“Did you fuck him?”
“Are you jealous?” There’d been no hint of it in his remark, but I couldn’t help myself.
Edward said nothing, expressionless and impervious to my charm.
I sighed. “Not that it’s relevant, but yes. He wasn’t my first either, so don’t try to make that into anything it’s not.”
“So you fucked him, he wasn’t your first, and he was nice,” he said in summarization.
I took a swallow of my wine. “Right.”
“And he made you forget all about the nameless guy.”
“That’s right,” I said cautiously, feeling there was a challenge in his last statement that I couldn’t quite pinpoint.
“I see,” he said in a way that made me sure he didn’t see at all. At least, he didn’t see what I wanted him to see. “And then what happened?”
“Then I came home for the summer. Dirk stayed in California because that was where he was from. He invited me to move in with him, which I considered, but I was young, and I missed home.”
“You wanted to go back and flaunt Dirk in the nameless guy’s face.”
“No.” It had been the first thing I’d told Hudson when I saw him again. My mother had plans for us to go to a garden show that afternoon, and I didn’t have much time to visit, but I’d snuck off to his summer house just to tell him. “No, not to flaunt. I wanted him to know I was over him, though, yes.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, unconvinced.
“Because I didn’t want my old crush to be an obstacle in our friendship.”
“I don’t believe you.”
His skepticism was maddening.
“I wasn’t trying to make him jealous,” I insisted. If that’s what he was suggesting. “What I had with Dirk was real. I thought he could have been it for me.”
He let that sit for a moment, letting me absorb the truth of what I’d just said, or the untruth, as he believed.
But it was true. Wasn’t it?
“So then you wanted to see the old crush to test yourself,” he said when I didn’t say anything else. “To be sure.”
My cheeks flamed with guilt. “Okay, maybe a bit of that too.” I pushed myself off the bar with my hip and walked back around the couch and sat down. “But I truly didn’t have some glorified plan to make him fall for me. I had fond feelings for him, and I wanted to find a new way to be in his life. So I told him all about Dirk, and it worked. I had a boyfriend and wasn’t after him anymore so suddenly I wasn’t someone he needed to avoid. We were together so much that summer, going to the movies and the beach and parties of people we knew in high school. Except for my parents and my best friend, Christina, I saw him more than anyone else.
“It was all fine until the end of August. We’d gotten close, really close, and, sure, I still felt things for him. Those aren’t the kinds of feelings that go away easily, but I was okay with what we were and what we weren’t, and I had Dirk, who I talked to every day.” I checked myself. “Maybe not every day. Not at the end.”
“Because the boy was seeming interested.”
I scowled because I hated how Edward thought he knew everything. But he was right this time. Which I hated even more. “Yeah. He did seem interested.”
I took another swallow of the Malbec and ignored the way Edward made me feel with his presence in order to better remember how Hudson had made me feel in the past. Literally manipulated me into feeling, to be truthful, but I wouldn’t know that for sure for another several months. “He would brush up against me, accidentally. Or he’d sweep the hair from my face. Touching, he was always touching me, and that had never been like him before. He’d never been a real physical guy. And he was thoughtful about me. I’d lamented to him about not knowing what to major in, and he’d researched my school and gotten all these brochures on interior design and gave me a gorgeous coffee-table book about it.”
The memory made me smile. It had seemed utterly romantic to me—a guy going out of his way to help decide what I should do with my life. What I should be. It was the best proof of mattering. A guy wouldn’t go out of his way like that, wouldn’t notice, if I didn’t matter. That kind of gesture got me fluttery every time.
Though there hadn’t been that many. The last time a man paid that much attention to me…
I glanced quickly at Edward, as if he could read my thoughts, as if he could know I’d almost compared his gifts over the last three months to the gift Hudson had given that had swept me away.
They weren’t the same. I refused to think of them as the same.
“Is there something else?” he asked, trying to interpret my train of thought.
“I didn’t sleep with him.” I couldn’t tell from his expression if that had been truly what he’d assumed. “I did kiss him. Or I let him kiss me. I’m not sure which it was anymore. And I wanted him to kiss me.”
I’d wanted him to do more than kiss me. I would have let him, if things had gone the way I’d wanted. I’d thought it was inevitable after that kiss. That we’d be together. That we’d be a couple.
I could still feel that wanting, under layers of years and walls and nothing. Like a bruise that never healed but only hurt when I pressed on it. Of all the made-up things there had been between Hudson and me, before and after, that moment was real. That wanting was real.
Wanting that was magnified by believing he felt it too.
I’d thought all that had stood between us was Dirk, a guy who, as Edward had pointed out, was good but bland.
“I wasn’t a terrible person.” How long had it been since I’d been able to say those words? “Not yet, anyway. So I did the honorable thing, and tried to call Dirk to break up. But he was at work so I had to leave a message and when he called back I was already at this big party Christina was having, which wasn’t the place to break up with a guy, and I knew it, but…” My only excuse had been eagerness, and that sounded petty, so I left it there. “He was hurt. I could tell. Even over the phone.” Let’s wait and talk this over when we get back for the new semester, he’d begged. “It hurt more than I’d imagined it would, hurting him like that. I had to leave for a bit to take a drive and get my head together afterward because it hurt so bad. But when I came back, I was better and ready, and I saw...I saw the boy’s car, so I knew he was inside, and I looked for him everywhere. Asked everyone. Searched every room, and when someone said he thought he was hanging in Christina’s room, I ran up there.”
I could still see it like it was happening. Me flinging open the door, and them. The image permanently seared into my mind.
“He was fucking her. Fucking my best friend. As if we hadn’t kissed the night before. As if we hadn’t agreed to talk more about our relationship at the party. As if I hadn’t told him I loved him.” It sounded so insignificant in the telling compared to how it had felt to witness.
The worst part, though, hadn’t even been that moment but after, when I’d confronted Hudson, and he’d pretended there’d been nothing, that all the signs I’d read were mistaken. He’d told me to grow up.
What did you think was going to happen between us? You thought I was going to love you? You thought we were going to ride off into the sunset together?