His Wicked Christmas Wager. Annie Burrows
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frightening.
“Okay, Mom,” I agreed.
And then she laid out a list. Her list of more. She made me repeat it until there was no way I could forget it.
Ten years from now, I will have gone to Europe at least once.
Ten years from now, I will have met the love of my life—a kind, smart, generous man. He will value me.
Ten years from now, I will have a successful career. It will be one that matters.
We never talked about it again, but the memory struck me sometimes, and when it did, it would fill me with the panic I was feeling at that exact moment. Because I was right on the cusp of my twenty-second birthday, and I had not accomplished a single thing on that list.
“Liandra!” I hissed.
She muttered an incomprehensible response.
“Liandra!”
“Tucker,” she groaned from across the room. “What do you want?”
“What if I never amount to anything?”
“You’re not even going to make it until morning if you don’t leave me alone,” she grumbled.
I waited, knowing that any second she would remember how many times she’d woken me up over the past year for things far less significant than a crisis of self-faith. She sighed resignedly.
“What’s this about?” she asked.
“I just thought I would have it all together by now,” I replied.
“Does this have anything to do with the fact that you’re turning twenty-two in three months?”
I nodded, even though she probably couldn’t see me in the darkness of our shared bedroom.
“And because you got that letter this past week, asking you to declare your major?”
“More like demanded it,” I told her.
She ignored my comment. “And because of what happened with Mark…an awfully long year and a half ago?”
“Are you trying to make me feel worse?” I asked.
“No,” Liandra said. “I’m just gathering all your points so I can accurately refute them.”
“And now you’re resorting to lawyer speak?”
“I’m not a lawyer.”
“Not anymore.”
“Tucker.” My friend sighed. “How old am I?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“I’m thirty-four!”
“I know,” I told her. “I was trying to soften you up so you’d be nicer to me.”
“Well, stop it.”
“Sorry.”
“How many boyfriends do I have?” Liandra asked.
“None.”
“None,” she repeated.
“But at least you’ve been married,” I reminded her.
“None,” she said a second time, this time heavily.
“But—”
She cut me off. “So. I’m a thirty-four-year-old woman with one failed marriage, one failed career, living off a student loan that I will probably never pay back, in some run-down, all-girls dorm with a self-pitying twenty-one-year-old who is sad because she has never been to Italy.”
“You are trying to make me feel worse,” I accused.
“I’m giving you perspective,” she corrected.
And truthfully, what she was saying did make me feel better about my situation. When I had come to Liandra, I’d been in the lowest state of my life, and she had helped me rebuild. She’d had her share of hard times, and she understood loss. In fact, it was often what she had been through herself that inspired me. She’d left those details out of her little rant, but my mind went to them immediately. I thought of the fact that she’d battled breast cancer for eight years, and that the radiation treatment had resulted in infertility. And how her boss at the law firm where she’d worked had also been her husband. And that he’d fired and divorced Liandra after impregnating his office assistant.
“Liandra?” I said softly.
“Is it working?” she replied.
“Is what working?”
“My evil plan,” she said. “Are you lying there thinking about my crappy life instead of yours?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
She chuckled. “Good. And you’re welcome.”
“Thanks,” I said belatedly.
She was quiet for a minute, and I wondered if she had drifted back to sleep. Then she leaned across the space between our beds and squeezed my hand.
“Your mom would be proud,” she told me. “I know it.”
My heart ached for a single beat, and I pushed the pain aside. I’d come eight-hundred miles away from home so I could put the past and all that pain that went with it behind me.
“Do you feel any better?” Liandra wanted to know.
“A lot.”
There was a pause, and I thought she might call my bluff, but instead she just said in a teasing voice, “Good. Now can we please get some rest? It’s 2 a.m.”
“Today is Friday,” I reminded her. “You don’t have any classes. And neither do I.”
“I know.” She yawned. “But you’ve got that rally thing in the morning, and work in the afternoon. And let’s face it, if you’re tired, you’re cranky. And if you’re cranky and tired, then you’re noisy.”
“It’s not a rally, it’s a business meeting! And now that I’m thinking about that, I’m all anxious again.”
“See?” she said. “Already cranky.”
I threw my pillow at her, and grinned to myself when I heard her responding squeak.
“Good night, Liandra,” I called out sweetly.
“Good night, Tucker.”
After a few more silent moments, my roommate’s breathing became even and slow, and I knew she had fallen asleep. But I was still wide-awake, thinking of my immediate future instead of my long-ago past.
The project I’d taken on was a big one, and close to my heart. In fact, it was the biggest thing I’d ever undertaken. And the most personal. This wasn’t just some cause I’d read about, or some park that needed to be cleaned up. This was about me.
A full year earlier, when I’d still been more or less picking up the pieces of my life after my parents had died and I’d left Mark, I’d heard that a local community center was being shut down. At first, I’d just felt a little sad that a place so similar to the one where I’d spent so much of my youth was going to be turned into high-rises and a mini mall. But the more I’d thought about it, the more it had upset me. And when I’d decided to visit it, I’d seen the number of kids there, and something in me had snapped. I couldn’t let it close.
So I did the only thing I could. I volunteered to fix the whole damned thing. So I’d started researching. I invested quite a bit of time looking over the details, finding out how I could save it, or even if I could. The city owned the land and the community center, but the building was old and expensive to maintain, and someone in the line of officials had decided it was no longer worth