Friday Mornings at Nine (31 page)

Allie looked at her like she was an uninformed and rather unsightly beetle. “You didn’t hear? He owns N-tech Toys. They just went public last spring. Good ole Nico could buy and sell
all
of us three times over.” She shook her head and smirked. “Sometimes you just can’t call ’em.”

Jennifer could see it was true. Even Bill and Bryce were kowtowing to him like he was Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and the CEO of a Japanese electronics firm all rolled into one. Poor guy. And then there was David—for a second his expression registered something like resentment. Huh.

Mitch, who’d been busy setting up an ancient Macintosh Classic II for part of their evening’s entertainment, saluted David, then Allie and then her as he plugged in the beast they had all considered state-of-the-art once, despite their preference for PCs. (Well, except for Mitch.) He quickly welcomed Nico to the party and announced, “Who’s ready for an original game of Monkey Pong?”

A cheer went up.

Monkey Pong, a game conceived and programmed by Mitch long before he became a designer at Apple, had monkeys swinging from trees and lobbing bananas—boomerang-style—at a range of unsuspecting jungle creatures. Players got points if their monkeys hit an ocelot or an anaconda, even more if they nailed a flying toucan or a scurrying iguana. Some of those suckers could be hard to see. In college, they had set up two consoles side by side and had tournaments in the lounge. That night, there was just one old computer, but the gang surrounded it like it was the newest Mac-Book Air.

The guys started taking turns playing. Mitch, in his element, grinned and guzzled some kind of vodka slushie thing while annihilating a jaguar and a couple of macaws. Charlie was the closest to giving Mitch a run for his money, but Jennifer also saw Dale, Jake and Ruben jumping in to play a round or two.

Ruben, one of the most tenderhearted guys Jennifer ever knew (David told her he now worked as a branch manager for Sprint), waved them over. Allie ignored him and sidled up to Nico, but David and Jennifer walked over. “Wanna play a round?” Ruben asked them. “For old times’ sake?”

David said, “Sure,” and when Jake finished his turn, David slid in. Despite the game’s sentimental charm, though, Jennifer begged off.

Ruben grinned shyly at her. “Too much excitement for one night already?”

She nodded. “It’s a little overwhelming.” She watched over David’s shoulder as he whacked his first ocelot. The guys whooped for him, but he barely seemed to notice. Ah, the beauty of computer games. Players could focus so hard on the screen and, like hypnosis, lose themselves. All the awkwardness, self-consciousness and the social unease would just disappear. It was one of the things she had loved so much about playing. Something she knew Shelby, if not Veronica, understood.

Jennifer sucked in some air. What was going on in Glendale Grove with her daughters? With Michael? She stole a peek at her cell phone. No messages from home. She didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad one.

The guys played for about an hour more as Jennifer observed the group and answered, with quiet one- or two-line comments, the questions asked by the guys from the old gang. Allie kept Nico hostage by the snack table but, otherwise, it was a gathering much like one of her family’s holiday dinners. People who hadn’t been together in months or years picked up threads of conversation as if no time had elapsed. It was surprisingly simple to slip into the old patterns of talking and being, and she couldn’t help but notice how David reveled in his return to CPU sovereignty.

After that, they milled around, eating appetizers, drinking alcohol and chatting in revolving clusters. Jennifer was glad to see that Nico finally escaped Allie’s clutches thanks to some deft maneuverings by Mitch and Pete. David stayed by Jennifer’s side or very near it for the next hour, but she watched him shape and lead a number of discussions, crafting them with the skill of his old presidential experience. She, likewise, watched the other guys respond, happy to be in his orbit again.

Just before the pizzas and buffalo wings arrived at ten past seven (Fiorello’s Pizzeria didn’t follow David’s orders for a precise 7:02 delivery—so much for an adherence to multiples of thirteen), Lexi appeared. She stood in the shadow of the doorway for a long moment, seemingly unsure whether she should walk through it. When Jennifer caught her eye, she made her decision.

“Hey, Jennifer,” Lexi said. “Am I ever glad to see
you.
” She hugged her, said a quick “Hi, there” to the guys, then glanced anxiously around the room.

Jennifer knew the person Lexi was looking for, so she said, “She’s supposed to come, but she’s late.”

