The tears kept flowing, and I couldn’t stop myself. I reached for her hand across the table and held it. I shouldn’t have. I knew that, but I had to. I had to touch her. It was selfish, and it was just for me, but I needed to. I needed to feel her hand and I needed her to know that what happened wasn’t okay.
“And then you walked across that courtyard,” she whispered. “You were coming over, and I was going to ask you, and then...”
“And then I put my arm around your best friend.”
“Yeah,” she whispered. “I was totally blind-sided.”
“We’d talked the day before and agreed to go,” I said.
“Really?”
“Yep. Her brother had asked me to take her as a favor to him. He’d been helping me with James, and I owed him a favor. I couldn’t always drive my brother to his doctor’s appointments, and Larissa’s brother had been helping me. He said it would mean a lot to him if I asked her to prom. Honestly, I figured it would be a good chance for me to hang out with you and to show you that I wasn’t a horrible guy.”
“I just can’t quite get over it,” Cordelia shook her head. “She gave me so much shit for wanting to ask you. Why did she try to convince me to ask you?” She looked at me, eyes wide. “If she was just going to snake it away from me, then she shouldn’t have even tried to get my hopes up.”
“She wanted to make you feel bad. People like Larissa...that’s what they do.”
“It’s not very nice.”
“It’s not very nice.”
“But you dated,” Cordelia said then.
“What?”
“You dated. You and Larissa. You dated all of her senior year. She was always bragging about how even though you’d gone off to college, you kept in touch, and you were going to come back and take her to our senior prom.”
“Did you see me at prom?”
“I didn’t go,” she admitted.
“You didn’t go to prom?”
“No.”
“Larissa and I never dated. I took her my senior year, but then that was it. The senior year where you two were still at school, I didn’t ever speak to her. I went off to college and never looked back.”
“Well, you’re back now,” she pointed out.
“I had no idea she’d kept up some weird lie that we were dating.”
“You didn’t want to date her at all?”
No way.
Prom had sucked.
The entire night, Larissa had talked about herself. Once she’d realized that Cordelia wasn’t coming, she’d gone off and talked to all of the guys she really liked, and I’d been left alone. When I’d slipped away, she hadn’t even noticed, and I hadn’t bothered speaking to her again. Besides, I’d graduated a week later and then I’d left for college.
Now I was breaking down what happened for Cordelia, but it didn’t feel very good. She had missed prom both years because of me. Well, because of Larissa and me. I would accept the blame for it, though. I hated that such a special experience had been stolen from her because of fear and because of a bully. That was what Larissa really was.
She was a bully.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t want to date her.” The idea had never held any semblance of appeal for me. There were a lot of things I wanted from life, but taking Larissa out wasn’t one of them.
“Wow,” Cordelia leaned back in the chair. “Talk about a fuck load of information I didn’t know I was missing. Knowing all of this fifteen years ago would have made my life a lot simpler.”
“How? What did you do after that night?”
“You never looked me up? Hannah didn’t tell you?”
“I may have peeked at your social media profiles,” I admitted. “But Hannah wouldn’t say much except that you were dating someone.”
“Past tense,” she said. “Jake and I broke up.”
“I’m sorry.”
I wasn’t.
“I’m not sorry,” she said. “After college, I settled. I wanted to study bakery science, and it was just...hard. I was lonely and depressed. My mom died. I was alone in the universe. Nobody my age had lost a mom, so nobody understood what it was like. it was just hard. I was an orphan in the middle of what were supposed to be my best years,” she frowned. “It was isolating. I should have reached out to people, but I didn’t.”
I wished we had stayed in touch. I lost my mom around the same time. It was unfair how easy it was for parents to die. James and I had both mourned our mom a lot. Talking to Hannah had helped me so much. I wished I had been there for Cordelia. There was a part of me that knew it wouldn’t have mattered, though. At that point, we were both still so broken.
“And then you met Jake?” I asked. I got the feeling that he hadn’t treated her right, and that rankled me. They’d been together a long time, but from what I could tell, they had never married. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to marry someone as cute and sweet as Cordelia?
“Yeah. Then I met Jake.”
“You were together a long time.”
“On and off for what feels like an eternity. We got a job at the same firm and worked in digital media together. For awhile, it was fine. After a few years, we were more like roommates than anything else.”
That was strange, but not uncommon. A lot of couples would grow apart as their lives moved forward, but in different ways.
Jake and Cordelia hadn’t grown apart, though, I suddenly realized.
“He cheated on you,” I said, finally understanding.
Cordelia didn’t say anything for a long time. I noticed that she liked to take her time formulating her thoughts. It was a good habit. A lot of people spoke too soon and listened too little. Taking a few minutes to consider what she wanted to say was important.
“Yeah, that’s one way of putting it. Then again, I didn’t really care.”
She bit her lip and shook her head.
“That’s messed up, isn’t it?”
“A little,” I agreed. “It’s not a good sign, anyway. Well, unless you and your partner are polyamorous. It sounds like this wasn’t the case, though.”
“It wasn’t. We were supposed to be monogamous. We were supposed to be happy together. I kind of thought we’d get a happily-ever-after, you know?”
I just waited, watching her. She definitely deserved a happy ending.
“I made a ton of money, though, and I was happy in my career. Then I wasn’t. It was like one day I just woke up and realized that I was in my 30s and that was it. I was in my 30s and I was working at a job where I wasn’t respected and I had a boyfriend who’d fucked every girl in the office. When things ended, I was hurt, but I was more hurt that I’d wasted so much time pursuing things that didn’t make me happy. Sometimes it feels like I’m too old to move forward.”
She wasn’t too old.
“You’re only 31.”
“Yeah. Is that too late for second chances?” She asked.
“Absolutely not.”
I gestured around the bakery. She had spent a lot of time painting, reorganizing, and decorating the space. Hannah had created a homey, wonderful bakery. Cordelia was making it spicy. She was making it an even more wonderful space. Now it seemed not quaint, but sleek.