Sparks the Matchmaker

CHAPTER 19

Ollie and Joy were halfway to her house before she finally broke the tension and let the words spill. By that time she was clearly worked up, even more so than the night before.

“Why didn’t Dusten tell me he was roommates with Scott?” She sounded perturbed.

Ollie didn’t have an answer for that. He had nothing interesting to say. He was completely lost for words and lost for emotion; numb. Lost.

In a few more steps, she had tightened her grip on his hand. When she had first seen Scott her grip had conveyed anxiety. This time it was a plea, asking him not to let her go. She buried her head into his chest and let go of his hand so that he could wrap his arm around her as they walked.

“He was my boyfriend in high school.”

Ollie felt like he’d been stabbed, but he soldiered on. “I assumed it was something like that.” He paused, breathing, hoping she couldn’t feel his heart racing. “I’m guessing he was the one to break up with you? I mean, bumping into him seemed a lot harder on you than it was on him.” The words just came out. Sure, he was wondering that, but giving voice to the worry made him feel like he was being insensitive. What he needed to do, and he knew it, was to let her tell her story. He couldn’t help himself.

“No, that’s not true. I broke up with him.” Her voice was choked. “We still hadn’t broken up after I moved to Missouri. After I was there for about a month, I broke things off.”

She sounded to Ollie like she was confessing something, not relating the events of a story. “So you didn’t like the long distance relationship thing. That’s never easy.”

“Yes, in a way, but mostly… it was just the best thing to do at the time. I felt like I was going to hold him back from… from his life, if I didn’t cut things off. It was the best thing for him.”

“I don’t understand, Joy. Why would you hold him back? And from what; moving on and finding another girl?”

“That’s part of it.” She sighed. “But it’s going to be okay.” Her eyes were vacant. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve dealt with it, but lately… I’ve realized I still need to sort some things out inside.”

Ollie walked her home in silence the rest of the way. He said goodnight on the same doorstep as the night before. Throughout the evening he had been thinking about stealing the first kiss, but that was out of the question— just like every night before. Once again he gave her a warm hug, once again he watched her slip through her door.

As he walked home, he thought about this guy, this Scott.

It didn’t seem like he should be a huge deal. But Scott was obviously quite fond of her still, and that was an unsettling thought. Scott had said he wanted to get together with her, to catch up again. From what little Ollie knew about him, he was sure that Scott was the kind of guy who would find a way to make that happen.

Plus, there were still a lot of things on Joy’s mind, things she wasn’t telling him. He was going to need to get them out of her— somehow— before they could move on.

Sparks was sitting at Ollie’s desk when he returned, saving him the effort of putting the hat back on. “I think we’re going to be okay.”

“You’re not giving me a whole lot of reasons to feel secure here, Sparks. What’s making things so cloudy all of a sudden?”

“It’s cloudy because she still doesn’t know how she feels.”

“Well, how is that fair?”

“Bomber, there’s a cheer for that,” Sparks said, standing. “Women are like, ‘WHO ARE WE?’” He held his hands like pompoms to one side, like a cheerleader gesturing to one side of a stadium. “And they answer, ‘WOMEN!’” he held his imaginary pompoms to the opposite side. “And then they say, ‘WHAT DO WE WANT?’ and they answer, ‘WE DON’T KNOW!’ and then they’re like, ‘WHEN DO WE WANT IT?’ and they all answer, ‘NOW!’” He pranced around Ollie’s bedroom shouting, “YAYYY!”

Ollie just stood there blinking at him. “Sparks. What are you trying to tell me?”

“What. That wasn’t clear?”

“She doesn’t know how she feels about him?” Ollie asked, “—or about me?”

“You know the answer to that already.”

“Just tell me.”

“But you already know.”

“Tell me anyway. Why can’t you just give me answers when I have questions?”

“Because you need to be able to do things on your own. I’m not going to be here forever.”

“I can see that. I always thought you meant I’d want to send you away someday because I’d want to continue on my own, but I can see now that it will be because I can only take so much of you teasing me, dangling a carrot in front of me that I can never reach.”

“Calm down, Ollie. All I’m saying is I’m not going to feed you information that may steer you in the wrong direction. I don’t know all the answers right now, but I feel like we’re still on track. I’m not going to give you information before it’s time for you to know.”

“What’s all this we stuff, anyway? You always say we are on track. You do realize this is my life we’re talking about here, right? You can’t live through me.”

“It’s not like that.”

“Well, you said earlier that you might know after Acoustic Night about when the time might come to ask her what’s up. Do you know now?”

