For The One(29)

Her cinnamon smell assaults my senses the minute she’s settled beside me. It’s so distracting that I can barely keep my mind on the road.

I clear my throat. “I’m always on time. Or when I’m not, I have a good reason for it.”

She shifts in her seat. “Somehow I already knew that about you.” I puzzle over her words, wondering how she could know that about me. “So how are you feeling about this?” she asks.

I shrug. “I’ll have more information for you when we get there.”

“Are you nervous?”

“I’m trying not to think about it. When I think about it, I keep picturing massive crowds of people all shoving up against each other—” And again that image fills my mind. I can practically feel the press of bodies, and I can’t see anything but heads and arms all around me. I shake my head to rid my mind of the image.

“Don’t think about that.” She places her hand on my upper arm. “Try not to picture it that way.” I shrug my shoulder, causing her hand to slip away, but she doesn’t comment on it.

“I can’t help it. It’s how I think. Everything is in pictures.”

“But there are other ways to be in a crowd—controlled ways. Like a hockey game where everyone has their own seat and more or less stays in their own space. It doesn’t all have to be like a mosh pit at a rock concert. You could imagine yourself at a museum, looking at pretty art, everyone respecting their own space.”

She watches me for a long time, but my hands are on the wheel and my eyes are on the road. I try to ignore that feeling I get when she’s near. It can be so overwhelming that it’s distracting, and I have to fight that in order to stay focused on my driving.

Minutes later we are in Anaheim, and I park the car. We make our way to the sidewalk along the busy, crowded Katella Avenue. The Santa Ana River, which, despite it being winter, is barely a trickle as we cross over the bridge. I glance over my right shoulder toward the mountains and see that there is very little white on them. Meteorologists are predicting one of the worst droughts ever this year, and I think they are correct.

When I think of droughts, suddenly I picture the empty high desert along Interstate 15 on the way to Las Vegas. But that picture is yanked from me the moment I feel someone take my hand and squeeze it. I jerk my head to look.

Jenna’s hand is holding mine, and everything speeds up—the pounding of my heart, the speed of my blood through my veins, the rate at which I’m breathing. I have no idea what this gesture means. I bring our hands up to stare at them.

“Sorry—do you not like that? I was just offering some moral support.”

“Support? Like…holding me up?”

“Figuratively, yeah.”

I ponder that. “Is that what holding hands means?”

“Sometimes. But sometimes it’s more. It depends on the context…on the relationship.”

I realize that I’m focusing more on comprehending her than I am on the orderly file of human beings who are making their way toward the entrance of the towering Honda Center, home of the Anaheim Ducks. So I squeeze her hand back.

“Thank you for your show of support. So far it’s working.”

“We should have a code word.”

“A code word?”

“So you can tell me when you aren’t feeling so great.”

“Can’t I just tell you I’m not feeling so great?”

She shrugs. “Yeah. But a code word could be more fun. We could make it a game. Like…when you aren’t feeling great, you can say ‘pickles.’ And when you really, really feel like you need to leave, you can say ‘relish.’”

“I like relish.”

“It doesn’t matter what the word is. We can pick something else if you like.”

By this time, we are at the glass doors that lead inside. Sadly, I have to let go of her hand to pull the tickets out of my wallet and hand them to the ticket taker.

The building looms above us as we walk in. It’s big—really big. I’m trying hard to breathe the way she showed me, but I’m not sure it helps. I’ll keep trying though, because she showed me and she seems to believe in it. What does help is that we are headed in a direction that most are not taking. I bought the more costly tickets, hoping that would be the case.

Jenna looks down at our tickets stubs to determine where our seats are. “Wow, you spent the big bucks. I’ve never sat in the good seats before.”

“You come to hockey games often?”

She shrugged. “I dated a guy who was into hockey. He shared season tickets, so I came with him a lot.”