Second Best Fantasy by Angela Kelly Read Free Book Online

ago, I hadn’t thought about it until that morning, with Janine, Janine Jordan for God’s sake, sitting at my kitchen table. My swinging lifestyle, cool job, and life in the Village had made me very happy, and I’d become a rather well adjusted single person. Yet, when looked at from the other side, from that side across the table at the Sandbar in Keyport, NJ, my happiness was a sham and had been for eons. I do believe people can change, but really only superficially or in minor ways. Deep down inside, where we don’t even want to know ourselves, people never really alter, not their very being, the makeup that gives us our personalities, likes, dislikes, loathings, all sorts of things that will never bend and certainly not break. I was no jet-setting dyke in the big city. I wanted a wife, I always had. Never mind the great sadness that comes with that realization. No wonder I never wanted to think about it.
    The food arrived and jolted me out of my orbit around a past not often dwelt upon.
    “Another round?” Either the stewardess had metamorphosed or there’d been a shift change for the dinner crowd. We took our new hottie up on her offer and delved into our swordfish. No one from a coast who doesn’t like seafood should have the privilege of having been born there.
    “Well?” Janine looked pleased, and it lifted my spirits. Or the ‘spirits’ were lifting my spirits, either way I was very contented to sit there with her, although I was looking forward to stop number two.
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    “It’s excellent. I suppose it’s my turn to tell a story?”
    “Not necessary. We’ll have our own novel to write by the end of the day.”
    I noticed suddenly that we were surrounded by people. I’d been so lost in my story, and then lost in her eyes, I’d barely noticed the influx of the dinner crowd. I ate my swordfish in silence, enjoying the simple pleasure of sharing more than one meal with her over the course of only one day. The boardwalk and the romanticism that wraps around it like a blanket awaited us. However, the LA conversation was lurking in the backdrop no matter how I tried to quash it. Two more days and nights with her was all I had. I wanted to fill the next 48 hours with a million reasons for her to return to me in New York.
    After dinner we stayed at the Sandbar for an hour or so, drinking and talking about books, movies, and music. I found it unbelievable that her range of knowledge was equal in all three categories and not limited to her trade. She told me she was twenty-nine and I had to grab on to the table so I didn’t fall out of my chair. Not that an age difference bothered me, she just seemed older, I originally thought I was the younger one. Janine seemed to me so worldly, and I was considered pretty worldly myself.
    She was highly educated. Janine had spent two years at a small, private university in Denver she’d chosen based on the reputation of its math and science curriculum. She’d studied to be an architect, and taken an opening in an exchange student program to go to Versailles for a year. After that year, she came back to the states, dropped out in Denver, and moved back home to apply to Julliard.
    “I’d always been into the arts, architecture just seemed to be somehow more, I don’t know, practical, I guess.”
    I could hardly imagine Janine ever having been practical.
    “Anyway,” she told me, “after a year in Versailles, being exposed to that culture, I decided to go for what I really wanted, and that was to paint.”
    There was no end to her surprises. “I didn’t even know I could sing until Julliard.”
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    Amazing, I thought to myself. “Do you still paint?”
    “Do you still write?” she responded. Quid pro quo. The check arrived reluctantly, the longer we stayed the bigger the tip, our new waitress was no fool. I doubled the tip anyway, she was much better than the teenagers she succeeded.
    I made the most amazing time between Keyport and Lavalette and