Chapter Eight
CHAPTER EIGHT
Groundhog Day . Not the holiday, but the booth.
I felt the weight of the movie as if Kevin had sat me here as a bad joke.
Cory and I were both late again, and I sensed we were about to have the same conversation as before, too.
He had requested another meet-up at the diner, and I wasn’t entirely sure why, although the location seemed right to me, too.
Perhaps it felt like neutral territory. Perhaps the apartment already felt more like mine.
Did it unsettle him to imagine who might have been there in his absence?
I wondered if I should tell him that nobody had, that it felt wrong to bring somebody home who wasn’t him.
When he finally arrived, he looked wilder than at our previous meeting.
The mania had been turned up a notch. The comparison to the character Phil Connors felt accurate, except that Cory and I had chosen this time loop and Phil had not.
We hugged before sitting down and discovered that the looseness and distance between our bodies had also increased.
Our friendship was still there, though. Cory was grinning at me, and it spread into his voice. “ You had a date. My coworkers saw you.”
I blushed and dropped my gaze. “Yeah. I figured they’d tell you.”
“So? Did you?” If it had been a text, a dozen question marks and exclamation points would have followed the words.
I nodded, and he cackled with glee. Halted and sat there in silence. Shook his head and knitted his brow. Fell motionless again. “You know,” he said. “I don’t know how to react to that.”
I laughed once, low. “Imagine how I feel.”
“This is weird, isn’t it?”
“That’s the word I keep using.” Underneath the table, I gripped my thighs for support. For the first time, I realized that I hadn’t worried about him bringing a ring tonight. And looking at him now, I was positive my instincts were correct.
“Iggy, I have to say it. I’m still not ready.”
I had expected a powerful rush of relief, and it came. Yet an irrational part of me was also hurt and upset. I didn’t want him to come home, but I wanted him to want to come home. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to marry him, but I wanted him to want to marry me.
“Say something, Ig. Talk to me.”
My fingers clawed deeper into my legs. “I need another month, too.”
He’d been leaning toward me, but at this, he collapsed back into the booth. “Oh my God. You scared me. For a second, I thought we weren’t on the same page anymore.”
It was a strange thing for him to say. Sure, we were still on the same page, but our page was currently in two separate books. We were acting out two separate stories.
“You do still want this, though? Us?” I asked.
He sat up again, nervous and ready to reassure me. “Of course. February was just such a short month, you know?” His expression shifted into fear. “Do you still want this?”
“Of course,” I said, because I thought I did. I reached for his hands—I needed to touch him—but just then two red plastic tumblers of water thunked onto the table between us. We jumped. It was Hank, the same lithe server we’d had a month earlier.
“Hey there,” he said. “I’ll be taking care of you folks tonight. Can I get you something else to drink?”
“A Coke, thanks. Actually, I think we’re ready,” Cory said, glancing at me to confirm. “I’ll have the chicken tenders and fries, and she’ll have the grilled cheese and tomato soup.”
Hank tapped his shaved head and then strolled gracefully away to place our order.
Cory said something I didn’t catch.
“Huh?” I was still watching Hank. “ Groundhog Day vibes are strong tonight.”
“What? Oh yeah. The table.”
That wasn’t quite what I had meant, though. We were out of sync and confused, but what mattered most was clear: Our groundhog had seen its shadow. We both needed more time.
I texted Gareth from the diner’s parking lot. Lunch tomorrow?
Our schedules weren’t compatible, so we arranged a date for the weekend instead. But I’d forgotten the following day was a Thursday, his library day, and was excited when he pointed out that we’d see each other anyway. I wore a dress to work and put some effort into my hair.
“Aw, look at you,” Alyssa said when I walked in. She was sitting behind my station doing the morning desk shift. “Cory must be coming home.”
I started at the name.
“Sue and Macon said it wouldn’t happen,” she continued. “Elijah was less sure. But I knew Cory would be back.”
Heat flashed through me. “You’ve all been placing bets?”
“Not betting. Speculating.”
I thumped my tote bag down on the desk. “Well, you’re wrong.”
“Who’s wrong?” Sue asked, appearing from the annex. It wasn’t a general question. She had been eavesdropping on our conversation.
I’d been dreading having to tell them but couldn’t avoid it. “Cory and I extended our experiment.”
