Page 36 of Anywhere with You
“No.” She paused. “Piano.”
I smirked harder.
“Anyway,” she said, ignoring me. “He was hot, and he had this soft way of speaking, and I’d been listening to a lot of Enrique Iglesias. Honestly, it was entirely predictable. I don’t know what my parents were thinking.”
“What do you mean?”
“Inviting an attractive teenage boy to stay for a week at a house with a…willingteenage girl?”
“You meanhorny.”
Cara glared. “Passionate,” she said, then sighed as though giving in to my vocabulary. “Honestly, within two hours, we were making out behind the shed, and he snuck into my bedroom every single night. It’s a miracle I wasn’t pregnant after that week.”
“Wait,” I said. She had my complete attention, even though the waiter had arrived with cake. “Are you telling me that you had your first real kiss the same day you had sex for the first time?”
Fenske discreetly set down the plates and walked away.
“No,” Cara said. “We just kissed for the first two nights.”
“Cara, that’s still really fast. And you were what, fourteen?”
“Almost.”
I stared at her.
“What?” She was looking back at me, wide-eyed with confusion. “It was consensual.”
“Isn’t there some kind of age you have to be before youcanconsent? I don’t know what it is, but it’s not thirteen. You were just a baby.”
I sounded angry, but Cara seemed to understand that I wasn’t angry at her. She put a hand on my arm, and I tried to relax so she didn’t feel how tense my muscles were.
“I was fine,” she said gently. “Iamfine. Yes, I was probably too young, but he was gentle and nice. We talked on the phone for years after that. He would tell me about school and his basketball team. I would tell him about having a different crush every week and abouthow desperate I was to get out of New Orleans and go to college somewhere new and exciting.”
I made my foot stop violently tapping. It was shaking the whole table.
“He’s a creep,” I said, “and I’ll hate him forever.”
Cara nodded. “I’m okay with that.” Then she opened my hand and put a fork into it.
The waiter had brought two enormous slices, cheesecake and chocolate cake, and Cara and I split them both, making noises that approached the erotic.
“This feels like the wrong thing. Shouldn’t we be getting makeovers or something?” Cara said, licking chocolate off her top lip.
“Uh…what?”
“That’s what you usually do to show your ex that you’re over them, right? You get a haircut, join a gym, start dating someone younger.”
“I don’t want to do any of those things,” I said.
“Neither do I. I also don’t think it would work. I got a haircut and joined a gym last year, and Lorenzo never noticed.”
I noted that. Either Cara’s gym days didn’t include running or she’d kept pace with me instead of leaving me behind while the rabid javelina was chasing us.
Cara the passionate teenager. Cara the compassionate adult. I was learning new things about her every day.
“By Christmas,” Cara was saying, “there were days I didn’t even see him. He’d be gone when I got up for work, and I’d be asleep before he got back. It was only dirty clothes in the hamper that showed he’d come home at all.”
“You should’ve started dating someone younger. I bet he would’ve noticed that.”
