Page 88 of First-Time Caller
“Oh boy.”
“More or less, yeah. I’ve been trying to move on—clearly—but I don’t think I can.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“What can I do when I feel like this?” He lifts his hands and drops them. Picks up his tiny spoon and spins it around and around. “I didn’t choose it. I don’t particularly want it. Lord knows I could have picked one of the seventy-five million better options for me. But it is what it is. I can’t change how my heart feels. I can’t guide it somewhere else. I suppose I’m going to see it through, for better or worse.”
It sounds like there might be a whole lot ofworsethan better in that situation for Oliver. But I hope he finds what he’s looking for. One of the best parts of this show and the decision to put myself out there is discovering I’m not alone in my loneliness. Not by a long shot.
Affection tugs at me and I lift my tiramisu cup. I clink it with the edge of his.
“Oliver, this might be the strangest date I’ve ever been on.”
A laugh bursts out of him. “For me too.”
“But also one of the best.”
His smile is warm. “Yeah. Me too.”
AIDEN VALENTINE:I hope she has a good time.
JACKSON CLARK:You’ve said that, like, sixty-seven times tonight.
AIDEN VALENTINE:Well. I hope she’s having a good time.
JACKSON CLARK:More energy, bud. More enthusiasm.
Iwas a freshman in high school the second time my mom was diagnosed with cancer. I had been operating under the foolish impression that because she had it once, she wouldn’t have it again.
She was sick. She got better. We were done with it. Forever.
So when she started getting tired again, when the headaches came back, the optimistic part of me thought it was a cold.
But it wasn’t a cold, and whatever part of me that was responsible for hope went quiet.
I’ve always been good at avoiding the things that make me feel like shit.Content to compartmentalize, a therapist told me when I was younger. But now all the heavy doors I’ve locked everything behind are rattling on their hinges. I know I’m acting like an asshole, but I don’t know how to stop. It’s muscle memory.
The back door to the station opens and Maggie appears at my side.
“It’s ten degrees out here.” She shivers. “Why are you sitting in the parking lot?”
“I’m standing,” I mutter.
She slants a narrow-eyed glare in my direction. “Lucie is here.”
I know she is. That’s why I’m standing in the back parking lot in ten-degree weather. Because I don’t know how to sit in the space next to her and hold myself in my carefully contained boxes.
“You need to get in there,” Maggie says, gentler than she’s ever been. She nudges my shoulder with hers. “Don’t keep her waiting.”
“I won’t.”
Except I already have. In more ways than one.
All I’ve been able to think about is our night at the bar. I’mhauntedby it. My hands on her hips, her fingers sifting through the hair at the nape of my neck while we swayed in the middle of a sticky floor. Her hands reaching for me from the couch in the middle of her dark living room, her dress almost indecently high against her thighs. The happy sigh she made when I slipped socks over her cold feet. How her whole body softened against me in sleep, her nose nudging at the hollow of my throat.
The couch in her living room was lumpy and too small, but it’s the best sleep I’ve had in my fucking life.
It’s just a crush. We’re spending so much time together. It’ll fade.
