Landline(48)

Her mom sighed. “All right, I can take a hint. Good-bye, Neal. It was so good to hear your voice.”

If she even mentioned the girls, Georgie would start screaming. She would. She’d figure out how to explain it later. “Good-bye, Mom.”

Her mom sighed into the receiver right until the second she hung it up.

Georgie wasn’t sure how to recover.

“So,” Neal said, “I guess your mom thinks we broke up.”

She took a second to feel utterly relieved by his train of thought, then said, “I thought we did, too, up until a few days ago.”

“But not now?”

“No,” Georgie said, “not now.”

“No matter what happens,” he said, “I’m never calling your mom ‘Mom.’ It’s too weird.”

“I know,” she said. “I’ll cover for you.”

Neal started a sentence, then stopped. Then started again. “Georgie, I—well, I wasn’t ever sleeping with Dawn.”

“But—” Georgie stopped. “Yes, you were. You were engaged.”

“I never slept with her.” Neal’s voice dropped. “She wanted to wait until marriage. Her first boyfriend was a monster, so she reclaimed her virginity.”

“She reclaimed her virginity?”

“Leave it, Georgie. She can do whatever she wants with her virginity.”

“Right,” Georgie said, nodding her head. “Right . . . It doesn’t sound like such a bad idea, actually. Maybe I’ll reclaim mine before you come back. In the name of Queen Elizabeth.”

Neal sounded like he might have laughed.

“Because she was the virgin queen,” Georgie said.

“I got it.”

Georgie was quiet. Neal had never slept with Dawn. She’d always assumed he’d had lots of fabulous young sex with Dawn. Freshly scrubbed Heartland-teenager sex. “Suckin’ on a chili dog outside the Tastee Freeze,” et cetera.

Did that mean he’d never had sex with anyone but Georgie?

She thought of their first time. At Neal’s apartment, in the middle of the night. Laughing and fumbling with the condom—and Georgie wanting to get past this first time together, so they could get to just being together, whatever that might mean.

Was that Neal’s first time ever?

That’s exactly the sort of thing he wouldn’t tell her. Neal didn’t like to talk about sex. And he didn’t like to talk about before. Before they were together, before Georgie. (He didn’t like to talk about yesterday.) She thought of Neal. Practically a teenager, pale as paper. All concentration and broken concentration, laughing through clenched teeth and touching her like she was made of glass.

Neal.

“You can’t be jealous of Seth,” Georgie offered quietly.

“Really,” he huffed.

“Really. That’s like the sun being jealous of . . .”

“A comparably sized sun?”

“I was going to say the moon.”

“The sun probably is jealous of the moon,” Neal said. “It’s a hell of a lot closer.”

“Seth and I are just friends,” she said. It was true, it had always been true. Best friends—but just friends.

“You and Seth aren’t just anything.”

“Neal . . .”

“He’s your soul mate,” Neal said. And the way he said it, it was like he’d already thought it through—like he’d thought it through and through, like he’d chosen that word intentionally.

Georgie’s jaw dropped against the receiver. “Seth. Is not. My soul mate.”

“Isn’t he? Aren’t you planning your life around him?”

“No.” Georgie leaned forward. Even in 1998, that hadn’t been true. “No. God. I was planning my life around me.”

“Is there a difference?”

“Neal . . .”

“No, Georgie, let’s just get it out there. I’m optional for you—I know that. I know that you love me, I know you want to be with me. But you can imagine your life without me. If I walk away from you now—if I don’t come back—you won’t have to adjust your grand plan. But Seth is your grand plan. It’s obvious. I don’t think you could imagine going twenty-four hours without him.”

“Are you asking me to?”

“No.” Neal sounded dejected. “No. I know . . . what you guys have together. I’d never ask you to choose between us.”

He never had.

Neal had never liked Seth—that hadn’t changed over the years. But he never complained about him. He never complained about all the time Seth and Georgie spent together. About the long hours or the middle-of-the-night texts—or the days when Neal and Georgie took the girls to Disneyland, and Georgie ended up sitting on the curb in Critter Country, talking Seth through some script emergency over the phone.

And Georgie was so grateful for that. For Neal’s acceptance. (Even if it was just resignation.) Sometimes she felt like she was walking a fine, precarious line between the two of them. Like there wasn’t enough of her to be who she needed to be for them both.

If Neal pushed her, or pulled her—if either one of them did—it would all come crashing down.