Free Intermission by Erika Almond Page A

you.”
    He came closer and I’d never seen those soda-pop-brown eyes
so free of the fizz that usually made them sparkle. “Josie, just hear me out,”
he said. “If you’re still hating on me after that, I’ll go.”
    Partly to keep my business from being aired with my neighbor’s
laundry, and because I had to know how Riley could possibly justify cheating on
me, I agreed. While I didn’t want to invite him inside, there was no other way
to get this done.
    He followed me past my azalea hedges and into the small
white cottage I’d lived in very happily as a single girl, the same one Riley
had been living in with me for a month as my boyfriend. Prior to today, I’d
thought a month with one woman was a first for Riley Wanamaker, aka Wily Riley,
aka Wanamaker Happy, Mad or Crazy, depending on his effect on a given woman. I’d
found out this morning that Riley’s track record was as yet untarnished by
fidelity.
    “Don’t sit,” I said, seeing him aim for my blue velvet
couch, where he’d been parked regularly since moving in. “And get that dog off
it too.” Riley and Roscoe had much in common, loving to lie on the couch and
chase after females. At least Roscoe was housebroken. “You got a limited time
to explain yourself, so start.”
    Riley’s broad shoulders, which filled out his white T-shirt
so well, slumped as he sighed. He raked a hand through chestnut-brown hair that
always looked as though he’d just had sex. Usually that was exactly the case. “Josie,
how long have we been best friends now?”
    “Ten years,” I said, remembering the day we were paired as
lab partners in Mayfield County High. “We’ve been friends a long time.”
    “ Best friends,” Riley corrected. “And then some.”
    His words softened me against my will. True, Riley and I had
been friends from nearly the first day we’d met, though it could’ve gone
otherwise. Riley surely was a package tough to resist. Back then he was close
to what would top out to be a height of six foot two. His wide, very full mouth
alternated between two positions, smiling with glee or slightly pursed as
though hinting for a kiss. He had the muscles of an athlete, though he said he
had neither time nor care for sports. I didn’t ask him what he did to keep fit
because I’d already heard. By freshman year of high school, Riley’s reputation
with the ladies had crossed the boundary from his town of Knickersonville to mine
of Hawthorne. I could see why so many girls had given him their hearts, and the
rest of their bodies, but I wasn’t interested in just being the next girl on
Riley Wanamaker’s list.
    The better I got to know him, the more it seemed that Riley
wasn’t into womanizing so much as he just loved women. As many as he could and
as often as he could. Maybe because he grew up without a momma, who died when
he was young, or because he got lost somewhere in the middle of a clan of seven
kids. Riley loved female attention and as a good-looking charmer, he got lots
of it.
    I wasn’t particularly interested in getting my heart set on
someone who belonged to half the county so we became friends. It worked for us.
Riley seemed to like having one girl in his life who wasn’t asking him to be
true to her alone—something that seemed impossible for him—and I liked the way
I was holding out for someone who’d see me as special.
    But high school in a small town can be a tricky situation
for a girl who’s something of an outsider. I was not at all excited about
sports, or the boys who played them, which amounted to sacrilege in a county
proud of its state-champion football team. I was considered even more of an odd
duck when my tastes began leaning toward fine art and painting, not a useful
career like working in the mills or becoming a lawyer, as both my parents were.
    So instead of attending games with everyone else in Mayfield
County, Riley and I would climb up to his old treehouse and talk about me
becoming an artist someday, and him