“Ha!” Sue said to Alyssa, who looked disappointed in me. I wasn’t sure if it was for moral reasons or because she’d lost.
Macon slouched into the building. “We were right,” Sue said to him. “No Cory.”
I expected him to brush her off—he was always grouchiest upon arrival, so it was too early for gossip—but instead he stopped. Stared at me. I glared back. “Are you okay?” he asked, and then the others remembered their manners because they asked, too.
Before I could respond, Elijah swaggered in for his shift. He hooted when he saw me. “It’s that guy!”
“What guy?” Sue and Alyssa asked.
“Thursday-night dude. I forgot you asked him out. You’re all dressed up for him, right?”
I hadn’t been aware that Elijah had overheard my fight with Macon about asking out Gareth. Alyssa leaned forward eagerly. “What Thursday-night dude?” she asked. She and Sue didn’t know about Gareth because he always came in after they were already gone.
Macon stalked into the annex to put his lunch in the fridge. When he returned, the other three were still crowded around me, hounding me. “Leave us alone,” he barked.
Elijah and Alyssa scattered. Sue lifted her hands in surrender and moseyed away, but then she glanced back over her shoulder. One eyebrow was raised.
Us . Macon hadn’t said leave me alone or leave her alone . He’d grouped us together again. It was a small thing, but I clung to it.
“Thanks,” I said.
He flumped into his chair in an exhausted response.
How had he known that Cory and I would need another month?
And what did he think about it? I hated that his opinions still mattered so much to me, but thankfully, I had a distraction.
As the clock drew nearer to the Gareth hour, my adrenaline surged.
I wasn’t sure why I felt less embarrassed about Macon seeing me with Gareth than seeing me with Justin.
Maybe because he already knew about Gareth, or maybe our fight had made me stubborn.
Or maybe I was just so frustrated that some unkind part of me wanted to rub it in his face.
He never gave me the opportunity. The instant Gareth appeared, Macon disappeared to water the plants.
It didn’t matter, though. I was thrilled to see Gareth again.
We didn’t hug, and he didn’t peck me on the cheek like Justin had done.
His initial approach was bashful, but then we flirted exhaustively, and by the time he finally left—after spending much longer at the desk than usual and being throat-cleared out the door by another waiting patron—I felt delirious with wantonness.
Macon slammed the watering can down onto our desk, and I jumped. The jarring clang of metal reverberated through the quiet library.
“Yo,” Elijah called out.
I stared at Macon in astonishment until he looked at me. He crumpled with embarrassment. “I have a headache,” he muttered, as if that made any sort of sense.
If I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought he was jealous. Except, actually, I was still pretty sure that he was. Excitement flickered inside me until anger flared and overtook it. I had tried, and he had said no, and he had no fucking right to be fucking jealous now.
My mood clearly showed, because Macon rose to the challenge. His back stiffened. His expression hardened. We stared each other down like two beasts in the wild.
“I found bacon in my mystery novel,” somebody sang.
Our attention jerked to the man entering the library. “My word,” Mr. Garland said, eyeing the two of us with delight. “What have I interrupted?”
“Nothing,” I said, as Macon said, “Bacon?”
“A strip of cooked bacon,” Mr. Garland confirmed, opening the hardcover in his hands. “The person who checked this out last must have been using it as a bookmark.”
Macon sighed. “For fuck’s sake.”
“That’s what I said,” Mr. Garland said. “I couldn’t wait to show it to you.”
Macon plucked out the bacon with two fingers, dropped it into the trash can, and inspected the greasy pages with disgust.
“Do you need me to order a copy from another branch for you?” I asked.
Mr. Garland waved a hand airily. “No, I just turned the page and kept reading. It’s a good one.”
Although the tension had been defused, Macon and I remained sullen and aggressive toward each other until late the following morning. The post-storytime rush was nearly over when the phone rang. I answered, and it was an older woman with an unsteady voice. “May I please speak to Macon Nowakowski?”
“Of course. He’s helping someone, but it’ll only be a moment.”
“Thank you,” she said.
As I waited for Macon to finish checking out a stack of picture books for a mother and her son, an affable preschooler who loved whales and sharks and especially whale sharks, I had a delayed reaction.
The voice pinged in my memory bank along with the realization that the caller had correctly pronounced Macon’s last name. I clutched the phone against my chest.
He sensed the change in my energy and glanced over.
“I think it’s your mom,” I said.