“Not exactly, no.” Sparks examined his nail beds. “The only thing I really know is that she’s confused about Scott, and she’s going to need to come to terms with that before she can move on with you— with anything for that matter.”

“Great! So in order for me to catch her, she has to be able to let go of her high school boyfriend that she hasn’t seen in years. And I suppose I have you to thank for engineering his reappearance?”

“It’s more complicated than that, but those are the basics, yes.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me not to go to Acoustic Night in the first place? Then we wouldn’t have to deal with this!”

Sparks sighed. “Ollie, it’s not about you. Can’t you get that? The guy lives a block and a half away from her. How long do you think it would have taken before they bumped into each other anyway? It’s a wonder that they’ve made it two months into the semester without seeing each other.”

“Yeah well, I bet we could have avoided it somehow. I mean, you can predict pretty well where a softball is going to fall. You can probably predict where and when they’d run into each other, and we could find a way to avoid that.”

Sparks buried his face in his hands in frustration. “It’s not that simple.”

“Why not?”

“It’s just not. The situation is a lot more complicated than you think it is.”

Ollie sat down on the corner of his bed and stared at Sparks, searching for the right question. It never came.

“Keith is about to knock on your door,” Sparks said, breaking the silence. “I think I’m gonna split, Bomber.”

Ollie said nothing, burying his own face into his hands until Sparks quietly slipped out of the room. Even from that first moment, when Sparks helped him push his car, he had always irritated him. But this was something much more.

Ollie’s life was the thing at stake, but instead he was a pawn in the virtual chess game of a nosy little gimpy Yankees fan.

***

The door opened. It was Keith. “How did it go tonight?”

Ollie felt angry. “It was going great until we went to that acoustic show and ran into her old boyfriend. Whatever set her off last night, I think it had something to do with him.”

“What, is she not over him or something? How long ago was this relationship?”

“High school.”

“Well… that shouldn’t be a huge problem.”

“It seems like it might be. Hopefully it’s not.”

“Most people don’t go around thinking about their old high school flames. If seeing this guy got her all worked up, you know, maybe it was something insignificant— or at least maybe it will be soon.”

“I don’t see how. She was fine last night until I brought up her teenage years. I think it has something to do with moving to St. Louis, or with him, or both. I’m just not sure.”

“You’re just gonna have to come out and ask her.”

“I don’t know, man.”

“Well, you can’t let this thing keep on going. If you wait for it to fix itself, this guy might get in the way. Was he still interested in her?”

“Sure seemed like it. I don’t think now’s the right time to bring it up with her, though.”

“Every situation is different, I guess. You know her better than I do, but… I wouldn’t wait too long.”

Keith soon left Ollie with his thoughts.

Maybe the relationship had taken off too fast; maybe that was what it was. She was probably looking for some stability in her life, having just broken off one relationship, but Sparks had seen to it that she’d met Ollie before she’d even had time to catch her breath. Then again, maybe it was him, not Joy, who was feeling those things. After all, he was still in love with Anne when he first started flirting with Joy. Maybe he wasn’t ready for another relationship yet. There had been only a few days’ difference between the moment he’d popped open the ring box to ask Anne to marry him and the day he popped in to Joy’s work to ask her out on a date.

It was Sparks. He was the one who had picked out his girl for him. He had been the one to pick the timing, too, however poor that timing obviously was right now. Sparks was the puppeteer pulling his strings, making him dance all over the stage.

The funny thing about all of that was that Ollie had known it somehow, all along. Sparks was the one making all the decisions for him, and how could he do that unless Ollie both knew it and allowed it? No, he wasn’t telling Ollie what to do— in fact, Sparks rarely gave him any answers that might even remotely tell him what course of action to take. But Ollie was definitely making all of his decisions based on what he thought Sparks wanted him to do, and that meant he was out of control of his own life.

The more he thought about it as he lay in bed— the orange glow of his space heater lighting up the room— the more frustrated he became. He was tired of playing the marionette. He wanted to take control. Sparks wouldn’t be calling the shots anymore. He didn’t want Sparks to be the one who got to tell him how high to jump or when to lie low.

Ollie had to admit to himself that if he truly felt that way he would have put the hat on his head, and when Sparks showed up he would have told him off, that it was time for him to move on to someone else. But that’s not what he did. He jumped out of bed, snatched the hat off the computer desk, flung open the closet door and hurled it onto the back corner on the top shelf. He wasn’t going to touch it for at least a week.

Now Ollie was in control again. It felt good. The first item on his to-do list of defiance was, first thing in the morning, to ask Joy about the details from her past as they walked to class. That would get things rolling.