Little Secrets(58)

“I avoid trust-fund babies like the plague,” she once told Kenzie. “First, they’re terrible in bed. Second, if they were born with money, then they’ve always had a safety net, so they’ve never worked for anything a day in their lives. Plus, they always want kids.” She shuddered. “A self-made, divorced, rich man is the holy grail. They work hard, they’ve likely done the kid thing already, and now they want to have fun and spoil someone. That’s where I come in.”

Then Izzy met Mike. Mike wasn’t divorced. Mike wasn’t rich. Mike was only three years older, and they’d met at the gym. It had just ended with Rick, and she was feeling restless, so she agreed to a coffee date because Mike was “cute.” Coffee turned to drinks, which turned into dinner, which turned into Izzy not coming home until late the following day.

“Well, I’m fucked,” she said, plopping down on the sofa.

“Literally or figuratively?” Kenzie asked.

“Both. He works in IT and drives a six-year-old Toyota Camry. A Camry, Kenz. And this morning, he took me to IHOP for breakfast. IHOP. And you know what?”

“What?”

“The sex was incredible, and the pancakes were good. What is happening to me?”

Kenzie had to laugh. It was hard to picture Izzy in a chain restaurant holding a giant laminated menu. “So then … fun for a night, right?”

“Right.” Her roommate spoke a little too decisively, and Kenzie didn’t know if Izzy was trying to convince her, or herself. “But, oh god, he made me laugh. I forgot how good it is to be with someone who makes me laugh. For the last twenty-four hours, it felt like I could be myself around him. It didn’t matter if my makeup stayed perfect or my hair got limp from the drizzle. I even offered to pay for breakfast since he got dinner and drinks last night. When’s the last time I did that?”

“Are you going to see him again?”

“I don’t know.” Izzy seemed genuinely confused. “I wish he wasn’t so … adorable.”

Six months later, she was still seeing Mike, and after a brief affair with a restaurant owner named Erik, Kenzie had moved on to Paul. Married, forties, three kids under the age of twelve. He was a managing partner at a downtown Boise law firm, and he kept an apartment near his office since the hours were so long. His family lived in the suburbs, and he mainly saw them on weekends—if he wasn’t with Kenzie.

Paul asked her once if his bank account was the reason she was attracted to him. “Would you still be into me if I was, say, a janitor?”

She turned the question back on him. “Would you still be into me if I was forty, and overweight, with three kids?”

Without meaning to, she had described his wife, and he drew back, stung. “Point taken,” he said.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“No problem. What should we do for dinner?”

She dated Paul for four months toward the end of her senior year, and spent most nights at the Boise apartment. Izzy was spending most of her time at Mike’s; he had a small house of his own with a cute little backyard. Neither of the girls wanted to admit that their close friendship was growing apart, now that Izzy had retired from the world of professional dating, whether she meant to or not. Which would have been perfectly fine—what did Kenzie care?—but Izzy was becoming judgmental about Kenzie’s lifestyle. Which used to be her lifestyle.

“How do you still do it?” Izzy asked her one night.

They were both squeezed into their tiny bathroom a few weeks before graduation, jostling for position in front of the mirror. Kenzie had borrowed one of Izzy’s skintight dresses and was getting ready for a night of dinner and dancing with Paul. Izzy was wearing jeans and a sweater. In the mirror, they looked like they had switched places from where they started.

“Paul’s married,” Izzy said, as if Kenzie didn’t damn well know. “He has kids. A wife. They’re a family. Don’t you feel bad about that at all?”

“Nope,” Kenzie said. How many more times could they have this discussion? “Not even a little bit.”

Izzy turned to her. “It’s wrong, Kenz.”

“Since when do you care?” she shot back. “You do you, remember?”

“Yeah, well, I was wrong,” Izzy said. “People can change. Don’t you want to fall in love?”

It was the first time Kenzie had ever heard her roommate say the word love, and she was taken aback. She didn’t think Izzy was built that way. Love always seemed to be at the bottom of her list of priorities, and Kenzie found herself getting pissed off. Not everybody gets to be in love.

She turned back to the mirror. “I’m not a homewrecker, Izzy. He is. The thing people forget is that it’s his home to wreck. If things were good at home, he wouldn’t have given me the time of day.”

“Do you know how Mike and I met?”

“The gym, you said.”

“We actually met before that. He came up to me at a bookstore, started chatting me up about the memoir I was holding. Apparently, we had a whole conversation about it, but I seriously didn’t remember it until he reminded me on our first coffee date. And then a couple of months later, on Valentine’s Day—we were still casual at that point—he gave me the book.” She smiled at the memory. “He tracked down a signed copy at a specialty bookstore. And all I could think was, this book costs less than twenty bucks and is probably the single most thoughtful gift anyone’s ever given me.”