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Alicia considers the question before she answers.
“She wasn’t mad. I think she blamed herself. The two of us talked a lot after you left, but she was always kind of hesitant to talk about what happened between you. I think she felt like you chose your dad.”
“I did.”
“She understood that you had to make your own choices.”
“I wish I’d come back,” I say quietly. “Before she passed.”
“It would have been nice,” Alicia agrees. “But there’s no going back, Cage. We can only go forward.”
“How’d you get to be so smart?” I whisper, looking over at her. Even now, in the dim lighting in Orlando’s room, I can see those bright, lovely eyes shining at me.
“Years of practice, I guess,” she shrugs.
“She was lucky to have you around.”
“I was the lucky one. Your mom helped me a lot. She was with me every step of the way when I was pregnant and she was with me when he was born.”
“Did your mom go to the birth, too?”
“Yep. All three parents were there.”
Except for my dad.
She’s not counting my dad.
“My dad died,” I tell her.
“I’m sorry,” she says quickly, but she doesn’t seem surprised.
“Did you know?”
“Suspected,” she shrugs. “I mean, you never came back. There had to be a reason for that.”
She’s patient. I’ll give her that. Alicia waits carefully, giving me both time and space. She’s not pushing me to tell her what happened between us, or why I left, but I also know that I can’t keep putting off the inevitable.
At some point, she’s going to have to know.
Eventually, I’ll have to just...tell her.
“My dad asked me to come with him,” I finally say.
“So you’d planned it.”
“Yes.”
“I see.”
The look of pain on her face is something that’s going to bother me forever. It’s going to fucking haunt me because I know what our last night together meant to her.
To both of us.
Alicia was a virgin.
We both were.
We never talked about it, and we never told each other, but it was obvious that for both of us, it was our very first time, and oh, it really was a magical, wonderful night. I still think about it often, even all these years later. I still think of the way she felt, the way she smelled. I think about how she touched me, and she didn’t have a care in the world when she did.
