“Did you get them?” Mitch asks from the end of the bed.
“Yeah.” I hold them up like a sad carnival prize from the doorway, keeping my distance. “Mitch? I’m really sorry, but . . . I don’t think I can do this.”
His brows dip. “Oh, okay. Did I do anything to make you feel uncomfortable?”
“No. Definitely not. You’ve been great. I just don’t know if I’m cut out for one-night stands.”
He scratches the side of his head like he’s in deep thought. “I’m kind of thinking the same thing, if I’m being honest. I mean, you’re beautiful. I just . . .”
“It’s just not right.” My shoulders ease in relief.
We nod in mutual understanding, and I see him out. When I close the door and turn around, Trevor is sitting in the chair in the living room, one of my thriller books in hand.
I muffle a scream, clasping my palm to my chest. “Holy shit, Metcalfe. Why are you sitting out here in the cloak of darkness like a weirdo?”
He sets my book on his lap. “Couldn’t sleep after you woke me up. Figured I’d try finishing my book.”
“Oh.” My hand is still pressed to my chest, feeling the thrum of my heart beating wildly from the events of this strange night.
He’s looking at me, his expression unreadable. I don’t know if he’s going to chew me out for waking him up or say I told you so. He doesn’t do either. He stands and comes toward me, making a come here motion. “You okay?” he asks, pulling me into a hug.
I sigh into the warmth of his bare, solid chest, which is more reassuring than I’ll ever admit. My heart rate settles immediately at his touch. I wish I could close my eyes and stay here until the sun comes up and goes back down again. “I’m not cut out for that life. I don’t know how you do it. I’m exhausted, and I didn’t even get it in.”
“Please don’t say get it in.”
“Do you prefer going to bone town?”
“No.”
“Bumping uglies?”
“No.”
“Boinking? Bruising the beef curtains?”
He closes his eyes, pained. “Never say any of those again.”
“No promises.”
The rumble of his low chuckle gives me an overwhelming sense of comfort. “You are just . . .”
I peek up at him. “I’m just what?”
A brief smile plays across his lips. “Nothing. Wanna go get a greasy twenty-four-hour-diner breakfast?”
“Yes, please.”
? chapter nineteen
ARE YOU AND Uncle Trev an item?” Angie so bluntly wants to know. She casts a suspicious eye at the folded red construction paper in my hand. Arts and crafts with Angie during lunch break has become a regular routine. We’re making Valentine’s Day cards today.
I’m particularly thankful for the opportunity to pretend I’m a child for an hour. Prior to lunch, we had our bimonthly NICU all-staff meeting. Seth used the opportunity to launch a number of petty, non-job-related claims.
People have been stockpiling the good Keurig pods.
People have been clogging the kitchen sink with their lunch containers.
When the meeting was adjourned, I overheard him updating another doctor in the lounge about my ex-boyfriend search after my latest social media update, boisterously delighting in the fact that I only have one ex left. He went on to ramble about how embarrassing and unprofessional it is to post these things and how I must have “scared off the other nine.”
I have a working theory that Seth suffers from youngest-child syndrome. His three older brothers are a bunch of bullies whose immediate instinct is to pretend to wrestle in any given social situation. As the smallest, he always got bulldozed. He was relegated to the scraps, the leftovers. He never got to choose what to watch on television. And because the poor lamb missed out on so many cartoons, he’ll wield his power any way he can have it.
Crystal picked up on this straightaway. The first time I brought Seth home to meet the family, he debated her on a variety of fitness and nutrition topics, brushing off her credentials because he was a doctor. The entire family was outwardly disturbed when I proposed. When we broke things off, Crystal sat me down with a prepared list of every reason Seth was wrong for me.
For the longest time, I was convinced she was just trying to make me feel better. She didn’t know the real Seth, the one who saved the lives of newborn babies on the regular and showered me with affection in those first few months of our relationship. But the more he shows off who he really is, the easier it gets.
