Emma: Friends and Lovers (F&L Story #1)

Emma: Part 2

"So?" Eve asked, hopping to the armrest of the purple plaid couch as I dropped my keys on the table by the door.

"I didn't do it," I said.

She blinked at me. "We had a bet."

"Screw the bet."

"Wow. Who ran over your cat?"

I dropped heavily to the cushions of the matching loveseat and let my head fall back. "Michael Evans," I said to the ceiling.

"Michael? I'm confused. You don't have a cat."

"I'm thinking of getting one. One of those orange, furry ones that are over-weight and just kind of roll across the floor because its short legs can't hold it upright."

"Never mind the cat. What's this about Michael?" Eve curled her long, perfectly tanned legs under her bottom and eyed me.

"He's back."

A long, thick silence filled the room, kind of like breathing in the hot, sticky, humid July air. Eve suddenly grinned from ear to ear and jumped up to bounce on the cushions like a trampoline. "Michael is back? At last, the runaway prince charming comes back to his kingdom to claim his princess!"

I rolled my head to stare at her. "You've never met him. How do you know he's a prince? He could be the frog or the red-cape, chasing pedophile for all you know."

She giggled, "I've read your diary. He's a prince."

I shot up and smacked her with a purple, fringed pillow. "I haven't kept a diary since high school." Eve squealed and tumbled backward of the back of the couch, landing with a thud and a grunt of pain.

"Doesn't matter," she groaned and peered at me over the edge of the couch. "Michael is back."

For good measure, I pitched the pillow at her - she ducked - and said, "But did he call and tell me that? Noooo. I had to find out by fainting on the DMV's nasty, cold floor, looking like this!" I did the Vanna wave over my body, grimacing from the recollection. Eve grinned evilly.

"Yeah, you look like a hooker."

"These are your clothes," I hollered at her. Sometimes I wonder why I have a roommate in the first place. Oh, yeah, right...the whole financial curse of the "perpetual student."

Eve studied the smear of dirt decorating her jeans. "What did you do? Roll around in a dumpster? Oooh, did you? In a dumpster? With Michael?"

"What with Michael? I haven't seen him in years. I'm not going to jump his bones in the back alley of a government building. That's illegal, not to mention...Gross!"

Without a word, Eve scampered out of the room and rushed back again, holding the most recent picture I had of Michael, taken last summer while he was on a fishing trip in Montana. "I'll crawl into the sewage drain with this man."

I'll have to admit. Eve had a point. Michael was delicious. All through elementary school, we were best buds, and as soon as puberty hit us in junior high, right before he moved away, I'd developed a crush on him. He was the first boy I kissed that summer before he left, and not a man to date had ever measured up to that thirteen-year-old, lanky boy with bed-head, black hair and blue eyes the color of an August sky. We managed to stay in touch through letters and post cards - sometimes taking me days to decipher his sloppy, wildly slanted scribble - until the coming age of computers and cell phones and the marriage of the two with increasingly popular smart phones made it easier for me to send a quick text message to him on his birthday or Christmas.

Eve never knew about our one-night rendezvous and five years ago, right after Michael bailed the Emma Ship, Daddy slapped a newspaper article from the Anchorage Daily News - Daddy was a newspaper fanatic, getting publications from all over the country, even though I told him that the internet provides national news for free - in front of me, announcing Michael's engagement to a busty blonde real estate agent called, Dixie.