Page 6 of Like First Love, Again

Eric:I didn’t want to do it this way. Please answer my lawyer’s call. She needs to serve you with the divorce papers. Please.

Nausea swelled like the crescendo in Beethoven’s Fifth. Belatedly, she’d registered her conversation with Tori. Why had she told her she was already divorced? Mia was putting her key in the front door when she acknowledged why. It had taken threeseconds to see that Tori had gotten the manual to Life while Mia’s had obviously gotten lost in the mail.

She pushed open the door and entered the home that had been her grandparents’ and then her mother’s. Sixty years worth of memories she’d barely started sorting. Stacks of boxes and rolls of tape and a million things Mia couldn’t part with. Her mother had never gotten rid of her parents’ things, so she’d just incorporated them in when adding her own tastes. It was sweet, but it also meant that every inch of the house was adorned with something.

Like those who’d survived the Great Depression, exiled Cubans who’d left everything behind were not great at getting rid of stuff. Everything held some future utility or sentimental value. Bonus points for both.

When her phone started ringing in her hand, Mia looked down at the 215 area code. She threw the damn thing across the room, watching as it landed on the white Pottery Barn couch her mother kept pristine, even when Mia was a teen who spilled everything.

How was she going to explain to Tori that everything in her life was a mess and she had six weeks to figure out what to do with a collection of hand-painted wooden roosters among so many other things? Giving up before she’d started for the day, Mia trudged from the foyer and down the hall to her old bedroom turned guest room. All the furniture was still the same, but the bedspread was boring beige and all her posters were gone.

Tired, she collapsed onto the bed that still felt like hers and tried to remember what it was like to know what she was doing. Or to at least go back to the time when she didn’t know the difference between confidence and delusion.

Three

Standing next to Larissa in a Wynwood brewery, Tori chugged the rest of her third beer. Happy hour was busier than usual and the late summer air was sticky with humidity. It didn’t help that there were too many people crammed into the bar. Too many people and too much noise and too much slipping out of her grasp.

“Man, that crush is still crushing,” Larissa decided, taking a bite of their shared pretzel.

Tori traded her empty glass for a fresh one. There wasn’t enough booze in the world to make her day feel less like a dream, but she kept trying. Her loft was only a short walk from the brewery, and she didn’t have to get up early in the morning. She could afford the dalliance.

“Are you going to help her?” Larissa asked in a way that meant she shouldn’t.

“Eight hours ago you were forcing us together, and now you’re?—”

“I was tossing you an assist while you froze,” she corrected with a laugh. “Now I’m being your very sexy voice of reason.”

Tori rolled her eyes and then bought some time with the incredibly thorough mastication of a chewy pretzel chunk. She could easily think of a hundred reasons she shouldnotget involved with Mia. Why she should turn down her request and go back to her regularly scheduled programming. She had her hands full at the brokerage, regular networking events, and a running group she’d started with Larissa. Was she supposed to drop everything to help her?

The sound of Mia’s crying, of her voice raw and wavering under the weight of her grief, tore through Tori’s good sense. Mia and her mom had been so close. Even closer than Tori was with hers, and Tori called her five times a day. She couldn’t imagine that kind of loss. The idea of Mia facing something so devastating alone was unbearable.

Tori’s instincts were the heat rushing over her skin. A primal need to stand between Mia and the source of her pain made her forget all the work she’d done to prioritize herself. Made it seem worth the risk of losing so much ground.

“You can’t resist, can you?” Larissa smirked at her. “What have I told you about laying off the straight ones?”

Tori’s face was hot and her muscles primed to tackle an advancing lion. She forced herself to release the tension and shrugged. “But I like the straight ones.”

“Mule.”

“Nag.”

Larissa chuckled. “I’d be an absolute trash best friend if I didn’t give you the stock advice for this situation.”

Finally buzzed, Tori leaned back and motioned for Larissa to let her have it while she sipped her beer.

“Someone with your condition?—”

“Condition?” Tori interrupted.

Larissa sighed like it pained her to speak, but there was nothing she loved more than a theatrical moment. “You, myfriend, have a straight girl fetish sprinkled with a touch of savior complex,” she said like a doctor imparting a diagnosis.

“I donothave a fetish,” she snapped a little too sharply. She’d dated a handful of women still exploring their sexuality, but that didn’t make her some kind of creep.

Larissa scanned her face before nodding once. “It might be more of a magnet. That tomboy femme thing you’ve got going is like catnip,” she decided. “The point is, maybe it’s time you funneled your energy into a nice girl who already knows what she wants.”

Tori shook her head. “Trust me. It’s not like that with Mia. She’s not interested, and I’ve been over that childish infatuation for a long time.”

Larissa’s raised brows called bullshit.

---