Read One & Only (Canton) for Free Online

me.” There was no malice in his voice and only the tiniest hint of scolding. He might have been talking about a string hanging off my sleeve.
    I swallowed. I had no excuse, or at least, none that I was willing to share with a guy I hadn’t seen since my teens. “I know. I’m sorry, I—”
    “That hurt.” He certainly hadn’t lost any of his frankness. “For a week or two.”
    A week or two? I narrowly resisted my impulse to gape. “Well,” I said, doing my best to smile. “I’m glad you got over it quickly.” I had kept his messages on my voicemail for months. Just because I hadn’t called him back didn’t mean I hadn’t wanted to. Even without seeing him, Dylan had taken up too much space in my head. A relationship with him would have been too dangerous. “How did you manage?” I asked lightly and popped a cube of cheese in my mouth.
    “I slept with a lot of girls,” he replied.
    I choked. I could not believe we were having this conversation over cheese.
    He handed me a napkin. “Okay there?”
    I snatched the napkin and glared at him as I attempted to get my coughing fit under control. Okay, I deserved that. I could admit it. Dylan was smirking at me, but his eyes held amusement, not anger.
    Two could play that game. “Oh, I did the same. Lots of girls.” In truth, there had been zero girls and only two guys.
    He raised his eyebrows and his grin grew wide. No blush though. The teenage blush was gone, completely masked by a nice summer tan. “Really? That I’d like to hear about.”
    I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Sure you would.”
    Dylan was who he’d always been: friendly and funny, gentle and genuine. I had little doubt he had been mad at me, but doubted even less that he’d held on to that anger. Long before we’d been lovers, we’d been friends.
    “It’s good to see you, Tess,” he said after a moment, his tone more serious. “Welcome to Canton.”
    And just like that, I knew we would be friends again.
    ***
    It would be lying to say that I had anything else on my mind but Dylan that night. In between reading for my first classes, I scrolled back two years on my email to our old exchanges. I read them all, from his first email inviting me to work with him, through every note and message and quick reminder that came in between, to his final email—the only one out of all of them I’d never replied to:
Tess,
I’m worried something has happened to you. I don’t know why you won’t answer me or call me back. I wish you would, if only to say goodbye.
Love,
Dylan
    Love , he’d written. Love . At the time, I’d told myself that was silly. It had only been one day. But it hadn’t. All these emails, read in a row. It hadn’t been a day. It had been weeks of seeing him every day, working with him night after night, studying and researching and laughing and joking. That one afternoon in his bed had led from the runway of our entire acquaintance. He’d told me so at the time.
    Not that it made the slightest bit of difference. I didn’t regret any of the choices I’d made except one—that I hadn’t been clear to him that we didn’t have a relationship. I might have saved him the hurt evident in his last email. But as he’d said at the reception, the pain didn’t last long. He’d slept with other girls.
    Lots of girls, he’d said. Lots.
    I was glad I’d gotten him on a roll, then. And if I didn’t quite have the same scoresheet, well, I’d had other things on my mind. School, work, transferring to Canton and figuring out how to afford it. There’d been Jason, who I supposed was my first real boyfriend. I liked him because he hadn’t complained about seeing me only once or twice a week. After about three months of that, though, he’d said he didn’t “see where this was going,” and I really couldn’t blame him. There had also been Sean, whom I’d met at a friend’s party one night and taken home. It was…uneventful, to say the least. I wasn’t sure how to tell