Chapter 25

I typed slowly, trying to pick my way through the words without hitting any landmines. “Hi. I pushed so hard because it matters to me to know. I don’t know why I feel like I want to know everything about you. But I do. So.”

I didn’t push send. I read and re-read the message. Did it say too much? Or not enough? All I knew for sure was that if forced to choose between sending it or presenting to the company board in my laundry day underwear, it would be a toss-up.

That was an overstatement. I’d definitely rather present in my ratty underwear.

Jane Austen fell flat on her face. I picked her up and steadied her. “I guess I know what you think about all this.”

I pushed send and bolted out of my office to do a million tasks that did not involve thinking about how Jack would take my text. By the time Hailey came back, I’d done about another half of her jobs for the day. She shot me an exasperated look when she intercepted me going to make copies. I stepped around her and promised her another coffee run the next day.

I hadn’t heard back from Jack by the end of the day. I stopped at the gym on the way home and ran for miles on the treadmill. Still no message from him.

I took a long, scalding shower and checked my phone when I got out.

I blew my hair dry, flat ironed it, and filed my nails. And finally my phone dinged with a DM alert. I opened it.

Finally, a message from Jack. A video message.

“Hi. I guess I have to say what I need to say in a minute or less.” His eyes darted toward the corner of his screen, and I knew he was watching the ring count down how much time he had left in his recording. “I figured since you sent me a video, it’s the least I could do to answer back in one.” He scrubbed his hands through his hair, which I realized was hanging loose. I’d never seen him wear it down outside of his ridiculous Photoshops of himself. Instead of softening the hard lines of his cheekbones and jaw, the contrast made them stand out more. “The thing is, my hard things are the heavy kind that try to sink whoever is carrying them. I don’t want to do that to you. Because I like you. So much. So much that I won’t put this on you. I’m sorry. I should have known better than to…I don’t know, let my hair down, I guess.”

Right then, a hank of his hair fell forward over his eyes. He brushed it away and laughed. “Wow. I wasn’t trying to be literal. Anyway, sorry about all this. Just know I wish you all the good things. And also—”

But the recording cut off before he finished. He also wasn’t online anymore.

That was it, no follow up video to expand on what he’d meant to say before it cut out.

I mulled the message and replayed it a few more times, but I didn’t know what to say to him. “Give me your heavy things”? To what end? I’d played out that conversation to its logical conclusion where one or both of us upended our lives to gamble on a relationship that didn’t have a deep enough foundation to support the emotional kind of weight Jack was hinting at.

And honestly, that was all on him. He wanted us to keep it at a level where we didn’t dig too deep in the way you have to when you’re building a strong foundation.

Also, if I made one more stupid building analogy, I was going to find the tallest one in San Francisco and push myself off it. Enough, already. Enough.

I set down my phone again. I would not be reading management articles. I would not be crossing anything off my to-do list. I would have to buy Hailey more coffee instead. She had a lot of chasing after me ahead of her because the second I slowed down, I would dwell on Jack. And I didn’t want to do that anymore.

At work, there were two types of inefficiency: the kind that came from not working smart and the kind that happened when you didn’t work at all. And when I got caught up too much in worrying about Jack, I got nothing done.

That wasn’t me. That wasn’t okay. And that wasn’t going to happen anymore.

I attacked work again, examining any sections of my schedule that looked like they were unstructured enough to give me time to brood. Or sulk. Or whatever happened when I thought too hard about Jack. Then I stuffed them full of more work.

My new task list was a meditation, like the lists I made in my head at night to force out all the intrusive thoughts that tried to keep me awake. I’d done it for years, growing each list until I could get all the way from A to Z in a category before moving on to a new list. When I was trying to name a vegetable for every letter of the alphabet, I got too hung up on H to focus on any stress trying to creep into my brain and wake it back up.

When I had a solid week structured that allowed no head space for Jack, I poked my head out of my office door and smiled at Hailey. “I’ll stop doing your work.”

“Yeah, right.” She held out her hand. “Should I go load myself up at the café now?”

I shook my head. “I mean it. I figured out a schedule for me that involves doing none of your work.”

She clasped her hands and mouthed a “thank you” to the ceiling like we were in the cathedral of Our Lady of Administrative Assistant Sorrows.

