She left the building and walked toward the aquarium. She realized that she was half intending to go in and try to catch Brian flirting with someone else. Just as quickly, she realized that she didn’t care if he was. She wasn’t in love with him, and she could get what she wanted from him whether he was chasing after other girls or not.

This made her think of Nicole. She did love Nick, even though he cheated on her. Caddie was at least not in that position, and because of this she considered herself smarter. Nicole was a nice girl, but Caddie would never be like her. I’m stronger than that, she told herself. I can play around with Brian and not get hurt.

There was another advantage to keeping Brian in her life; her father still didn’t like him. He’d lectured her for a long time about how irresponsible it was of Brian to take her diving, the implication being that she was equally irresponsible for going with him. At first, she’d almost given in and allowed her father to teach her the “right” way to dive. But she’d held that back, not quite ready to give him that gift.

Now she wouldn’t. If he wanted to pine around after Hudson, she would let him. It was no skin off her ass, as Bree would say. She didn’t care what he did. She imagined what Sam and Bree would say if she told them her father was puppy-dogging around after another guy. She sort of felt like that should freak her out, but it didn’t. She knew a lot of gay guys. Girls, too, although she was convinced that girls slept with each other mostly because guys had no clue what to do with them in bed. She had fooled around with a girl or two, just to see what it was like.

Anyway, Sam and Bree would probably get a kick out of it. Her mother, on the other hand, would flip out. In fact, she thought, she probably could get a one-way ticket back to L.A. just by calling her mom and letting it slip that she thought her father might be going a little queer. She imagined her mother’s response and was sorely tempted.

In the end, though, she didn’t care if her dad was gay. Not that she really thought he was. He was really more asexual; she couldn’t imagine him with anyone in that way. Not even with her mother. The two of them did not work together, that was for sure. The men her mother went out with were power broker types, men who wore suits and made deals on their cell phones during dinner at Koi. They would eat her dad up and spit him out before he knew what was happening.