Page 84 of XX Love Affair

“Either way, she must have been super smart. Wish I talked to her more.”

“It was an athletic scholarship, but yeah, she was pretty sharp.”

“Sounds like you miss her already.”

Delia sighed. “Of course I miss her! Do you know what she said to me when we were in the actual act of breaking up and packing her bags?”

“No.”

“She asked me if we were falling in love.” The words barely bubbled in Delia’s mouth before she cleared her throat, purging any emotion that came. “Seemed like she meant it, too.”

“I mean, yeah, that’s classic youth shit. Falling in love with the first person to show you positive affection.”

“You don’t get it, Tiff. We’re talking about me. The woman who has never been in love before. Not like that.”

“Wait…” Tiffani dropped her wooden chopsticks. “Were you falling in love with her?”

“I dunno… maybe? We were doing whatever felt right. I figured the long-distance thing when she went to college would be what killed it, but at least it would have been mutual.” Never mind that Delia had plenty of fun coming up with ways for them to keep seeing each other that upcoming fall. I could go out to see her about once a month. She could come see me on her breaks. Lots of ways to have fun with the internet… No one had been more generous with the nudes than Helena, which only now bothered Delia.

Ugh. No. She wanted to feel like Helena’s ex, not her big sister or cool aunt. That would be the worst, to be pigeonholed like that.

Yet wasn’t that what Delia was doing to Helena? The young woman she wanted to call her ex? To give agency and respect to the relationship they had for three months?

“Two years from now,” Tiffani resumed after picking up her chopsticks again, “would I be going to your wedding? Like, is that where that was heading?”

“Maybe not in two years…”

“Right. Gotta let her graduate first, at least.”

This was what pained Delia more than anything. The mental gymnastics of trying to make sense of everything. The muscles in her mind hurt as much as her heart, and they both threatened to overextend if she thought too much about Helena.

But wasn’t that impossible to avoid? It wasn’t only the shock of finding out she was dating a nineteen-year-old. It was the feelings that had burdened her from the moment Helena proved she wasn’t going anywhere and didn’t want Delia merely for her money. It was them having fun with a bucket list that straddled between the impossibly kinky and wholesomely human. Isn’t it how I felt when I woke up in the morning… next to her?

Delia liked it when someone was in bed with her. For the first time ever, she looked forward to that woman actually waking up.

“In the end, we wanted validation from each other.”

Tiffani looked at her as if Delia had sprouted another head. “I get that she liked the validation of an ‘older’ woman wanting to sleep with her, but what did you get out of it?”

“I guess it was the validation of someone liking me for who I was, not who they thought I should be.”

“Hey! I like you for you who are!”

“You know what I mean, Tiff. I haven’t always been the nicest girl in town. There are women in our circle who still give me a cold shoulder or sneak out of a room when I’m around, and it’s because I was a bitch. Or I roped them into financial situations because I could.” She thought of Mira when she said that. What she always treated as a rivalry between them had probably been a lot more one-sided from Mira’s perception. I basically bullied her back in college, if you think about it. The only reason Mira put up with her now was because Delia was reliable capital.

But Delia wasn’t as rich as some of her other heiress friends, like Tiffani, who didn’t have to work at all. Neither did Delia, technically, but her parents had instilled in her the need to make her own dimes in case something unfortunate happened to the family.

“I do miss her,” Delia muttered. “She was what I needed.”

“Now you know. So you move on to someone even more better suited to you.”

Delia snorted. “More better?”

“Hey, I’m not the full-ride scholarship kid here. My parents paid every dollar for my BA. Only got in by the skin of my teeth.”

“Tiff! Our university had a 90% acceptance rate!”

“My high school grades were abysmal. I could barely string a sentence together on paper… and in person. That didn’t include a multitude of ‘likes’ and ‘duhs.’ I was that obnoxious Millennial my grandparents always complained about, okay?”

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