Eleven
Mary pursed her lips. She’d not called all day. It wasn’t like she had expected. There was part of her that had expected the whole thing to play out as simple as can be. She just wouldn’t call him and it wouldn’t be a big deal.
Calling had been a verb, in that case. She just didn’t do it, and it was as simple as that. As it turned out, Not Calling was a verb, too. It was something that she did actively, and it drained her as much as thinking about calling had drained her all morning before the call.
So instead, she did what she always did when she was stressed about something. She checked her engagement numbers.
The newest blog post had gone up at 11 am, just like it did every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Which meant that it had been almost six hours since she put it up, and that she had spent most of those six hours not calling. Which, by the way, when you end with the exhortation for people to come at their problems head-on, felt a little bit hypocritical.
But she wasn’t ignoring her own advice, either. After all, she’d been very careful to acknowledge that there were times when someone shouldn’t approach their problems, head-on or otherwise.
For example, when things will get worse because you approached it. It’s best to let sleeping dogs lie when you’re just going to make things worse. And in her case, she would definitely make things worse by calling when she’d been explicitly told not to.
Mary stood up. She could hear, distantly, Pete upstairs. He had a guitar that she’d bought for him. It wasn’t the sort of thing that she wanted him to get into as a profession. Then again, he didn’t seem to have his father’s talent. Not quite, anyways. It would take hours and hours of polish to achieve that, and he had other hobbies and other interests. Thank God for that, it might keep him out of trouble.
She walked up the stairs. The music got louder. She had to admit that she was giving him a slightly hard time. Few people could compare to Roman Townsend. He was one in a million, as guitarists go. A gem.
Pete was barely eight, had been playing the thing for two years now, and sounded like he’d been playing the guitar for two years and practicing hard in that time. There wasn’t much more that a person could expect. And of course, that was without lessons. Certainly without lessons from the best guitarist that classic rock had on offer.
She leaned against the doorway. The boy’s fingers stopped where they were, his fingers frozen. He looked up.
“Something wrong?”
“No,” Mary answered. Her head hurt. “Nothing’s wrong. I just thought I would listen to you.”
“It’s not too loud or anything?”
“Not at all. Don’t worry about me.”
“Oh.”
She smiled. He tentatively adjusted the guitar in his lap. She could see Pete watching her nervously as he moved his hands up and down the neck without playing.
“You want me to go?”
“It’s fine,” he told her. He was nervous. But if he was ever going to leave his bedroom, then he’d have to get used to playing in front of people at some point. And she didn’t want that to be a major problem.
Mary’s smile faded as she thought about the problems that she’d left when she left her phone downstairs. Her son started to play again. The sound rang out through the amplifier. It wasn’t loud enough to bother anyone, she thought. But then, if he was this self-conscious about it, then he probably thought that having it on at all was a bother.
His fingers seemed to trip over themselves. The difference in sound was immediate and obvious. But he settled into it eventually. And eventually, Mary decided that she’d freaked him out enough and blew a kiss, and left him to his own devices again.
The sound of music faded as she walked away, and eventually it became a muffled noise in the background that meant nothing at all. Like so many other things in her life, it was just another fact.
She let out a long breath and picked the phone back up. It was just a piece of electronics. Glass and aluminum and a battery that, if the fiasco of last year had shown anything, could apparently burst into flames at the slightest provocation.
But it hadn’t burst into flames. It only weighed a few ounces. Given her nerves about it, she thought that it should have weighed more. But it didn’t. Not even when she turned the screen on and saw that there was a text.
Not even when she saw who the text was from.
Not even when she read the message in it, and her heart started to thump again as adrenaline shot through every part of her body.
If the man wanted her, then he ought to figure out how to stop sending such strongly mixed signals. When you tell someone not to contact you again, you shouldn’t send them a text six hours later, asking why you didn’t call.
The reasons should be pretty obvious. But apparently, when you’re Roman Townsend, rock god, the rules are a little bit different. And given that she pressed the button to call him a second later, apparently he was right.