Free Class Reunion by Juliet Chastain Page A

memory. He’d been too shy. Couldn’t figure how to simply appear on her doorstep with no excuse beyond that he was still crazy in love with her, that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.
    It wasn’t that he was lonely now; his world was very different from the wretched one he’d endured in high school. He glanced through some of his other personal e-mails, smiled at the notes from friends wanting to get together, telling him about a great band or a new video game he might not have heard of.
    And the e-mails from women—here was someone introducing herself, telling him they had all sorts of things in common, from a fondness for the Black Keys to thinking Will Wright was the greatest game designer on the planet. Whoever she was, she had obviously read the article about him in The New York Times . She repeated every detail in the same words as the reporter who had wheedled the personal information out of him.
    He sighed. Read another e-mail and shook his head. Sexual favors from someone he didn’t even remember meeting wasn’t something he wanted. Looked like he’d have to change his personal e-mail address again.
    Now that he wasn’t so scrawny and poor, it seemed like half the women he met wanted to jump into bed with him. And that included some of the most beautiful women in the world. He had to admit, for several years it had felt great to have women after him, and he’d taken plenty of advantage of that, thoroughly enjoying himself in such attractive company. But the truth was, he really only wanted one woman. Even though they hadn’t seen one another in seven years, they’d been faithful pen pals the whole time, sharing their thoughts and many of the details of their days. They’d shared plenty of their feelings too—except he’d kept his love for her to himself, always waiting, hoping, she’d give him some hint that she felt the same way he did.
    He didn’t care what Dana looked or sounded like now; he was perfectly clear how he felt about her. He loved her more than anything, and that’s all that mattered.
    If by some miracle things felt right—and he hoped with all his heart that they would—he would ask her to marry him. If she didn’t feel the way he did, well, he wouldn’t embarrass her by proposing. They could go on e-mailing each other every day or two and he would have to settle for that.

Chapter Two
    Dana opened her suitcase and took out the outfit she had bought to wear to the class reunion dinner and dance tomorrow night. She put it on and studied herself in the mirror. Serious brown eyes belied her curly, blonde hair. Her friends told her she was pretty. She shrugged thinking of it. Yeah, she looked pretty good, she thought. She’d outgrown the bad skin and outrun the fat that had helped make her teen years in Aurelia miserable.
    The dress showed off her curvy figure, but maybe the salmon color was too sober. Maybe she should have chosen a livelier color. Maybe... She sighed. It didn’t matter what she wore because all eyes would be on Patti Malone, queen of the prom and the heart’s desire of nearly every boy at Aurelia High. Dana wondered if Patti was still the same breathtakingly beautiful, mean, self-satisfied bitch she’d been in school.
    She reminded herself that the only person she wanted to impress was Nicholas, and he wasn’t the kind of person to care about her appearance. After all, he had liked her when she was a plain, fat girl with bad skin. Nicholas liked her for her. Still, she wanted more. She wanted him to find her desirable, someone he would love. Someone he would want to take to bed. She couldn’t help imagining herself in his arms as he whispered that he’d longed for this moment.
    She hadn’t seen him for years, although she would have liked to, but she hadn’t dared suggest it since she’d seen in the paper that he was the chief designer at one of the most successful video gaming companies in the world, and the Internet was full of talk about