“I know,” Lexi whispered. “I almost didn’t show when Mitch told me Tash was gonna be here, but”—she shrugged—“can’t let fear and bad memories ruin our lives, now can we?”

Jennifer shot a look at David and then back at Lexi. “Guess not.” The two women shared a smile. Each having a huge club relationship crash-n-burn in public, they had more in common than most.

When Natasha—“Tash”—finally arrived, she gave Jennifer and Lexi a long-distance nod, but hung out in a different corner of the room with Dale, Kyle and a plateful of pizza. David, who was occupied with impressing Allie, Ruben and Bryce in a captivating discussion about his employer’s GPS receivers, left Lexi and Jennifer to their “girl talk,” as he called it.

Lexi raised her eyebrows at that, but said nothing back to him. To Jennifer, though, she said, “It’s so weird seeing Tash again. Or even thinking about her. All those hurt feelings, all that betrayal…it’s all still there, you know?”

Jennifer laughed faintly. Yeah, she knew. “But you’re with someone good now, right? Someone caring?”

Lexi nodded. “Becca’s great. We’ve been together for about twelve years. How about you?”

Jennifer told her about Michael and the girls, judiciously omitting all the marital tension of the past few months.

“Nice,” Lexi said. “I’m glad to hear it, ’cuz, man, David was a real jerk to you at the end of college.”

“Any idea why he did it? Or why Tash had been such a bitch to you when you two broke up? Was it a deep and permanent character flaw?” Jennifer asked her, not realizing until that moment how helpful it was to finally talk about David with someone who actually knew him. “Or was it just youthful thoughtlessness?”

Lexi pondered this as Jennifer snagged them each a slice of pepperoni. “This is what I think,” she said, around a bit of pizza. “I had a few relationships blow up between when Tash and I split and before I met Becca. The thing I learned was that I needed a measuring stick to see whether a relationship was even worth fighting for. That knowledge still might not be enough to save it, but I had to know if there was a threshold below which there was
no way
it could possibly work. You follow?”

She gave a short nod.

“Okay,” Lexi said. “I thought of this for the first time right before I left Tash. I kept asking myself if I believed she had my best interests in mind. Not because I was looking for some kind of martyr, but because I needed a girlfriend who, at least most of the time, seemed aware of me and my needs. Who didn’t always put her own wants and wishes above mine. Tash might be really great for someone else, but for
me,
she wasn’t so good. She didn’t have my back, wasn’t all that considerate and every time there was a choice to be made about what I wanted versus what she wanted, she assumed we’d go with her choice because she had the more forceful personality.” She shrugged. “In the end, my leaving blindsided her and it pissed her off big time, but that was only because she hadn’t been paying attention to what I’d been asking for all along.”

Jennifer considered this. “So, you’d told her? You’d expressed what you needed and
still
she didn’t listen?”

“Yep.”

She thought about David at the end of their relationship. She knew she had told him she loved him and she needed him. She knew she had expressed those things as part of the rhythm of their daily interactions. She thought he had expressed them in return. Did she not remember correctly? Could
she
have been the one who didn’t recognize the signs of his unhappiness? Might he have tried to tell her what he needed and she just didn’t realize it?

A few minutes later David wandered over to them and asked to steal her away for a walk. So, after she and Lexi exchanged e-mail addresses and phone numbers, Jennifer and David slipped on their jackets and headed out into the crisp mid-November night.

They roamed through the campus, soundlessly at first. Past the Weaver Center. (“Want a strawberry milkshake?” he asked, breaking the silence. “Not this time,” she replied, knowing his cryptic reference was: “Remember our first date?”) They meandered near the Catacombs, where student voices could be heard clearly even out on the walkways, and then alongside TJH. In the dark, if they didn’t look at each other directly, Jennifer suspected they could almost delude themselves into believing they were those kids again. David, unspoken and glancing at her askance, reached for the sleeve of her coat, near her wrist, squeezing it as if he were holding her hand.

Because it
wasn’t
her hand, she let him keep his grasp on it, but she had waited long enough to question him.

“So, what’s going on with you and Marcia?” she began.

