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Story Notes:
I won't lie to you, folks, this is major angst.
Author's Chapter Notes:
It is not often someone comes along that's a true friend and good beta.  Cousin Mose is both.
She starts to think that maybe, after the let down of Toby’s goodbye party, maybe she’s got it all wrong.  It’s Jim, and Jim doesn’t do things on grand scales.  He’s a paper salesman in Scranton who has sandwiches and carrot sticks and grape soda for lunch and simple things like that.  Simple.  So maybe that’s what the proposal will be.  Understated but with just as much love behind it as any fireworks show could have.

So she starts looking for the simple things.  Like the steam on the bathroom mirror after she gets out of the shower.   And the words he makes on the Scrabble board.  And the e-mails he sends her during work.  She hopes that maybe “Lunch at noon?”  is code for “Marry me, please.”  

But she’s pulling out of her driveway, away from him and towards Brooklyn, and nothing.  His last words to her, as he hugged her close and kissed her hair were “Don’t get mugged.”  And while she loves him for his clumsy goodbyes, her inner voice is hoarse from screaming ask me throughout the whole ten-minute goodbye.  

She brings one suitcase up with her when she gets to her apartment, the one with a change of clothes, toothbrush and floss.  Maybe he put it in a note in her makeup bag, or tucked into a pocket of her jeans.  But there’s just sixteen cents and a receipt from Starbucks that she already knew was there.

It’s not in the voicemail he leaves her that morning during her first class.  He calls to say good luck, which would have been more reassuring had she heard it beforehand, before she had a ten page syllabus handed to her, before she looked around and realized she was the oldest in her class.  But it’s not his fault, he had no way of knowing that her teacher didn’t know how to smile and whose idea of a first-day pep talk is telling stories about students who leave the summer with nothing more than fingerpaintings to hang up on the fridge.  She doesn’t take it as a good sign.

He visits that weekend, greeting her with a hibiscus she’s pretty sure he stole from the neighbor’s yard a few doors down.  They stand on her stoop making out like teenagers until cars start honking, either at them or typical Brooklyn traffic. Still, she pulls away and pats his chest and they go inside to order Thai takeout and have sex four times before midnight.  She thinks maybe he called ahead and put it in a fortune cookie, until she realizes that he had no way of knowing they’d have Thai food.  And he didn’t ask her while they washed dishes, even when he smiled and nudged her elbow with his and her heart latched to her throat.  Even then all he said was “Pass me that towel.”   She swears she’s relieved when he doesn’t ask during sex, because that’s tacky and not all that romantic, even though she went to the trouble of buying candles and new underwear.  But when the end comes, the ring finger that digs into his back is still bare.

She’s distracted at school, because of him or the intimidation of just being there, she hasn’t decided yet.  Either way, the frustration mounts at an unhinged pace until the silence is so maddening she breaks a piece of blue chalk and gets glares from her classmates.  The professor doesn’t notice.  Or maybe he’s ignoring her.  She picks up another shade of blue and this time, bites the inside of her cheek to focus.

They get in a fight on Thursday night, because it’s technically her turn to drive out to Scranton.  But classes are exhausting and she wants to stay after class longer on Friday to talk to her professor about her progress and then she’ll hit bad traffic.  She insists that he doesn’t have to drive out again, and he insists that he does, and somehow that’s enough to piss her off.  She ends the call saying something to the effect of “Don’t bother.  I’m pretty sure we can survive one weekend without each other.”  He doesn’t call back and she falls asleep on her couch, red-faced with hiccups from crying.

She’s distracted at her meeting.  She can see her professor’s mouth moving and eyebrows dancing in time to his words, but when it was over and she thanked him for his time, she couldn’t recall anything he’d said even if she tried.  She wants to blame Jim, because that’s the easiest thing to do these days, but even after five days a week of involuntarily getting high off of paint fumes, she still knows the fault is hers.  Maybe he sent it to her in a letter, she thinks as she kicks off her shoes and flips through her forwarded mail.  But it’s absent among credit card offers and bank statements.

And she starts to think that maybe it’s just the distance.  Maybe he doesn’t want to propose with so many miles between them, and once that distance is closed, he’ll drop to one knee before she even unpacks.  So she does an experiment one night on the phone, reclining in the leather armchair with her TV on mute.  She finds a pause in the conversation and tells him that maybe she won’t stay for that third class she’d thought about taking, that taking a watercolor class was pointless.  But it backfires, and instead of racing back to Scranton like she assumed, she winds up listening to him lecture, in an albeit concerned tone, that she can’t give up and can’t take shortcuts and how she shouldn’t waste opportunities.  She mutters “I could say the same thing to you,” and for the second time that summer, hangs up on him.

She’s browsing Craiglist for part-time art jobs when her e-mail alert chimes.

I don’t know what that was, but it’s not us.  Talk to me.

Her reply moves faster than her thoughts.

Call me back.  Maybe if I heard your voice again.

She doesn’t finish the thought.  Maybe she never will.

 
Chapter End Notes:
*ducks to avoid garbage*


Wendy Blue is the author of 18 other stories.
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