Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
REID
“Hey, babe, can you grab the reusable bags?” I shout to Carrie from the top of the stairs while I dart around my bedroom, looking for my car keys.
The farmer’s market opens at nine, and it’s a quarter till.
Carrie insists on getting there when they open so she can buy the ripest berries.
I honestly don’t understand why she doesn’t just partner with the local farmers.
She owns one of the best bakeries in town.
I'm sure they would work with her to deliver the best berries and save me three hours of my life every Saturday morning.
I met Carrie early on when I moved to Auburn Hills, Oregon about a year and a half ago.
I liked her feistiness and admired that she owned her own business.
After a few months of stopping in for a morning pastry, I finally worked up the nerve to ask her out.
Nine months later, I’m still going with her on Saturday morning farmer’s market trips.
My buddy and coworker, Tyler, can’t stand her, but I think their personalities just clash.
This is the longest relationship I’ve been in, and yet it feels new every day.
Like I’m still learning who the person I’m dating is.
She still feels like a stranger at times.
“I have my own bags…let’s go. We are going to be late!” Carrie yells back, and I can hear her opening the front door.
I finally find my keys under a pile of yesterday’s jeans and dash downstairs. She’s already standing by my pickup truck, one hand on the door handle. I unlock it and hustle around to the driver’s seat. We are quiet as I drive the five-minute journey downtown.
The farmer’s market is a town event that takes place every Saturday in the parking lot of Auburn Hills High School.
Everyone, and I mean everyone, is here. Even people from neighboring towns like Medford to towns in Northern California come here.
The farmer’s market is an event everyone hustles to get to, especially my girlfriend.
Usually, she picks me up, or she’ll hit it by herself and swing by after.
But she spent the night at my place last night, so I am honored with the pleasure of driving us at ten to eight in the morning.
As I take the turn toward the Main Street, Carrie makes a dramatic gasp when she sees the cars lined up to get in. “I told you we should have left earlier.” She gives me a side-eye that could cut through ice.
“Just get out and head in. I’ll circle around and look for parking.” I’ll probably end up ditching and hitting a coffee shop instead.
“No, because you probably won’t even come in.” Dammit. Is she in my head?
We’ve been dating long enough that she knows me too well. I don’t know if I like it. Then I look over to her to see if she heard my thoughts, and she just gives me a scowl. I’m still unsure if she can read my mind. “Just pull along a side street and park there.”
I listen to her orders and start driving along the side streets adjacent to the farmer’s market. As I dart around, I start drumming the wheel and humming along to a Bon Jovi song I think I heard playing at work yesterday.
“Can you stop that? Please.” Carrie shoots daggers at my hands on the wheel. She looks up at me, and if this was a cartoon, she’d have smoke coming out of her ears. “You know, on second thought, I can’t sit here anymore. I’m going to just walk there. You do whatever you want.”
I stop and pull toward the side of the street, and before I can protest, she hops out. Something has been bothering her ever since we got home from dinner.
What did I do?
Being in a relationship is a fucking nightmare sometimes.
Half of the time, you laugh and share memories, and the other half, you said or did something wrong during the first half, which makes her ignore you for forty-eight hours until you decipher why she is mad.
I drive around the street a few times before I finally find an open space two blocks from the farmer’s market.
I go to reach for my bags and realize she never brought my bags.
She only brought her own. This is some kind of cruel revenge trip she’s on.
I thought yesterday went fine, but after she took a shower, it seems like she turned into her alter ego.
The version that despises me. When she’s this way, I even wonder if she still likes me.
What is the point in being with someone if they treat you like shit fifty percent of the time?
I feel like I’m giving her all of me, and yet I only get her free trial.
Like our previous fights, I retrace my steps to figure out what I did wrong in her eyes.
Yesterday started normally like any other weekday.
I picked up a cold brew with sweet cream foam before heading into the wellness center.
My uncle had a doctor’s appointment, so I was the manager in charge.
We had a few regulars in for their routine physical therapy appointments, one new client, and Tyler, who is the massage therapist, saw three people for one-hour deep tissue treatments.
