Chapter Nineteen Lily
Chapter Nineteen
Lily
It was possible I needed therapy. A lot of therapy.
Though that was nothing new; it had been an errant thought over the years, but I’d dismissed it easily because, ugh, then you need to sit and unload all the big bullet points in the first hour.
An expensive hour that could be titled What’s My Villain Origin Story?
But I was considering it again, as I found myself lying belly down on the floor, trying to hand-feed my dog, who hates me.
It was expensive food, the kind that had to be kept in the fridge and was supposed to cure everything that could possibly ail him.
Except, in my case, his horrible disposition—that wasn’t going anywhere.
Much like me, in that way. Cookies hadn’t cured my bad attitude, either, so I guess we were even.
“Come on, Larry,” I coaxed gently, easing my hand closer to his mouth. “Even I think this smells good.”
He leaned forward, sniffing the food balancing on my outstretched fingers. He gave it a half-hearted lick and then retreated again, laying his head down between his paws with an old-man groan.
I sighed, flicking the food back into his ceramic bowl. It had his name on it and everything. Teeny black paw prints painted on the rim. It was cute. And expensive. And he still didn’t want to eat out of it. “Fine. Be that way,” I said, wiping my fingers off on a piece of paper towel.
Unable to stop the worry creeping steadily through my veins, I chewed on my bottom lip as I watched him fall asleep in a small patch of sun he’d found streaming through one of the front windows. He was fine, acting normal, other than not eating as much.
My phone buzzed, and fuck.ing.hell, I got a flutter of something in my chest. Could’ve been fear. Might’ve been excitement. To err on the safe side, we’d call it general nausea, because honestly, both of those feelings fit within that umbrella.
A football field heart-to-heart and one measly little text exchange with mildly flirty undertones, and I’d turned into an absolute overthinking wreck.
Had he sent anything else since then? No.
Did I want him to? No. Maybe. Except no.
I searched the Buffalo social media and found videos of him after the game. Like a moon-eyed schoolgirl who wanted to catch a glimpse of the popular boy. Surrounded by tall, strapping men with an overabundance of muscles, Barrett commanded the locker room with ease.
I liked that he wasn’t over-the-top cheesy, shouting and screaming cliché catchphrases. Instead, he seemed to speak from the heart, every single person on the team listening intently to what he had to say. It was likely that some were older than him, too, but he was still undeniably in charge.
No wonder he was in such a damn good mood. Why he was being sorta flirty with unsuspecting neighbors who weren’t mentally prepared? How was I supposed to react to that kind of bullshit?
I sure as hell wasn’t going to initiate. Like I was begging for his attention or something. I’d never give him the satisfaction.
My phone buzzed again, and I pinched my eyes shut, finally screwing up the lady balls to look at the screen.
Not Barrett.
It was Patty, wanting to know if I had time to talk today. Please, all I had was time. I’d done nothing the last week except blow through three new fanfics and a binge of Schitt’s Creek for the seventeenth time.
With a sigh, I pulled up her contact information and settled my back against the couch while I waited for her to pick up.
“Good morning,” she said cheerily. “Is the house still standing?”
“So far.”
“Oh good. I realized yesterday when I saw how cold it was there, we forgot to tell you how to change the whole-house humidifier on the furnace. Have you been getting condensation on the inside of the windows?”
“A bit, yeah.”
“Just need to lower the humidity in the house when it gets this cold. There’s a chart on the front of the box to tell you what to set it to; it’s in the mechanical room back by the garage.”
“You got it, boss.” I had an actual person on the phone, and I wasn’t quite ready to hang up yet. Maybe the state of New York was slowly breaking down my inner introvert. “How’s Arizona? And please, feel free to describe the weather in great detail.”
She laughed. “Beautiful. Sunny every day. Scott’s playing pickleball, and I’m reading about some sexy dragons in the sun. Have much snow right now?”
“Not too bad,” I admitted. “Sometimes I wake up and we got a couple inches, but I really can’t complain. It’s just cold as shit this week, so I haven’t gone out much.”
I scratched the top of Larry’s head, and he opened his eyes in a doggy glare. I pulled my hand back and raised it in apology.
“Seen the kids much this week?”
“No. They’re back at school.”
My glum response made her laugh again. “They’re great, aren’t they? They used our pool a lot last summer. It was wonderful having a little life back there again.”
