to deliver them personally.”
“You did not?”
She only smiled in response. It wasn’t often that Gwen used her curves and killer smile to get her way, but sometimes she couldn’t seem to help herself. Besides, it’s not as though she did it very often.
Deanna shook her head, but her friend smiled. “Hey, if you can get away with it…why not, right?”
“Exactly. And heaven knows I haven’t always had this skill. I might as well take advantage sometimes. But don’t tell anyone, okay?”
Deanna stared at her. “Who would I tell?”
She forgot sometimes that not everyone lived their whole life online. For Gwen, it was normal to record everything, and censor anything she didn’t want getting out. It was a carefully constructed existence, one that was almost entirely public, because she’d built her following by not keeping very much private. Her readers liked to hear everything about her, including her workouts, what she had for dinner, her dates, and even more personal things about her dating habits. Not that she’d had much to report lately. She may get a lot of attention from men, but that attention disappeared pretty quickly when they found out who she was and what she did for a living.
“Forget it.” Gwen shrugged it off. “I didn’t really mean it like that. I mean…”
“I keep forgetting what you do for a living,” Deanna said. “I mean, it’s crazy to me that you can do that for a job. Oh, but I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry, Gwen. It’s just—”
“It’s fine. I totally get it. It is crazy. I’m not offended.” She decided to change tact and confide in the one person who would totally understand. “But you know what did offend me?”
Her friend froze on the sidewalk and waited.
“Ian McCormick.” She pronounced every syllable of his name with an edge.
“Ian? You saw him?”
“You know he’s here?”
Deanna blinked at her mildly before she put a smile back on her face and ushered Gwen down the sidewalk. “You know what? Let’s drop your bag off and then you can tell me all about it over a cup of coffee.”
Gwen eyed her friend and shook her head. “How about a drink?”
“Why didn’t you tell me Ian McCormick was here?” Gwen sat across from Deanna at her kitchen table, a glass of soda water in her hand. She’d gone for the soda, deciding against alcohol. It was her default drink, but now that she had it, she wished she’d gone for something stronger after all. Ian McCormick was in Cedar Springs. That had not been part of the plan. Not at all. Sure, whenever she thought of her summers in Cedar Springs visiting her grandma, Ian figured largely in her memory. Whether he knew it or not, his attention—or lack thereof, as was the case—had figured largely in her teenage life. She couldn’t remember a summer she hadn’t spent lusting after him. As one of the summer kids, he was kind of a celebrity among the local kids. Not that she’d been a local kid. But she also wasn’t a summer kid. Gwen had definitely floated and never really had any friends except for Deanna.
Ian had no shortage of girls after him, but he’d never wanted to date any of them.
No. That wasn’t true. He just hadn’t wanted to date her. Not that she could blame him. If she’d been a teenage boy back then, she wouldn’t have wanted to date her. Almost a hundred pounds overweight, with bad hair and glasses, she was a walking cliché. Hell, she was even more of a cliché now that she’d lost all the weight, turned her life around and was returning to her past childhood haunts. She was a made-for-TV movie, for goodness sake.
“I honestly didn’t think it mattered.” Deanna joined her at the table. “He’s a summer kid.”
“A…he’s not a kid anymore. And, B…you know he’s way more than that. He’s way more.”
Deanna almost spat out her water. “No.”
“No what?”
“No way you still have a thing for Ian McCormick.”
Gwen didn’t even have to answer that question, because the woman she’d always considered to be her best friend knew her well enough to know the answer. Or, she should have known her better than that, anyway. She narrowed her eyes and tilted her head.
“No way.” Deanna shook her head. “Gwen, how can you possibly still be hung up on him? Honestly, I thought maybe after…well…”
“We said we’d never talk about that, remember?”
The situation they were never to discuss was a moment that could