Page 1 of Villainous Summer

Summer

With a bottle of champagne in hand, I studied the front door of the man who’s made me the other woman.

Five blissfully ignorant hours before, I was forty-one thousand feet above Alberta, staring at the picture on my phone.

Despite the past three months of daily video calls, sexting, and exchanging more naked pictures than the ones littering my cousin’s nudie magazine stuffed under his mattress, Cory was engaged to someone else.

Cory Thompson. My Cory. Only he wasn’t mine.

Someone named Kodi Ann had tagged him in the pictures, proving that. Her heart-shaped face split in a big grin as she held up the halo style engagement ring between her and Cory. Cory kissing her, with her left hand resting on his cheek.

Cory and Kodi.

Bile rose in my throat.

Two weeks before I was to leave for London for my three-month internship with Prescott Hoteliers, I met Cory at a local dive bar, Skol House.

It was trivia night, a weekly tradition I would faithfully attend with my cousin Autumn and our friend Wren. Only, this time, they bailed. Leaving me to sit alone at the bar and watch the fun being had by other teams.

Three Freedom Bay Ales in, I had spotted him nursing a bottle of German beer and staring at the Kraken game three stools down. When his eyes would catch mine, a warmth would flush through my body.

Medium brown hair, light-brown eyes, and a slender build, he was charming and seemed sweet. He had told me he moved to the area a week before for a civilian job in on the local naval base.

As I switched to soda water, he had three more beers. As that night wore on, our knees knocked together, and he brushed strands out of my eyes, his thumb tracing my jaw.

When he asked me to go home with him, I did.

He had no ring or tan line. His phone’s wallpaper displayed a Gonzaga Bulldogs graphic.

We had spent two perfect weeks together, laughing and falling for one another.

In his rented house, pictures of his parents, Don and Sheila, hung from the walls. Wallets of nieces and nephews stuck to the stainless steel fridge with a magnet from Kamloops, BC. Sparse decorations indicated he was still moving in.

When he would leave the room to answer calls, I had assumed it was his job. When I would ask him to meet my friends, he would have an excuse, but I would chalk it up to him settling in.

As I tried to leave for London, he kissed me a dozen times. He’d downloaded a new app for us to talk on while I was abroad. Upon landing, I had a dozen sweet messages filling my inbox. After finding out my new address, he had arranged for a bouquet of blue tulips to be delivered the next morning, as he would call me “his blue” for my eyes.

Blue as my heart without you.

I had tucked those flowers between pages in a book and kept with me while I was away.

Every day, we would talk, sending pictures back and forth. It was lonely in London, though the weather was so similar to my hometown of Ridgewood in the Pacific Northwest I didn’t have my usual homesickness for rain. Confiding in each other and reading his long, passionate emails got me through damp nights.

At no point did I think there was someone else—worse of all that I would be the one to intrude.

I had dissected every detail. She was tiny, smaller than me, with dark hair like mine. Blue eyes. We could have been sisters. No one could say he didn’t have a type.

Gripping the phone, I reread the caption.

Five months of the greatest love story, two months long distance, one big move-in day, a foster kitten, and I finally got that BLING.

Five months.

They, likely, had started dating only weeks before we met.

With the gift of foresight, I could see everything I had missed. All the hints I had ignored.

With social media full of sports memes and beer, he wouldn’t let me post pictures of us, claiming that he liked “privacy,” that others didn’t need to know our business, and that what we had was “too precious to spoil with social media.”

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