Love Letters That Aren't About Love

Chapter 1

On a day that had been long, and tiring, and far more complicated than it needed to be because of other people’s problems, Emma received an email that was meant for someone else.

She was at home, on the couch, and had taken her laptop into the lounge with her when she got home, just to check if anything was going on. Anything at all. Messages from work, or something interesting in the news, or just people wanting to gossip with her who couldn’t be bothered trying the phone. She was tried, and her feet hurt because she’d worn nice shoes even when she knew she’d be standing up half the day, and she was just a little bit lonely, too. Lucy wouldn’t be home until late because her firm always had drinks for the associates after their weekly department meetings and the drinks always turned into dinner, and staying out half the night.

Emma didn’t mind that. She had wine, and she had the TV, and later she’d warm up a box dinner from the freezer, but she did miss Lucy sometimes, and she thought it was quite sad that the most interesting thing in her evening was probably going to be her email.

She sat down, and looked through the messages, and saw one from someone she didn’t know, saying, “I had a great time.”

She looked for a moment, puzzled, and opened it.

And then stopped. And looked again.

“Em,” the message said. “I had a great time. I can’t stand how good you taste. I want to again. I really do. Alyssa.”

Emma sat there looking at it, wondering if it was a joke.

She looked at the email address it had came from. A big webmail service, so it could be someone playing a trick.

She didn’t know why they would, but it could be.

Or it could be some kind of bizarre identity theft. She worried about that for a moment. That someone had stolen her email account and was using it to seduce Alyssas all over town.

She didn’t think so, though. Not once she thought about it. More likely it was just a mistake.

She looked at the rest of the email, trying to work it out. The email had been sent to her own address, by the look of it. To her private address, not her work one, and not the one she and Lucy shared to use for their families. It had her name at the top. Her exact name. It seemed to have been intended for someone with the same first and last names as Emma, which was probably why she’d got it. Her name was basically her email address too.

It made sense why she was seeing it, she decided, but it had to be some kind of misspelling or mistaken identity. Perhaps a wrongly spelled surname, she thought, or perhaps the right name, but completely the wrong email company. Something like that.

It definitely wasn’t for Emma. She didn’t know any Alyssas, and hadn’t done anything with anyone, lately, except Lucy, that would let someone find out how she tasted.

She was sort of interested in what Alyssa and the other Emma had been doing, though.

Not interested, precisely. It was pretty obvious what they’d been doing. Emma couldn’t think of anything else that taste could mean but what it seemed to mean.

Not what they’d been doing, but how they’d ended up doing it.

She liked things like this. Little leftovers of people’s lives, showing where they’d been, and what they’d done, and that they’d been happy. People holding hands in public, and staring at each other. People telling stories about how they met.

This was what this was.

It was kind of funny, as well. As a story. Sending something like this to a stranger by mistake. Not funny like a huge joke, but as an oddity of life. Something funny and human and wonderful. And it was curious, too, that of all the people involved were obviously into women.