Page 77 of All That History
It was entirely possible that I was getting ahead of myself, anyway.Putting ideas, projecting possibilities, where they hadn’t naturally sprouted yet, if they were ever going to.Flynn might be keen to reconnect simply because of our shared childhood history.The fact that we’d had hooked up, well, that could just as easily be put down to post-breakup angst, rather than anything more meaningful.
So no, I couldn’t say conclusively how he felt, where his interest actually lay.All I could do was look at my own response to him, pore over my reactions this past weekend, and try to backtrack from there to the motivations I didn’t seem capable of understanding yet.Like the memory of that goddamn afterglow, as we’d clung to each other and our sweat cooled, and the knowledge that no, I’d never felt like that before after a hookup.
Usually, sex felt like the ending of something, the culmination.Of flirting, of teasing.Only with Flynn, my treacherous mind kept seeing it like a beginning piece: an acknowledgement even, that the physical connection was there, and that it might be safe - if you dared - to move on, and risk your emotions.
If the sex had been bad, life would’ve been so much easier.
Because, no matter which way I cut and juggled it, the truth of the matter was that Flynn wasn’t going to leave the city, and I couldn’t bring myself to abandon home.A reality we both seemed to intuitively understand, too, even if we were equal in our willingness to ignore it.
The gray ballon swelled and creaked inside my cranium.It felt like the mother of all headaches.
Thinking about Flynn as anything other than an old friend I was happy to reconnect with was, as Catherine would say, a false economy.Investing into something which had no hope of paying off; only building myself up for a disappointment, and one which I’d have nobody else to blame for, but myself.
Chapter Twenty-One
“Just let me do it!”
It came out harder than I intended, my tone harsher.I could tell, from the pinched expression on my mom’s face, that any goodwill my assistance might’ve generated had already been outweighed by my surly temper.
I’d been in a foul mood ever since I got home.Fuse short; patience practically non-existent.At first my parents could blame it on the long drive; I was fine with letting that tiredness excuse me from conversation, cloistering myself in my room with my headphones on.
As the days went by, though, there was no escaping the truth that I was being a grumpy asshole.
Scathing with my dad when he asked me to fix his ancient flip-phone yet again.Biting in my criticism of the people at work: for not sorting old sweaters in the way I felt they should be sorted; for not answering the phone properly; for not filling in the log book of sales only ever read by me.
And terse with my mom, when I stalked into the kitchen to find her trying to unclip the dishwasher racks.Leaning - bad back and all - over the gaping door, top half of her body practically inside, fumbling and sighing at the little plastic tags.
I was angry at myself, as I took her place and tried to open the clips without snapping them off.Angry for how I talked to her, and for the voice in my head that I talked to myself with.And furious, too, at my mom for not giving me as good as I dealt out.
I wanted her to shout back at me, to call me a rude, ungrateful little bastard.For things to escalate into an all-out argument, our barbs whiplash-sharp and just as fast.Something I could get my teeth into, maybe relieve some of the ache in my gums as I chewed on my frustrations and - irony of ironies - ignored the man who was causing them.
It went without saying that I was too much of a coward to call Flynn.To talk with him; to bring up the stuff which was gnawing away in me, and which I’d repurposed into a thick mist of meanness to spread around in all directions.
Not something I could discuss with my parents, of course; as far as they knew, Flynn was the former friend whose mom I now rolled my eyes at.Nor with the people at work, or even Catherine and Kyle.My friends, I was sure, would have all manner of cold, rational truths to share: splashes of reality that would readily puncture my ire.Right now, ire was the only thing keeping me going.
He’d texted me the day after I got home.Not long after 9am, the workday we’d both been so diligent in observing only just beginning.
