Chapter One
Declan’s text says:
We’ll talk
“That’s it?” I gasp, Amanda closing her eyes slowly, as if someone reached over with fingertips and shut them, like on a corpse. It is apt; it feels like someone just died. I’m supposed to hop in the shower and get ready for work, but how do you do that when your entire life is imploding?
“He answered, at least.” She reaches in behind the shower curtain and turns on the water for me. A part of me feels infantilized. I can turn on my own damn water. I don’t need help. I know how to use a shower.
Another part of me is helpless and racked with a kind of cryogenic emotional freeze that renders me useless. She leaves the room and gently points to the phone.
“Answer back.”
The door shuts like her eyelids did just a moment ago, though Chuckles manages to slip in through the inch-sized crack as Amanda leaves. Didn’t cats accompany the pharaohs in ancient times as they were laid to rest in their burial crypts?
Something’s dying right now, and as he snuggles up against my ankles without meowing, his presence calm and serene, I feel a deep disturbance inside. Chuckles is being nice to me?
This is bad.
Tremors fill my fingers as I pick up my phone and stare at his sparse text. Two words. I get two measly words? No replies until now, no acknowledgement of the cyber-mess that has made real life an emotional land mine for me.
Just… We’ll talk.
I type back:
Okay. See you soon.
I hit Send with fingers vibrating so much they could be used as a sex toy prototype.
By the time I finish going through the motions and cleaning my hair and body, he’s had plenty of opportunity to answer.
Nope. No text.
I’m all cried out and numb now, wondering how we could go from talking about finding each other and enjoying so much together to this coldness, this arctic freeze that doesn’t even have an explanation. Not even a pseudo-explanation. We’re dancing on broken glass and denying that it hurts. Ignoring the river of blood that lubricates the pain. Only maybe I’m the one feeling all the pain. Perhaps this is nothing to him. A blip. I’m someone he used to sleep with and all that’s left is the final “It’s not you…” conversation where he walks away and I disintegrate into a thousand shards of glass.
That he walks all over with bloody feet.
It’s not that I really think he’s that cold. In fact, the opposite: the man I have gotten to know over the past month isn’t the man who is doing this right now. Two different men. Or—two different sides of the same man? Why do I have this long history of being surprised when people show a different side of themselves?
You would think I’d stop being so naïve, so childlike, being shocked when someone changes. I guess it’s because I don’t change. I am who I am (whoever that is…) and I’m what Josh calls a WYSIWYG—What You See Is What You Get. No hidden subtext.
Maybe, though, for Declan I’m a WYSINWYW—What You See Is Not What You Want.
I need to pull him aside and call it all out, to say what isn’t being said. How do you do that when you don’t even know what the other person is thinking? I’m no mind reader. I definitely don’t want to be one, either, because eww. Can you imagine how quickly you’d learn how perverted everyone in the world really is?
And how judgmental?
I get plenty of perversion and judgment from my mom, thanks. I don’t need more. If I get to have a superpower, mind-reading isn’t what I want. I’d prefer a clitoris inside my vagina, thankyouverymuch.
Now that’s a superpower.
Yet when I ask Declan what’s going on, I get we’ll talk? The sudden sub-zero temperature change from him is starting to look like the North Atlantic current being shut down.
Men. Can’t live with them, can’t shove an EpiPen in their groin and keep them.
“You ready?” Amanda calls out as I towel off my hair.
“You’re still here?”
“I figured I’d drive you to the meeting.”
“Because you think I can’t drive?”
“Because I think this is going to be hard.”
I stew over that one for a second, wondering why everyone thinks I’m a fragile porcelain doll. Then I realize I am. Right now, at least.
“Okay,” I call out. “But we’re taking your car. If I’m about to be dumped, it won’t be while driving the Turdmobile.”
“A girl’s gotta have standards,” she shouts back with a laugh.
* * *
It’s an icehouse in here.
And the air conditioning isn’t even on.
Unfortunately, Declan never responded to my text message, and he was also not anywhere near the hallway where I lingered like a seventh grader hoping to bump into her crush outside the band room instrument storage closet.