Chapter Thirteen
Ernie
It more than hurt; it was validating in the worst possible way.
It meant that what I was feeling wasn’t just my head playing games with me.
Jovan agreed my concerns were valid. How I longed for them to be irrational.
At least then I could push past them and move on.
Now, I needed to figure out if it was a deal-breaker or not, and that terrified me.
I slapped on my happy face for the rest of our date.
It was great that we talked. Keeping things inside had been an obstacle in all my relationships from family to partners to friendships.
Even with Hal and Ridge, I wouldn’t call us super close.
They opened up to me far more than I did to them.
We had fun together, but I wouldn’t say we were close. Not in the truest sense.
More than anything, I wanted to take Jovan home with me after our date and spend the night exploring each other’s bodies. But that was the exact opposite of taking it slow. Instead, I kissed him good night and went up to my apartment…alone.
I wanted to scream into my pillow, but all that would do would be to piss off my neighbor. Been there, done that. So not worth the thirty seconds of relief.
Instead, I filled the bathtub and grabbed the special bath bomb I’d been saving for a time when I really needed something fun.
It was one of those that had a capsule toy inside, and there was something magical about mystery toys and baths.
Put together, exactly what I needed to fall into little space. Or that was the plan, anyway.
I’d picked it up at a craft fair last summer, and it looked like it had seen better days when I pulled it out of the drawer. The color had faded, some of it sticking to the packaging. The scent wasn’t very strong and, try as I might, I couldn’t pinpoint what it was meant to be. It’d still be fun.
I also grabbed a toy boat and a ducky I won in one of those claw machines where everyone was a winner. They were the only kind I’d play because despite it being a 100 percent success rate, I still took forever to get something in the metal jaws.
It took years for the tub to fill. Fine, more like ten minutes, but it felt that long.
I climbed inside, held the bath bomb up high, and dropped it with a splash.
It fizzed, the water turning an odd shade of blue green, nothing at all like the ocean, more like a slushie when the kids are allowed to mix their own.
Now came the fun part. I watched as the bath bomb fizzed away, waiting for the capsule to pop to the top so I could fish out my prize.
There were times I didn’t make it long enough to have it release on my own, picking the bomb away with my fingers.
That would probably have been the case with this one had the color not acted so peculiarly.
“Okay, little ducky, let’s see what this is.” I squeezed the capsule until it popped open. Inside, there was a teeny, tiny boat made in the same fashion as my rubber ducky, only boat-shaped. “All right, ducky, let’s ride on the boat.”
Of course, my ducky was bigger and kept falling off.
When I was in little space, that would’ve had me in stitches.
Since I was too busy with my pity party for one in my head, instead, it was boring.
I refused to give up. I tried to play silly game after silly game, but they never distracted me fully from our conversation at dinner.
When the water cooled off, I gave up.
“Operation bath to forget is officially a failure,” I explained to my ducky.
I rinsed off, not wanting the blue to get on my favorite jams only to discover that the blue hadn’t only stuck to me. It was also on the tub, which turned into me scrubbing it.
“From now on, I’m only getting bath bombs from stores because, as nice as it was, there’s nothing fun about scrubbing the bathtub,” I explained to my new little boat.
It took a lot of elbow grease, but eventually, all the blue was gone from the tub and from me.
Thankfully, none stained my towel. If it had, I wasn’t sure how I’d get it out.
Bleaching a towel covered in pink flamingos wearing floaties would only lead to disappointment when the pink faded away or had blotches on it.
I grabbed my ABC jams, put them on, and set up the TV. If playing in the tub didn’t work, playing with my toys wasn’t going to either. But whimsical television? That might do the trick.
Pup-Pup and his little crocheted ducky were my companions for the evening.
They were the best kind. They didn’t talk back, wouldn’t try and eat all my gummy bears, and always let me pick the show.
That didn’t stop me from wishing Daddy were here.
Because yes, he was starting to be Daddy to me more than Jovan.
The joy of streaming was that I could find any cartoon I wanted, and I opted for a silly one with a tiny dog who reminded me of Zoe. Not in size, obviously. But in all other ways. This dog was the size Zoe believed herself to be, and the joy and silliness that she exuded was 100 percent her.
I watched most of the season before I realized I didn’t know what was going on in any of the episodes, thanks to my mind wandering back to the dinner conversation.
I grabbed my phone to text the guys to see if maybe they wanted to chat, but not about Jovan and me…
I wasn’t one who wanted to share the ups and downs of my relationships with people who weren’t part of them.
There was nothing wrong with that. It was just that I had a hard enough time talking about that stuff with the people who needed to hear it.
My clock lockscreen told me it was after one. I gave up on the idea, not wanting to bother them.
“What do we do now, Pup-Pup?” I picked him up, hugging him close. “You think we can fall asleep?”
I carried him and his crocheted duck to bed after flicking off the television. I climbed under the covers, hugging my second pillow close with Pup-Pup sharing my pillow with me.
“I wish Daddy was here.” I kissed Pup-Pup’s head, followed by the duck’s. “Try to go to sleep now, you two, because I don’t want you being grumpy tomorrow.” As if my stuffies could ever be grumpy.
But the odds were strong that I was going to be if I didn’t get my head out of my ass soon.