Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(72)

“How hard?”

“The hardest. You know how I’ve always turned in all my homework, and signed up for all the class projects, and was the line leader?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I’ve been doing the opposite of that.”

“Tell me why, right now, I shouldn’t get on a plane.”

Then I say, “Because of Evan,” but then I talk mostly about me. About my breakthrough. I talk about how what I should get for Christmas is a small car with big side mirrors and indoor timers for all my lamps and a really good microphone for my computer.

I tell her about Bob and Lisa and Melissa.

“I’m going to do this, Mom,” is what I say. “It’s like a research question, just for me. I’m good at research. I’m a scientist. I’m going to use my scientist powers on this problem, and I’m going to work out if it even really is a problem, and I’m going to let people help me.”

“Is Evan single?” she asks, but I can tell she is laughing, too.

I’ll probably get some huge care package in the mail this week.

Then, I find myself thinking about C again, and how last night, the best part about it was that we had started to be friends.

After all the parts where he thought of me, taking himself in hand.

After I thought of him, putting my hand between my legs.

It made me wonder, though, who I was thinking of? I was thinking of C, but who was C in my brain?

Fingers? Words?

Had I gotten so isolated that I could make love to an idea?

More than pictures of close-up things and games where we pretended to be someone else or verses of pornography, I liked the C that worried about me getting out of the house to see an Andy Warhol exhibit.

Who wanted to meet and eat mashed potatoes.

So I logged on and went to his blog and opened the message box.

You’re certain you want to meet? Is the first thing he asks.

Yes. I’ve turned over this new leaf, this new snowflake, I guess. Where I say YES all the time.

It takes a long time, but he finally answers,

I’m a little surprised to see you here, it’s later, and I thought maybe we were … taking a break? Until we met. Not that we have to, I just wasn’t certain.

I think about that. Maybe he’s feeling the same kind of sea change I am. That we need to be friends, start there, after we’d gone so far as strangers and words.

What’s more, Evan. There’s a sea change there, too.

It won’t be easy to meet C, I don’t think, because we have all these disconnected pieces of deep intimacy between us, but no normal introduction, no basic friendliness. I look at my blinking cursor, then I open my hard drive.

I choose a corny picture my mom took of me when I moved into this place, a kind of “kid on the first day of school” picture.

I’m wearing cargo shorts with hiking sandals and have on a black tank top and my hair is in two braids like a little kid—it was so hot that day. Coming from Seattle, Mom and I had been unprepared for the heat and it took us forever to bring my stuff in from the little trailer we’d rented.

I look sweaty and kind of red-faced, and normally I’d be a little shy about a picture where I’m wearing shorts and have cleavage and upper arms on display, but I’m standing in front of a stoop he knows and has walked up and down a million times, so that’s the one I upload into the message box.

I take a huge breath when I hit SEND.

So really meet me, or be introduced. Jenny Wright. Postdoc in microbiology, in the Blasdel Lab. I’ll be there, at Potato Mountain. Christmas Eve’s Eve.

I hold my breath.

You’re beautiful. So beautiful. I don’t even feel like I have the right to say that because you don’t even know who I really am, but I can’t help it. I think you’re so beautiful.

I don’t know why I expected that, but I do. I’m not surprised he thinks that I’m beautiful, it doesn’t scare me that this sort of stranger believes that I am and would tell me.

Even if all those times we typed things to each other in the dark he might have been thinking of some other image, I still don’t doubt that this man believes I am lovely.

I am. I look at my picture. I look happy in it.

If he would show me who he is, I think I would think he was beautiful, too.

Will you?

Three pictures load, not in the message screen, but on his blog.

The colors are warm; look warm to touch. I think, at first, it is because I am looking at sand dunes, then I realize it is the hollow between a man’s clavicle and his neck and the next is a smooth curve of muscle—a shoulder maybe. The last has another curve of skin, and the edge of a black-ink tattoo that looks like a fancy lowercase f.

Bits and pieces.