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“Nope,” she tells me. “I’m going on a date.”
My mouth falls open. “What?”
“That’s right,” she says with her head held high. “A bona fide date.”
“With who?”
“Fred Wythers.”
“What?I thought you dumped him.”
“Yeah, well. That’s because he wanted to see me more. I wasn’t looking for anything like that then.”
I still feel flabbergasted by this new revelation. “And you are now?”
“A heart attack really puts things into perspective, girl. I could be dead tomorrow.” She shrugs. “Maybe I decided I might not want to kick the bucket all alone.”
“That’s...” I’m still trying to wrap my head around everything I’ve learned in the last twenty minutes. “That’s great, Wanda.”
“We’ll see,” she humphs. “I’ll get a free meal out of it, at least.”
I can’t help it, I grin at this very classic Wanda outlook. “Right.”
“Now, I want you to sit there on that couch—”
“No problems there,” I snort.
“—and you think about what I’ve said. Maybe you’ll figure out that you don’t want to be like me, after all.” She winks at me then. “Even if I am cool as hell.”
I laugh as she heads back down the hall to get ready for her date—that’s going to take me some time to get used to—leaving me right where she found me but with a hell of a lot more to think about.
—
Wanda left an hour ago, and while it was strange to see her in one of her nicer pantsuits and being picked up at her front door like she was running off to prom, I like how cute she was, trying not to seem excited. Fred had given me a friendly hello before they left, waving with one hand and holding a bouquet in the other, and I hadn’t missed the blush on Wanda’s cheeks when he’d handed over the flowers. It’s definitely new, but it looks good on her, I think.
Although, the “don’t wait up” she’d tossed over her shoulder made me feel like a loser. Seventy-two, and she still has more game than me.
I haven’t done much since Wanda left, not that anyone’s surprised, but I have been doing a lot of thinking. About Wanda’s story, about my own predicament... but mostly about Aiden and Sophie. I’ve gone over every possible scenario that I can think of in regard to how I might apologize, or if I even should, and every spiral only brings me right back to the same guilt and the crushing fear that nothing I could ever say to them will make any difference. How could either of them forgive me after the way I left? Like they didn’t even matter.
I know at some point I will need to drag myself off this couch and make myself something to eat if I am going to keep up the facade that I am slowly getting better, but my brain is mush after all the thinking I’ve been doing, and I won’t pretend that turning off the lights and going to bed early at—I glance at the clock and groan—seven o’clock sounds like a much more appealing option.
I’m still going back and forth between my riveting options when there’s a knock at the door, and I frown at the other side of it as I wonder who might be here. There’s no way that Wanda would be back this early, and as far as I know I’m her only real friend, so who else could it be? With my luck, it’ll be the old man from 2B again with my package he “accidentally opened after they delivered it to him by mistake.” Right. He was just disappointed there wasn’t anything good in there. I huff as I’m forced to leave the sad velvet throne I’ve made a home on, trudging over to Wanda’s front door and looking through the peephole, but the hall looks empty. I frown as I look again, confirming that no, there isn’t anyone out there. Are we still ding-dong ditching in 2023?
I unlock the chain before fumbling with the lock in annoyance, finally managing to get everything undone so I can wrenchopen the door in the hopes that I can catch the little bastard who dares to give me shit while I’m still half wallowing. I find immediately that I hadn’t been wrong, exactly, since I couldn’t see anyone out of the peephole, but I hadn’t been right either.
Because there is someone on the other side of the door, someone who is too short to spot from the peephole and who has no business being here, especially by themselves. I gape at chestnut hair and freckles and a tiny face that makes my heart hurt, stunned for a moment as I try to make sense of her being here. I turn my head down the hall to confirm that yes, she actually is alone, squashing the slight disappointment and focusing on the little girl at the door who makes me feel both elated and incredibly guilty.
“Sophie?”
I think I feel more foolish than anything else.
I’m not a stupid girl. I don’t do things like this.
But half falling for someone whose name I don’t know and whose face I’ve never seen... well. It doesn’t do anything to help my case.
I stare at the settings page in the same way I’ve done so a dozen times in the last few weeks, wondering if I am a stupid girl. Would I be so hurt over a relative stranger that I was considering deleting my entire account otherwise?
But I miss him.