Tyler and I went and got sandwiches at this walk-up counter spot for lunch a few blocks down like we do every Friday.
It was a standard workday, and honestly, now that I think of it, we are doing great in terms of clientele.
I make a mental note to bring up an idea of a member's day to my uncle to celebrate the increase in sign-ups.
After work, I walked down to Carrie’s bakery.
She was hustling as usual. She closes the shop at two in the afternoon but spends four hours afterward prepping for the next day.
Now that I think of it, she was probably prepping for opening staff because she wasn’t going to be there in the morning to pick up supplies from the farmer’s market.
We walked down to a local diner for dinner, and each ordered veggie burgers and beers before heading back to my house.
I let her pick what movie we watched, and she went with Perks of Being a Wallflower.
It actually wasn’t as terrible as I expected.
Then we made out on the couch and moved to the bedroom.
If I’m being honest with myself, we had pretty average sex, but it wasn’t out of the ordinary.
We took showers and went to bed. She turned away from me all night and didn’t cuddle with me, which hinted to me that she was pissed about something.
Shit.
She was talking about how she wanted to spend more time at my apartment.
I got the vibe she was trying to ask if she could move in with me, but I am not ready for that.
Did she tell me she loved me? Double shit.
I don’t know if I want her in my space. I don’t know if I even love her.
My lack of response must have pissed her off.
I reach the market and look around, hoping to see her curly red hair.
I spot her by the fig booth. She’s laughing at something the vendor is saying to her.
He is a big, burly guy with a beard I could never grow, holding up two figs in either hand, bouncing them up and down. What the fuck is going on over there?
I catch up to her and stand beside her. “Hey, I finally found a spot. What we got here, some saggy figs?” I crack a smile and shine it over to the vendor and Carrie.
Her laugh immediately drops, and she turns to walk to the next booth.
What the fuck. I reach out to her shoulder to turn her back to face me. “Hey Carrie, what is going on? You can’t keep icing me out like this. I can’t read your mind.” I try to keep my voice down, but this is getting ridiculous.
“Can you not make a scene at the farmer’s market? This is my safe space.” She glares and looks around to see if anyone is overhearing us.
Of course, a few people are, everyone in this town is nosy as hell, but that’s what you get from a small town. People thrive on gossip like it’s oxygen. Nothing else really goes on here, so the young couple arguing at the farmer’s market might even make headlines.
“We have to talk about it, Carrie.” I keep my voice calm and stern, maintaining eye contact.
She puts her hand up to me and says, “Let me finish up, and I’ll meet you by the entrance.” With that, she turns away and continues her way along the booths. I go to do the same and head to the entrance. Not before I see that fucking fig vendor hand her a small piece of paper.
I hang out by the entrance until I see her small, fiery form blaze past me, nearly knocking me over with her armful of bags. She’s walking like she knows where I parked, except she’s walking in the opposite direction.
“Hey, I parked over toward Magnolia Street.” I basically have to break into a jog to meet up with her. “Carrie, what the fuck is going on with you?”
“I can’t do this, Reid.”
Those words ache in my chest like a nightmare that keeps haunting me.
I don’t even need her to keep talking to know how the story ends, and yet she continues with her rant.
“I pour my heart out to you, and I get nothing in return. I told you I loved you, and you just looked at me. You didn’t say it back to me.
It’s been nearly a year, and you haven’t asked me to move in.
You haven’t done anything to show me you care about me. ”
With that, everything I’ve been holding in starts pouring out. “If anyone has been leaving crumbs, it’s you. You always find something to argue with me about. I can’t do anything without you finding a problem with it. I do care about you, and I am losing energy.”
“That’s your problem, you give your energy everywhere else, and you don’t care to devote any to your own girlfriend.” She turns to a car that is pulling up and goes to the backseat before looking back at me. “If it isn’t clear, I’m breaking up with you.”
“Do you even love me? Or was that just something to say to move in with me?”
She turns back to me and says, “Fuck you, Reid.”
“Fuck you, Carrie!”