After All

Chapter Twenty-Three

Still reeling from both my afternoon with Leo and the most recent encounter with Ryan, a night entirely of female companionship was exactly what I needed. Relaxation oozed out of my pores as I sipped champagne while my toes were buffed to perfection. Rebecca's older sister, Kelly, sat next to me in another oversized massage chair. As the only married one in the group, we flocked to her like hungry baby animals, begging for any bit of relationship knowledge she could impart. Well, everyone else was. I was so befuddled by my current love life, I couldn't get my head straight enough to even formulate a question. Unfortunately, Rebecca decided to do it for me.

"Lily," she called out from the other side of the nail salon. "What's the story with you and Keith's friend Ryan? You were acting very strangely about him last night."

"Don't you mean Leo?" her friend Brooke interjected. "I saw you guys on the beach together today."

All eyes turned towards me. A half cough/half giggle escaped my mouth as I tried to cover my face with my hands.

"Out with it lady," Rebecca demanded. "This sounds juicy. You only got here yesterday and already you've snagged two of the most eligible bachelors in attendance."

"I promise it's really not quite that scandalous," I sighed before diving into my long, sorted tale. "Ryan and I dated our freshman year in college. I wasn't looking for a boyfriend, but he patiently waited for me to realize that being with him was what I truly wanted above anything else. We had some bumps along the way, but we were madly in love. Even looking back through the maturity of time, I know those feelings were real. We weren't just kids." I allowed the sweet memories to bring a smile before hardening my face again. "But then we both went home for the summer and about a week or so in, Ryan called and broke up with me. He said he'd met someone else and that he wasn't in love with me anymore. I begged and pleaded, but he remained firm. Coincidently, that was the same week I received my acceptance to the School of Visual Arts. So I transferred and never saw or spoke to him again for five years. Until last night."

The room was bathed in silence, each of the girls hanging on to every word of my story of first love and tragic heartbreak.

"What was it like seeing him again?"

"Did he ignore you?"

"Do you still have feelings for him?"

"Did you slap him? I would have slapped him."

I laughed as they shot questions at me like a firing squad. I silenced them with my hands. "It's been...weird. As soon as I saw him, all the years past faded away and I felt both scorned and still in love with him, just like I did at nineteen. We bickered a bit, but kept slipping back into our easy banter without even thinking about it. He said he wanted to talk at some point, but we would try and keep it friendly for the weekend." My nail technician had finished the last coat of pale pink polish on my toes, so I shuffled over to the dryers to finish my story.

"But just as we were easing into a comfortable place and catching up on our lives, he let it slip that he'd stayed in contact with my little brother the whole time."

The girls gasped in unison.

"I felt so hurt and betrayed. He tried to explain, but I kicked him out of my room. The break-up shattered me, but this cut even deeper. I called my brother for answers and apparently he had reached out to Ryan first, trying to get information for me. But they had bonded when we were dating and he didn't want to lose that. Knowing Ryan had kept tabs on me all this time made me feel naked and exposed. He lost the right to know anything about me the minute he broke it off."