He shrugged and, even peripherally, looked uncomfortable. “I told you almost everything already. You know it’s not…great between us. We’re still together because of the boys, but that’s all.” He shrugged again and Jennifer remembered he’d used those exact sentences when he’d told her of his marital woes via e-mail and text. “What can I say? I made a mistake, Jenn.”

She took a big breath. “What happened in those last couple of months of college, David—with us? Was it pressure from Sandra that broke us up? Marcia? Your parents or your friends? Or was it me? Did I not listen to you?”

He paused in the middle of the sidewalk and closed his eyes tight. Then he let his hand slide from her cuff to her chilled palm. The heat of his fingers burned hers, but she held on.

When they began walking again, he said, “It wasn’t you, Jenn. There was pressure…from outside of us. Mostly from my sister but, also, I kinda panicked. I caved in to what other people thought was best for me, but I didn’t know then what I know now. I realize it’s a cliché to say that, but it’s true. Time helps a man see things better, and I didn’t know what a good thing we had until it was gone.”

Jennifer wasn’t completely untouched by his speech, but it just seemed so
well practiced
. Her suspicions flared, possibly without reason. Or, maybe, there was a shred of logic that accompanied the unanticipated niggle of “feeling” that shot through her. In fact, had she not been at the reunion to witness the social dynamics with her own eyes, she wouldn’t have remembered something. That, in their last few weeks of college, Allie had made herself pretty scarce, too. That David wasn’t the only one who was MIA. And on this very night, all those years later, there was so much winking between them.

“David,” she said sharply, “did something happen between you and Allie? Did you two have some sort of fling?” She thought of the very first comment Allie had made to David back in the lounge: “
Good to see you”
—and then there was a pause—
“again.”
Again?

“When?” he shot back.

And that was when Jennifer snapped the puzzle pieces together.
Oh, my God
.
When?
as in
Which time?

“At the end of our senior year, David. And, again, I suspect. Sometime more recently.” She wrenched her hand away from his. “Right?”

He halted in the middle of the sidewalk, not more than a few yards away from a constellation of trees in one of the small quads. He tugged her into the shadow of a massive oak and leaned close to her. “Jenn,” he whispered, his voice urgent. “Don’t waste time thinking about Allie. She’s irrelevant. I’ve missed
you
. How do I get you to understand that? To understand that nothing else matters?”

He positioned her so her back rested against the tree trunk, jagged bits of bark pressing unevenly into her thin jacket. He leaned closer still until his lips connected with hers. Until he had slyly managed to reenact a scene from their senior year in college, one she remembered distinctly.

They had kissed here before. Right at that very spot. On a night like this one, not long before their Thanksgiving break when they knew they would be apart for a whole week. As David’s lips moved against hers, that past night and this present one merged. She didn’t resist him at first because, well, it was so strangely familiar. Almost not like a new scene at all. They were merely picking up—across the dimension of time—where they had left off.

And then, that very familiarity became creepy. The moment turned a shade peculiar, and the oddness of this recognized duality twisted in her gut, like a coin flipping sides.

She pressed her palms against his chest and pushed him gently away. “Did you have a fling with Allie?” she asked him again. “Ever? At any time?”

He took a step backward and exhaled heavily. “Look, a few years ago, we had a brief…tryst, I guess you could call it. We’d gotten in contact again—I can’t even remember how that happened now. But she’d just gotten divorced and my marriage really sucked and, so…” He tried to shrug it off. “It made me realize how much I missed you, actually. I think I was trying to substitute Allie for you.”

His dark eyes bored into her, his ultra-earnestness a poisoned-tipped bayonet. She closed her own eyes for a moment so she wouldn’t have to cope with the duplicity. Then she opened them and met his gaze. “And were you trying to substitute Allie for me right before graduation, too?”

He shook his head too vigorously. “No, Jenn, look—”

“Tell me the truth, David. Or I’ll ask her myself.” She pointed in the direction of the Vat Building. “I know Allie will tell me if you two slept together back then. Gleefully, I’m willing to bet. And in front of the whole CPU gang.”

He grunted and swiveled away from her. “Fine. Yes—okay? But just one time. It was a dumb thing. A reaction. I don’t know what it was. Anyway, it was a
really
long time ago. It doesn’t matter.”