I’m grateful to have Angie to occupy my mind and prevent me from spending my lunch hour in the stairwell, plotting revenge scenarios I’ll never have the guts to carry out.
My lips part in a blend of shock and amusement at Angie’s question about her uncle. “Me and him? An item? As in dating? No way.” I stare down at my card for Trevor. It’s totally non-romantic, or so I assumed. I’ve cut out a mini succulent in a flowerpot with a smiley face. For a dude who was vehemently opposed to my succulents, I think they’ve grown on him. In fact, he’s been watering them for me, single-handedly keeping them alive.
I’ve written My Life Would Totally Succ Without You across the top of the card in faux calligraphy. This card screams friend-zone. At least, I thought it did. Technically, I’ve made the eyes tiny hearts. Under Angie’s critical eye, I’m now paranoid Trevor will mistake it for a declaration of love, which is the last thing I need.
“But you live together,” Angie reminds me, carefully cutting her next red heart along the pencil line.
As I draw over the heart eyes, transforming them into innocent, totally casual circles, I remind myself I’m attracted to Trevor purely on a physical level only. It’s just a minuscule, microscopic, basically nonexistent crush. If I repeat that enough times, it must be so. Besides, Trevor Metcalfe doesn’t do love.
“We live together as platonic friends.” My tone is clipped as I press down a loose corner of one of the succulent leaves where the glue didn’t hold.
When she scrunches her nose and asks what platonic means, I’m reminded I’m speaking to a nine-year-old, despite her disgruntled-adult vibes. Time for a crash course in the bleak reality of love.
“Platonic means strictly friends. No romantic feelings. At all,” I explain, holding the booklet of construction paper to obstruct her view of my flaming cheeks. “Do you have any friends who are boys?”
She smothers a cutout heart with white school glue. “My best friend Dylan is a boy. He’s not cute. And he only shares his snacks with Sally.” She grimaces, apparently displeased with this Sally person.
“Aw, give him a break. He’s probably in love with her.” I let out a nostalgic sigh, abandoning Trevor’s card to start on Crystal’s. “My first crush, Daniel, gave me butterflies. Every year on Valentine’s Day, I’d give Daniel the biggest, most extra card. He’d give me a full-size chocolate bar when everyone else got minis.” If that’s not true love, I don’t know what is.
Daniel and I had an adorable meet-cute on the first day of kindergarten I’d be proud to tell my grandchildren about. He was wearing denim overalls and an oversize red ball cap, which I later learned covered the botched bowl cut his mother had given him. He was sitting in the sandbox, ugly crying and being an overall miserable little twat.
Daniel never grew to like other kids. I didn’t mind his antisocial tendencies in the slightest, mostly because I did enough talking for the both of us. It also meant I had Daniel all to myself. We bonded over our shared love of boxed sugary snacks, reading all the books we could get our sticky hands on, and a morbid obsession with pretending to be ghosts in his attic. We were inseparable, so much so that Mom and Dad referred to Daniel as the son they never had.
Bypassing the cootie stage entirely, we graduated to awkward, prepubescent hand-holding and close-lipped pecks by age ten. According to my doodle-filled notebooks and diaries, I was the future Mrs. Nakamura. It was destiny, or so I thought, until Daniel’s parents took a grand dump on my life plan and moved the family across the city partway through middle school. We sent emails back and forth for a year and a half, but their frequency fizzled the longer we were apart. We lost touch entirely by high school.
Angie isn’t buying it. “Butterflies?”
“Imaginary butterflies. Inside.” I point to my stomach. “Imagine a bunch of butterflies fluttering around in there.”
Angie giggles and scrunches her tiny nose. “That would tickle.”
“Exactly. That’s how it feels when you like someone. Like all the butterflies are flapping their wings inside of you, ready to spread their wings and soar.” I probably sound like an old kook, but Angie seems to understand.