Page 82 of XX Love Affair

“…But it doesn’t matter if you’re not coming off as someone who can commit. Life starts blasting by you at a certain point. How long ago does it feel like you were fourteen, just starting high school?”

Helena wrinkled her nose. “Forever ago. Like a whole lifetime.”

“That was five years ago. Do you know how long ago five years was for me? When I was in my thirties?”

Helena knew where this was going, but she needed to hear it.

“Yesterday. Since then, I’ve been divorced, fallen in love, and quit my job and gone back to school to start a new career.” She leaned across the table. “Yesterday. It feels like yesterday.”

It was a trap. If Helena said anything, she was only proving her coach’s point. Damn her for being right. Helena was intellectual enough to know Brynn was correct, even if it had yet to be experienced. That was the thing about Helena Pierce, and they all knew it: she knew what words meant. She knew high concepts. She only had to set aside her ego and thirst for validation to grasp it.

“I don’t know Delia,” Brynn continued. “She’s probably a hot mess, like we all are in some way. She’s probably made mistakes she’s embarrassed about at her age. Welcome to being an adult. We grow, we learn, and we talk down to people younger than us.”

Helena cracked a smile. “I miss her.”

“It’s been like two weeks.”

“I said I miss her.”

“Have you ever missed someone like that before?”

“Yeah…” Helena hesitated. “Mr. Smith.”

Brynn was silent for a few moments, her attention on the steam still rising from her afternoon coffee. “You know that…”

Helena slammed her eyes shut and interrupted the monologue about to happen. “I know that it was wrong, that he shouldn’t have done that. I don’t… nobody believes me, but I don’t care. I still liked him. I wanted all of that to happen.”

“I believe you.”

There was that stinging salt in the corner of Helena’s eye again. Every time I talk about that bastard. “He ruined my life,” she whimpered against her better judgment. “If he had kept all of it to himself, I could have had my stupid fantasies I’d be embarrassed about now. He wouldn’t be in jail or on probation or whatever happened to him. We wouldn’t have had to move again. I’d be a virgin for another year, probably.”

“But he didn’t.”

“No… and like a dumb kid I went along with it because I liked the attention. I liked how he made me feel in like… all those stupid ways.” Helena wiped her face. Brynn silently offered her a box of tissues from the credenza behind her. “Finally, someone saw me for the adult I felt like I was. He would challenge my way of thinking, my ideas and opinions, debate me like I was his age and we were dating outside of his work. But he had a wife already, you know. Even if we were never caught and I turned eighteen… he wouldn’t have left her for me. I know that now.”

“That’s a real feeling you have in your heart,” Brynn said. “Don’t forget it. Hold onto it for when you get older, more bitter and jaded. When you meet someone like Delia and wonder what’s so different about her.”

“Maybe it’s a sign that we shouldn’t be together, though.”

“Honestly, the fact that she was appalled you were so young is my first argument she should give it another go.”

“Tell her that for me, huh? She won’t talk to me.”

“Have you tried?”

“No. I don’t see the point. She wasn’t simply angry at me…” Helena recalled the sour disposition shooing her out of the New England apartment and toward the airport, which Helena went to alone and flew Economy alone. Five hours of suffering with her thoughts. Five hours of holding back tears she didn’t understand. Like that, everything came crashing down. I had to accept it. Yet her usual stoicism wasn’t helping her this time. Something new and unusual had claimed Helena’s mind. “She was disgusted. I think at herself… she compared herself to her father, who left her mother for a woman my age. Maybe she saw herself in him then. Like it was some family curse coming for her.”

“Did she seem any other way?”

“Tired. Like I had merely proven a point of some kind. And…” Helena stopped to drink some of her coffee. “Sad. Really, really sad. I asked her if we had been falling in love, and she said something like ‘we aren’t now.’ Maybe she was falling for me. Like, for real.”

“Were you happy with her?”

“Unexpectedly so. I see that now.”

When Helena went on about her day while Brynn returned to her studies, she stewed in the thought of how it had been different with Delia. She respected me. Even when we did fantastically dirty things together, I never felt beneath her. They were equals in the bedroom and outside of it. Helena’s age hadn’t become a problem until… it had.

All she could do now was wait. To grow older. To become even more jaded.