“They are.”
“And Barrett’s parents are still there, right?”
I nodded, then remembered she couldn’t see me.
“Yeah. I’m . . . I’m not sure for how much longer.
Maggie told me they leave this week.” My fingers played with the edge of Larry’s blanket.
The ragged edges were so faded, it was hard to remember what color it used to be.
My thumb dragged along the raised pattern.
Yellow. It used to be yellow and blue and white.
The fluffy hair above Larry’s eyes twitched as he watched me touch his blanket. There was no growling or groaning, though, and he didn’t move away.
“So,” she said decisively, “are you wishing you’d said no to my little job offer?”
I let out a quiet laugh and stared at the snow. The sun’s appearance made it all sparkly and shit, like the earth was coated in jewels. It was beautiful—there was no denying that, and I never would’ve known that if I hadn’t seen it myself.
There were a lot of things I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t made the decision to come here.
“No, I don’t regret it,” I said softly, allowing the admission to come out painlessly. There was no point in fighting it, so I didn’t even try. “It’s been a pleasant surprise.”
She hummed. “Where will you be going next?”
I laid my head back and stared up at the ceiling. This admission wasn’t so easy.
“I’m not sure.”
Patty made a noise of surprise. “How come? Don’t you always have the next move planned?”
“Usually,” I hedged. Always. I always had my next move figured out by this point. A destination, if nothing else. Or I was asking my current job if they knew of anyone who might need someone with my particular skill set.
I really hoped no one asked me to list those skills, because I wouldn’t look great on paper.
She hermits well, but please don’t ask her to have surface-level conversation. Also wears disdain and general disgust clearly on her facial expressions.
I’d joked about those things for so long, and it’s because they had a basis in truth—but wasn’t there room for our personalities to change as we got older?
That the things we wanted, the things we craved, could change too?
Allowing those changes was often the hardest part.
It made me think about what Barrett had said about not wanting to hold on to the way he used to do things. Arrogance, he’d called it.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever met a man so willing to admit his own flaws.
“It’s getting harder,” I admitted in a hushed voice, “to keep moving like this. But I’m not sure I know how to stop.”
Patty let out a quiet sigh. “I may not have a great answer for you, Lily. I’ll say this, though: No one’s making you leave. Not yet. The guest room is yours if you wanted to stick around Buffalo for a while after we get home.”
Her offer moved me far more than I dared admit, and that emotion built in the back of my throat. “Thank you. I’m not sure I’d make a great roommate, though. I don’t have very much practice.”
“It’s hard to change when we’re used to doing things a certain way,” she said carefully. “But I have a feeling you’d be better at it than you think.”
There wasn’t a whole lot to say after that, so we said our goodbyes after I promised to change the humidity thingy on the furnace.
Larry was sound asleep when I disconnected the call, and I pushed to my feet with a groan, wandering down the hallway to the mechanical room.
I found the knob and had to rise on the balls of my feet to be able to read the tiny print.
Once the knob was moved, I dropped back down and shut the light off, a lingering sadness hovering like a cloud after my conversation with Patty.
I’d felt it all week, if I was being honest with myself.
It wasn’t the kind of sadness that weighed me down completely, but I just couldn’t get it to go away.
It had settled at the back of my mind, found a tiny foothold in all my thoughts.
A thin wisp of fog that couldn’t be swept away.
If I tried, if I waved my hand in front of me or shifted my thoughts elsewhere, it simply crept back up, drifting in and out of my day-to-day.
It being the thing I was feeling. It did have a name; I’d just refused to use it the entire week.
I missed them.
I missed them.
What a horrifying discovery to make, because holy shit, there was no turning back from that.
On the dresser in my room was the postcard I’d picked up when I visited Niagara Falls. For the last couple of weeks, I’d left it sitting there, unable—or unwilling—to write anything on the back. The cloud, though . . . the cloud of sadness pushed and prodded until I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
Carefully, I picked up the ballpoint pen I’d left next to the postcard and slowly wrote three things across the back.
Maggie.
Bryce.
Barrett.
My eyesight blurred when I closed the pen.
For the first time in over ten years, I wrote names. Not a place or a restaurant or a sight that I’d visited. Living, breathing human beings—who’d provided memories to take with me, moments to miss and replay. A gift. One they weren’t even aware of.