“You should go see the city while you can,” I say as Phoenix sniffs at my knee. I rummage a chew toy out of the purse I dumped on Mike’s coffee table, and I toss it across the room for her.
“I miss you,” Mike replies, and I know what he’s really saying: that he’d spend his entire work-free evening talking on the phone to me if I let him.
“Go try the food so I know what to add to my food list,” I say, and he chuckles. In every city, Mike has told me what local foods he thinks I’d like, and we’ve kept a running bucket list of foods I need to try. “What country are you even in now?”
“Malaysia. Which is only ninety-five hundred miles from you.”
“Getting closer,” I say as I pull my knees up to my chest in my corner of Mike’s oversized couch. There are less than two and a half weeks until he comes home, but I still have no idea what I’m going to do when he gets here.
He still doesn’t know about Danica’s ultimatum. He has no idea that she gave me an impossible decision to make: Mike or school. Mike or my career. Mike or my future.
When he left, I had asked him not to send flowers to my apartment or anything. If Danica calls you, I’d told him, don’t mention me, okay? I don’t want to rub our new relationship in her face. She needs time.
It wasn’t a total lie, but really, I’m the one who needs time. I need two more years of it, until I no longer have to depend on Danica’s family to get me through school.
“I can’t wait to take you out,” Mike says, and a heaviness settles over me. I know he’s not going to be okay with never being able to pick me up from my apartment. I know he’s not going to be okay with never being able to be seen with me in public. I know he’s not going to be okay with being my secret, and I know he deserves better than what I can give him. He deserves a beautiful, smart, wonderful girl who doesn’t have to choose between him and everything else she’s ever wanted.
“Did Danica send you her video yet?” I find myself asking, and I listen to Mike settling into his new room as he answers me.
“Yeah. A few days ago. Why?”
My brows knit, and I pick at a tiny hole in the knee of my jeans. “You didn’t mention it.”
“Oh, sorry,” Mike says. “I didn’t know you wanted me to.”
I had told Mike about the video, and that Danica changed her number. But I couldn’t give him her new number to block, since then she’d know I was still talking to him.
“What did you think of her gray and blue dress?” I ask, remembering the mist-colored dress I had tried on in the fancy fitting room, and how gorgeous the blue wildflowers printed on the fabric had been. I had felt beautiful in that dress until I walked out to see Danica wearing the same one.
“I didn’t watch the video,” he says. “I just deleted the message and blocked her new number.”
“Oh.”
“Did you really think I’d bother watching it?”
“Aren’t you at least curious about what she has to say?”
There’s a long moment of silence, and then Mike asks, “Do you know how many times I’ve thought about Danica since leaving?” I brace myself for the answer, and he says, “None. Not one. Do you know how many times I’ve thought about you?”
I barely have time to wonder before he answers, “I think about you all the time, Hailey. Do you know what I do before bed each night? I pull up this picture I took of you the morning I left. You were sleeping, and I know that makes me a creep, but I don’t care. You were so damn beautiful, I just wanted to stare at you forever. So I took a picture, and every night, I look at it to remind myself that you’re what I’m coming home to. That I’ll get to see you like that again because I’m the luckiest fucking guy alive to have you at home waiting for me.”
I’m speechless when he emphasizes, “I don’t think about Danica, Hailey. I never think about her. She doesn’t even cross my mind. If I’m thinking about a girl, it’s you, because you’re the only girl for me.”
I’m silent for a long time while I try to calm my cartwheeling heart. And when I speak, I take the easy way out and crack a joke. “You took a picture of me sleeping?” I say with mock offense.
Mike chuckles. “You were covered up by the sheet, I promise.”
“Creep.”
“Worth it.”
I smile at the way my heart flutters, and Phoenix jumps up on the couch beside me as I listen to what sounds like Mike fluffing a pillow on his end of the line. “Are you allergic to dogs?” I ask as I debate making Phoenix jump down. She lays her front paws on my lap, and I scratch her behind her ear.
“Why?” Mike asks.
“Just wondering . . .”
“That’s pretty random.”
“I like random.”
“Hailey, if I was allergic to dogs, I don’t think I could date you.”
I bark out a laugh, knowing damn well I smell like dog ninety percent of the time, and Mike snickers against my ear. “You’re such a jerk!”
“You set ’em up, I knock ’em down.”
I’m still laughing when he says, “I love you, Hailey.”
“I love you too,” I say with a pink-tinted smile on my cheeks.
“Sixteen days.”
“Sixteen days,” I agree, petting a dog that shouldn’t be here and carrying a decision I can’t make
Sixteen days until I have no choice.
Chapter 44
I thought it was lonely inside Phoenix’s cage at the back of the shelter . . . but in Mike’s house, with his big couch and his big bed and all of his very-Mike things, it’s so much lonelier. He’s everywhere—in his soft bedsheets, in his oversized TV, in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figurine he has sitting on his mantel (Michelangelo, of course). He’s everywhere except really here.
I spend most of my time at his place, since I still haven’t found anyone else to take Phoenix in (and if I’m being honest with myself, I haven’t looked very hard), and every minute I spend in his house, with him on the other side of the world, makes the hole in my heart grow and grow and grow. After he leaves Malaysia, his schedule gets as hectic as he warned me it would. The texts become fewer and the calls grow further apart.
It’s a mid-November Saturday, less than a week before Thanksgiving, when my brother says, “I miss Mike.”
It’s been over two days since I last spoke to him myself. We’ve tried, of course—with him calling me, or me calling him—but after forty-eight hours of phone tag, I’m beginning to feel less like I’m missing him and more like I’m mourning him. For the past five weeks, I’ve felt like the calls and the texts weren’t enough—like I needed more, always more—but now that I’m not getting them, they feel like everything. Which leaves me with nothing.
“I finally find some time to play Deadzone with you,” I admonish Luke as I sit on Mike’s couch with a game controller in my hands, “and all you’re going to do is complain about missing Mike?”
“You suck tonight,” Luke counters, and as if on cue, my player gets shot in the head for the umpteenth time.