It was a good first step toward imposing order on my emotional chaos. Of course, it didn’t solve the problem of what to do when Jack intruded on my thoughts during non-work hours. I set up a strict policy of only checking my phone once an hour for alerts and removed all my social media apps until I could break the habit of checking his feeds.

Unfortunately, my mind still wandered his direction during any of my unstructured time and the urge to break all my protocols would grow stronger.

Is this what addicts felt like?

No, that was stupid. As best as I could understand, real addiction was a painful, debilitating illness. Trying not to think about Jack was more like…

Oh. It was exactly like the time when I’d gone to my friend’s church camp when we were thirteen, and I got poison oak on my leg. The camp nurse told me not to scratch because it would make it worse, but in the endless hours between midnight and dawn, nothing could have convinced me that scratching wasn’t exactly the cure I needed. So I scratched. And ended up spreading it over more of myself.

Jack was emotional poison oak. It wouldn’t kill me, but this situation would only make me more miserable the more I poked at it. That meant drowning out the itch when I wasn’t at work too.

If I found myself wondering what Jack was doing at the same moment, I spent time cleaning out old messages in my email folders. By the fourth day, I was already digging back to 2014. And that was after filtering thousands of emails. Based on how often I had to distract myself, biologists could conclude that wondering what Jack was doing was a reflex as instinctive as breathing.

If I caught myself reaching for the phone to see what he’d posted on Twitter, I immediately picked a spot in the house to reorganize instead, which is what Ranée found me doing on Friday afternoon when she walked in from work and called hello.

“Hi.” I had my head inside one of our lower cupboards while I hunted for a container lid.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

I stayed in the cupboard, still sifting through the plastic in the farthest reaches of it, but I waved my other hand behind me, brandishing a medium sized round plastic container. “I’m solving the Tupperware problem.”

“We have a problem?”

“Yes. We have almost twice as many lids as containers and somehow only half of them still fit. I’m purging. We’re going to get on top of this thing once and for all.”

“Wow. I feel so safe with a hero like you policing the cabinets of San Francisco.”

I backed out and turned to face her, settling with my back against the cupboard and a pile of plastic in different colors and sizes in front of me. I rummaged through it. “You laugh, but you have no idea how satisfying this is.” I plucked one of the lids out and snapped it on the container in my hand. “Look. Chaos,” I pointed at the pile, “and order.” I waved the newly sealed container at her.

She pointed from the pile—“Sad,” to me. “Sadder.”

I plucked up another lid. “It makes me feel better.”

“Than what? A poke in the eye with a sharp stick?” She set her purse on the counter and dropped down cross-legged in front of me. “Is this working?”

I didn’t pretend not to know what she was talking about. “I like it better than moping.”

“But Tupperware, Em? Is that what you’ve come to?”

I went back to sifting lids. “I’m highly productive and functional at work. I need to be that way at home too, then it’ll be fine.”

“What’s ‘it’? Your life? Your heart? What are we talking about here that’s going to be fine?”

I tapped the lid against my knee, trying to think of what “it’ll be fine” meant. “All of that. I’ll go back to being me.”

She pulled the lid away. “You’ve seemed less like you this week than I’ve ever seen you. You’re a workbot. It’s weird.”

I dropped my head against the cabinet and squeezed my eyes shut. “My brain isn’t cooperating right now. Giving it projects helps. I need to get back to a non-Jack habit.”

“Why?”

My eyes popped open. “Are you kidding me?”

“It’s not like he’s bad for you. He makes you laugh. You guys have a good time. Just call him up and say hi. Or text him. Or whatever. But there’s no reason for you to act like you don’t exist to each other. He’s a quality person, and those are the kind you keep around.”

I scooped up a bunch of the plasticware and turned to shove it into the cabinet. “It’s not my choice.”

“It is your choice.”

I shoved the rest of the plastic into the cabinet, heedless of any order, and climbed to my feet. “You’re right. I choose common sense and respect for boundaries.” I stepped over her and walked out of the kitchen, listening to the sounds of her scrambling to her feet to follow.

“Would you react like this if he didn’t matter?” she asked, pausing in my doorway as I knelt beside my bed to pull out a storage bin that needed organizing. “You weren’t even this upset when you and Paul split.”

