Girls in the City Alison - Suzanne Jenkins Page 0,1

no matter how hard she tried to love him and to want a life with him, Alison wasn’t on the same page. She loved Eddie like the best, closest friend, a friend with whom she’d shared the deepest intimacies. They were sexually active for part of the time they’d been together too, but lifelong?

Finally, after forty-five minutes, the crowd had considerably thinned out, and her name was called. Earlier, Tom had left, taking Adelaide with him, to tell his mother the news, but Samantha waited with her friends. She knew that life-changing events had taken place for all of them.

“She’s not going to be in LA, you know that, right?” Ed asked.

“I know,” Samantha said. “She has her heart set on San Diego.”

Alison came back, clearly trying to contain her excitement. “San Diego.”

“We can live in Dana Point and each commute an hour,” Eddie said quickly. “It’s not the end of the world.”

“No, it is not,” she said, a huge grin on her beautiful face, and she reached out for their hands. “Come on, you two. Let’s go celebrate. I know Samantha is thrilled.”

“You have no idea,” Samantha said, grinning ear to ear. “I feel sorry for Adelaide, but she’ll learn to be the world traveler, from Detroit to Chicago. It’s only four hours.”

“Now we just need to graduate,” Eddie said, depression permanently rooting in his heart.

They went to their hangout, Pink Piggy’s, for a beer, and the women celebrated, but Eddie was having an awful time of it. He would try to nip it in the bud because Alison was intolerable of any weakness or signs thereof.

“Buck up,” she’d yell. “I can’t stand the pity party. Get over yourself!”

The thrill about returning to San Diego was so intense she didn’t notice that her best friend was despondent. That would come later.

***

Graduation day meant the apartment was full of friends and family, which was a good distraction for the couple. In the weeks since Match Day, Alison had made it an act of her will to ignore Eddie’s growing unhappiness because there was too much at stake. She couldn’t afford to fight with him, and there was so much to do between now and July first when her residency began.

They had to vacate the apartment, load up a rented car, and travel back to California. Somehow, she had to remain friends with him that long. There wasn’t time to research his idea of getting an apartment at the halfway mark between San Diego and Los Angeles, so she would stay with her mother and father, and he would be forced to stay with his mother.

“I swore I would never live with my mother, and here I am, a doctor, going home to Mom.”

“Ed, just get an apartment in LA, then,” Alison begged. “Get a month-to-month rental if you must, but I can’t make the commitment to go halfway right now. An hour commute on a good day might be too much. What if the traffic is crap? I remember it taking four hours to get to LA on a Monday.”

“I’ll wait. I can wait,” he said.

The trip cross-country should have been a wonderful, memorable experience, but it was miserable, with Eddie begging her with every nuance of his word and body, and it took all of her resolve not to shove him out of the car. Two days in, she refused to talk to him unless he promised to change his attitude, which he was unable to do. The rest of the trip was made in silence.

Three days later they reached LA. After unloading Eddie’s belongings into his mother’s house, she shocked him; she was driving on to San Diego.

“Alison, spend the night. Or at least stay and rest for a while.”

“No, I’m anxious to get home,” she said. “It’s only about an hour and a half to my folks’ place.”

And with a peck on the cheek, she was gone.

The relief she felt finally getting into the car alone and heading south was overpowering, and she sobbed for a few miles. Three years earlier, once Samantha had had baby Adelaide and moved in with Tom’s family, Alison had performed a miracle by getting Eddie to move out of her room and into Samantha’s old bedroom.

“Why? We’ve been in the same bedroom for almost six months,” he’d complained.

“I’m ready for some privacy,” she said honestly. “It’s not a big deal, Ed. We have three more years in this place, and I think being in the same bedroom might be a bit