Excerpt: Ghosts of the Past

I nursed this one a little better, knowing that high speed drunkeness led to long term regret, but I needed something to take the edge off the 700 or so emotions that were swirling around. Closing my eyes for a moment, I sorted through some of them, trying to figure out which ones required lengthy analysis with Caroline and which were best left alone until I had time, and more importantly, privacy, to mull them over. Caroline was one of the few people in the world I’d cried in front of, but it wasn’t exactly something I wanted to make a habit out of, and with such an overwhelming crop of issues suddenly jostling for space in my brain, I figured I could afford to work through one of the less emotionally crippling ones until I’d had enough Scotch to make the other ones more palatable. And there was one obvious one loitering around, waiting to be hyper-analyzed in the way Caroline and I had been doing for 18 years or so.

“So I tried to seduce Kevin in the car on the way home from the funeral today.”

Caroline nearly spit out the mouthful of Scotch she’d just drunk, and it took a few minutes of coughing and me patting her on the back before she could manage to say anything.

“I’m going to assume I misheard that, because there is no way in hell that you just told me you seduced Kevin in the car on the way home. From your father’s funeral. Kevin. Your ex-boyfriend. With whom your broke up more than 10 years ago.” Caroline was a stickler for correct grammar.

“You did mishear, then, because I didn’t actually seduce him, I just tried to. He rejected me.”

“Seriously?” Caroline said. “I’m not sure which part I’m more surprised about - the fact that you tried to seduce him, or the fact that he turned you down. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t gotten laid since he got divorced.” Kevin had married the first girl he’d dated after me, and it hadn’t ended well. It was actually a bit of a scandal around town, because she’d been widely thought of as a bit of a floozy when she’d put the rather aggressive moves on Kevin shortly after I moved away, when everyone in town had assumed that Kevin and I would get married. They’d gotten married less than a year later, and within another year had divorced. Rampant speculation ranged from him being secretly gay (not a very popular one, really, since it wouldn’t occur to most of the people in this town that it was even a possibility, but it was also one I was quite confident was not a factor given my experiences with a very horny adolescent Kevin, which also explained why Caroline was so surprised by his rejection.), to impotence, to some sort of elaborate scandal involving a secret love child on one or possibly both of their parts.

What few people knew, and I only knew because my mother was quite close with Kevin’s mother, which made the breakup a real barrel of laughs, as you can imagine, was that Kelly had actually cheated on Kevin. Even though it would have done his reputation a favour to let that piece of information dissipate throughout the grapevine, Kevin was too nice a guy to trash someone else’s name, and he soldiered on despite knowing that people were talking about him behind his back.

“It was not my finest moment, I’m willing to admit, but I was thinking about the fact that sleeping with your ex-boyfriend at your father’s funeral seems like kind of the thing to do.”

Caroline looked at me with a mixture of amusement and disbelief on her face. “Annalise, you watch waaay too many movies.”

“It happens in books, too!” Even as I was saying it, I knew it wasn’t a good defense. Caroline rolled her eyes in response. “Besides,” I continued, “Kevin isn’t the only one who’s kind of hard up, let’s face it, and he IS a nice guy, and I’m kind of sad and lonely and needed something to take my mind off everything.”

“Hard up is one thing, and I am certainly not opposed to ex-sex, as I believe I have clearly demonstrated in the past, but I’m not convinced that ex-sex AT your father’s funeral is necessarily your best choice at this point. Particularly with Kevin.”

I was a little insulted by that. “What’s wrong with Kevin?”

“Nothing’s wrong with Kevin,” Caroline said, “but you know as well as I do that uncomplicated ex-sex with Kevin is pretty much impossible. I only approve of ex-sex when it’s genuinely no strings attached, and there are so many strings between you and Kevin that you’re starting to resemble a marionette.”