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“Yes,” I say as if it’s obvious.
“Why?”
“Just no. I’d never hear the end of it.”
“Doesn’t Sam live in Mexico or something?”
“Nicaragua.” Sam had stayed in Central America after a tour in the Peace Corps. But we were close; we talked almost every week over video chat, and I couldn’t hide much from him. “He’d hear about it.” From me. “Somehow. And I’d never hear the end of it.”
Mia folds her arms. “What if Tristan Galloway walked in here?”
My beer is halfway to my mouth when she says it, and I balk, grateful the dark lighting of the bar hides the hot pink blush rising in my cheeks. “Low blow!”
Tristan Galloway was Sam’s former best friend. Unlike my family—my brother Sam excepted—never treated me like I was just a personality to be managed.
So of course he’d been the source of all my girlish fantasies from the time I hit puberty.
“Well? Would you?” Mia’s eyes are pinned on mine.
She’s serious.
I almost laugh. “He hasn’t been back to Quince Valley in…” I do the math. “Twelve years.”
Both he and Sam had taken off the summer I turned sixteen and never looked back. I don’t know what tore them apart. It was one thing I’d never been able to get out of Sam. But it had to be huge.
“But if he walked in here tonight.”
He wouldn’t walk in here tonight. So I shrug, smiling. “I might make an exception for him.”
Mia laughs. “Glen Shmen!”
I lift my beer up to cheers her. “Glen Shmen.”
Then I point a finger at her. “But just for a kiss. Nothing more. I’m serious about changing, Mia.”
A guy with a shaved head and big ears swaggers up to our table just then.
I give a polite smile. “Hey Jimmy.” We went to high school together.
“Cora,” he nods, but his eyes are on Mia.
Mia smiles, batting her lashes. “Hi Jimmy!” As far as I know, she didn’t know Jimmy before tonight. But he must be why she took so long to get our drinks. I try to tamp down my envy at the easy way Mia switches gears, and at the way I know she’s only looking at Jimmy for what he’ll be for her—a little bit of passing fun.
As the two of them flirt and forget my existence, my mind wanders back to Tristan Galloway. Maybe he’s the problem. Maybe Tristan set the bar so unreasonably high early on in the most formative years in my romantic life that I’d been chasing that high ever since. It hadn’t taken much. Just him noticing me sometimes when it felt like my family only noticed Sam. Not laughing at me when I came up with yet another brilliant business idea at the dinner table when I was thirteen. Asking me if I was okay after I stormed out of a room after Sam or my dad poked holes in said idea, saying,ohthat’s just Cora being Cora.
Okay, and maybe the most magical moment of my life: the night Tristan had come over to pick up Sam but found me crying on my parents’ back steps on my sixteenth birthday.
If only Tristan and Sam hadn’t had that falling out, and Tristan hadn’t taken off to wherever he lived now. But who am I kidding? Even if we had gotten together, Tristan probably would have dumped me like everyone else. For coming on too strong. For wanting too much.
For being too Cora.
Mia flips her long red ponytail over her shoulder, laughing at something Jimmy says before he leans in to whisper something in her ear.
But nothing made me feel better about being dumped for the hundredth time than the idea that I shouldn’t jump into another relationship until I learn how to be with someone and feel nothing more than passing attraction.
So I cling to that, brushing all the rest of it aside. This is the new me. It has to be.
“I’m going to get another drink,” I tell Mia, who I’m not sure hears me.
