not interested in love. It’s not for me.”
“No love,” Izzy repeated. “Don’t you think that’s a scar?”
Bridget shook her head. “It’s a fact about myself that I learned the hard way. But I learned it. And so, if I live out the rest of my life never seeing or hearing from Archer Ellison the Third again, I’ll die a happy woman.”
“But maybe there’s someone else out there, and if you’re not open to it… Wait.” What? Izzy swallowed hard. “Did you say Archer Ellison the Third?”
“Yeah, why? Know him?”
Shit. Shit. Shit. “No. As far as I know, I’ve never met him, but…uh…that’s quite a name.”
Bridget smirked. “His family is some big deal in international shipping. Yawn. I probably dodged a big, boring bullet.”
“Yeah,” Izzy managed to say. “Probably.”
Bridget yawned for real. “Now that we’ve dragged my tragic past out and picked through it, I’m beat.” She stood and wrapped a towel around herself, then stepped out of the hot tub and draped a blanket over her shoulders. “I don’t know about you, but I’m calling it a night. Make yourselves at home.”
“Hey, Bridge?” Lilah waylaid her. “Was he cute?”
Bridget shook her head, but her slow smile conveyed pure, unfiltered nostalgia. “Not cute. That tall, blond, green-eyed sonofabitch was fuck-hot, and damn, he knew it. On that note, goodnight, girls.”
“’Night,” Izzy echoed as Bridget opened the door to step inside.
Key shot out the open door and beelined to the hot tub. “K’eyush, get your furry butt back inside,” Bridget scolded. The dog ignored her and put his head in Lilah’s lap.
She petted him. “He’s okay. I’ll make sure he comes inside with us.”
Bridget waved a hand in consent and closed the door behind her.
In her mind, Izzy frantically reviewed all the new information she’d just gained. After a moment she realized a not entirely easy silence stretched between her and Lilah, despite the distraction of the dog. In an effort to ease it, Izzy joked, “Wow. The things you learn during girls’ night.”
Lilah’s smile in response looked forced. “Yeah. I know. Actually, Izzy, I was hoping to talk to you, privately, if you have time? Tonight, I mean.” She paused to nudge Key’s nose away from her middle. “If you’re too tired, we could do it another time—”
“Now’s fine.” Izzy reached out and touched the girl’s arm. “What’s up?” Mentally, she prepped for a should-I-pursue-law-school discussion.
Key took the question for his own and answered by raising his snout to the sky and wailing, “Aaaay!”
Lilah blushed, shushed the dog and continued to stroke his head and scratch his ears. He laid his head in her lap and gave a soft, yawning, “Aay.”
“Poor guy,” Izzy murmured around the marble of sorrow lodged in her throat. “He misses his daddy.”
“We all miss Shay.” The younger woman bent and gave the dog a hug. “I know time is supposed to ease that, but just lately, I miss him more than ever.”
Once again, Izzy felt out of her depth. “I don’t think coming to terms with the loss of a friend follows a straight trajectory. I imagine like most any kind of healing, you have good days, and tough days, and hope that, in the long run, the good days start to outnumber the tough days.”
Lilah nodded, but remained silent. Pensive, if Izzy had to put a word to it. Captivity was a small, tightly woven community. Losing a native son at such a young age would leave a shadow of sorrow on everyone. Even so, there was a five-year age difference between Lilah and Shay. They wouldn’t have been classmates, or, surely, run in the same circles. True, she and Bridget were good friends, and Shay was her good friend’s twin brother, but still. “Were you and he close?”