Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Oh, shoot!” Garrett muttered to himself in alarm as he hastily removed his eggs, which were starting to burn, from the stove.
He’d been making scrambled eggs for, what, thirty years now?
And all it took was one confounding conversation with Eleanor to make it so he no longer knew how to undertake this simple of a task.
But he simply did not understand what had happened.
Sure, maybe he could have been a little more elegant when he’d brought up the issue of a longer-term relationship between them. In hindsight, the grocery store wasn’t the best place to open such a discussion. He could see that now.
If nothing else, Eleanor had gotten a clean getaway when he’d paused to pay for the groceries. And now…
And now she wasn’t taking his gosh darn text messages.
He’d sent four or five of them, trying to balance seeming like a reasonable person who was giving her the space she clearly wanted and doing what he actually wanted to do, which was go sit on her front step until she talked to him.
But maybe, he thought as he absently shoveled his overdone eggs into his mouth, barely tasting them, it was time to be a little less subtle. Texting was for kids, anyway, and he was a grown man.
He was a grown man who wanted a future with Eleanor. That’s what he’d been trying to tell her, that he didn’t find the idea of having a lifetime with her unpleasant in the least.
What he did find decidedly unpleasant was this time apart, this weird, stressful uncertainty.
He and Eleanor should be together, should be solving things as a team. That was the whole point of the conversation he’d been trying to have. He didn’t mean to spook her!
At least, he hoped she was just spooked.
It had occurred to him at about two in the morning, while he was staring at his ceiling and wishing sleep would finally find him, that maybe Shane’s information had been incorrect or somehow misunderstood.
Maybe Eleanor hadn’t fled because he had surprised her, but because she didn’t want to talk about their future at all…
He choked down one more bite of the eggs before shoving his plate away and grabbing his phone. He dialed Eleanor’s number. A phone call, this time, not a text message.
His heart was in his throat as it rang and rang. Every new trill caused his hopes to sink lower and lower. They blinked out when her voicemail clicked on.
“Hi, you’ve reached Eleanor Ridley. I can’t get to the phone right now, but please leave a message after the beep.”
He hung up the phone without leaving a message. He didn’t want to get into another potential misunderstanding. He wanted to talk to Eleanor, face to face. He wanted to see her. He wanted to be with her.
Yesterday, those things had seemed so easy to access. Today, he feared that she wouldn’t want to speak to him like that again.
He ground his forehead against his fist. He had no idea where it had all gone so terribly, terribly wrong.
Eleanor knew that it wasn’t her bravest moment as she watched her phone vibrate on her kitchen table, her untouched cup of tea growing cold in front of her.
She was usually a coffee drinker in the morning, but the very last thing she needed was anything that would make her more jittery, not when she’d practically been jumping out of her skin for the whole of the last twenty-four hours.
Garrett’s name flashed on the screen, taunting her. She watched, barely able to breathe, as it rang and rang. She sat, frozen.
She needed to talk to him. She knew that.
For one, just not answering someone’s calls because you wanted to avoid them…
that was childish. It was the kind of thing that she would expect from a tween with their first crush gone wrong, not an adult in her fourth decade of life.
And it was terribly disrespectful to poor Garrett, who did not deserve to be ignored and avoided.
But she just couldn’t make herself answer.
The night before, she had avoided her brother too.
She’d made sure that she was tucked into her bedroom early so that she hadn’t been forced to make conversation with him.
She really wasn’t mad, but she knew that Shane would immediately be able to tell that something was amiss, and then he’d want to know what was bothering her.
She didn’t want to make him feel bad about the slip, since she knew he would already feel guilty about betraying her confidence, however accidentally.
But it was hard to have nobody to talk to about all this. She could have turned to her friends, but she was pretty sure that they would tell her what she already knew.
She needed to talk to Garrett. She needed to clear the air.
She just… wasn’t ready. She was too scared that he would be scared off by the intensity of her feelings.
So, she let her phone ring and ring. She stared at it as it went to voicemail, then watched it long enough to know that Garrett didn’t leave a message, as her phone didn’t light up with another notification.
She took a sip of her lukewarm tea, just for something to do with her hands. It didn’t help at all with the stinging feeling at the back of her throat that told her that she was far less successful in holding back the tears that threatened than she might have hoped to be.