“I’m not upset.” I yanked the bin out and tried to open the lid, but it was clamped on too tight.

“Wound up, then.” She leaned against the wall and watched me trying to find a good grip on the bin.

“It’s not Jack. Or not just Jack. It’s not even about boys.” I couldn’t get my fingertips underneath the lid far enough for any leverage to pop it off.

“Then what’s it about?”

I dug my fingertips in harder and felt a fingernail break. I pounded the lid in frustration. “It’s about realizing that my life is out of balance and needing to find it.”

She walked over and held her hand out to me. “You’ve always worked hard, but you found play time too. This workaholism started after Jack, not before, so I guess I don’t follow your logic.”

I looked from her hand to the bin and back again. Finally, I shoved the bin beneath the bed and accepted her hand up, but she didn’t let go when I was on my feet, instead tugging me toward the kitchen.

“I’m putting on some tea, and we’ll fix this.”

“I’m not sleepy.” Sometimes Ranée made me chamomile tea to help during my insomnia spells.

“No, but your brain is so wired I can almost see sparks flying out of your head. You need to relax. And I don’t mean that in the condescending way. I mean you need to breathe or something, find a way to gear down your levels.”

I sat at the table while she filled the electric kettle. “I’m not in love with him.”

She immediately shut the water off and turned to stare at me. “No one said you were.”

“I’m just making that clear.”

She turned the water back on. “Why do you feel like you need to?”

“Because if I was in love with Jack, being this much of a nutcase would make more sense. I’m into him, yeah. But the more I date, the more I’m starting to realize that I’m more ready for a relationship than I thought I was. Like I want that in my life in a real way.” I sighed. “If I could just get a hybrid of Jack and Paul, I’d have the perfect guy.”

She dropped the kettle, and the clatter into the sink made me jump. “You thought Paul had qualities of the perfect guy?”

“Mainly that he lives in the same city. Maybe not the rest of him. But you add that to Jack, and we’d be getting somewhere.”

“So you didn’t like anything else about Paul?”

There was something odd in the way she asked. It reminded me of the way my mom used to ask me too-casual questions on lazy Sunday afternoons to get a sense of my weekend when I was a teenager. It was a way of trying to get info out of me, making sure I was on track, without asking things point-blank so that I clammed up.

“Paul was fine,” I said, trying to figure out what Ranée needed me to say. “I’m never going to be convinced that he was the personification of watching paint dry.” That had been one of her more memorable criticisms of him after an awkward double date when Ranée’s chatter had unnerved him enough that he barely spoke.

“I might have overstated that for dramatic effect,” she said, turning the water off.

“Duh.” But my eyes narrowed. From Ranée’s mouth, that was a borderline defense of a guy she had once called her nemesis. Wait, no. Not her nemesis: the nemesis of all that was fun and interesting in the world. “Have you been seeing Paul around lately?”

She fumbled the kettle as she tried to settle it on its base. “Stupid kettle.” She bent and glared at it like that would somehow make it fit.

“Ranée?”

“Hmm?”

“I asked if you’ve seen Paul around lately.”

“Around? Yeah, sure.”

“And how’s he doing?”

“Fine.”

“How do you know? Do you guys talk?”

“Sure.”

This was getting interesting. The more vague her answers became, the more curious it made me. “About what?”

“You want to know what we talk about?” She shrugged. “Just whatever.”

“Just whatever. I see. And how often do you guys talk?”

“He’s at the barn a lot.”

“And so are you. So you guys talk a lot at the barn?”

“Sure.”

“Ranée?”

“Hold that thought. I’m going to change my clothes while the water heats. Efficiency. Aren’t you proud of me?”

“So proud I can hardly stand it.” It was hard not to laugh as she disappeared down the hall. She was obviously hiding something, and it equally obviously had to do with Paul. Those conversations must be going really well for her to want to avoid the subject. Not too long ago, she would have spent all the kettle-heating time making fun of him.

Ranée might drive me crazy in a dozen different ways, but for as much of a know-it-all as she could be, she was also quick to admit when she was wrong. She wouldn’t normally have a problem saying she’d misjudged Paul and confessing that he was a pretty good guy. I didn’t think that was what had sent her escaping into her room. Which meant…

Whoa. Ranée had a thing for Paul.