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“Wow. A couple months ago you were begging me to stay here.”
“Yeah, well. That was before you had a whole-ass family out there wishing you’d come back.”
There’s a squeezing sensation in my chest. “They don’t. Trust me.”
“You think they’d write you off after a few weeks?”
“I told him I didn’t have time for them. I told him I didn’t sign up for any of that.”
“Yeah, well. We all do dumb things sometime when we love people.”
“Yeah,” I laugh. “We do.”
“I don’t want you to end up with any regrets.”
“Maybe I’ll be like you,” I chuckle. “New boyfriend every week. Sounds like a dream to me.”
“It’s not,” Wanda says flatly. “You think that sounds like a dream to you?”
I rear back. “What?”
“You think I like living in this tiny apartment all by myself?”
“I...” I feel at a loss for words. “I don’t understand.”
“Cassie,” Wanda laughs. “You are too smart to be this dumb. Of course I’m not living the dream.” She clucks her tongue. “The dream is coming home to someone who loves you every day.”
“But, if that’s how you feel, then why do you—”
“Because I had my chance at that once, and I ruined it. Just like you’re trying to do.”
I have no idea what to say. In all the years I’ve known Wanda, she’s never given me any indication that she had any qualms about her life. Sure, it’s a little out of the box that she could get to this age without having ever settled down, but I assumed that was the life she chose. It had never occurred to me that she might want anything different.
“Why is this the first time I’m hearing about this?”
Wanda shrugs. “You’ve never needed to hear it until now.” She crosses one leg over the other as she sighs deeply, looking down at her foot that’s tapping the air as she considers. “I wasn’t much older than you were, when I met Henry.”
“Henry?”
Wanda smiles, remembering. “Your typical surfer beach bumliving in La Jolla in the seventies. Blond hair, blue eyes... way too pretty for his own good. And of course, since I was such a looker, he obviously couldn’t stop thinking about me after we met.”
“Naturally,” I say with a grin.
“I thought I was hot shit in those days. I’m telling you, Cassie, if booby cams were a thing back then, I’d have made a killing.”
“I have no doubt.”
“So there I was, this stacked little brunette who thought her shit didn’t stink, and along comes Henry. I tell you, Cassie. He knocked me right on my ass. He bought me an ice cream on the boardwalk that first day, and I can’t even remember what we talked about, but I was just”—she claps her hands in a shooting-off motion—“gone. Right from the start.”
“What happened?”
“We were together every day that summer. We would lie on the beach, we would make out in his car, we’d do... other things.” I make a face, and Wanda snorts at me. “Oh, shut up. You and I both know neither of us are strangers to a penis.”
Words I would never like to hear again, thank you very much.
“Anyway,” Wanda goes on. “Of course I loved Henry, and of course he was obsessed with me—”
“Obviously,” I tease.
