5. Bree
brEE
Isit in my car in the station parking lot for ten minutes before I can drive.
My sweater is inside out. My hair looks like I fought a hedge and lost. There's a mark on my collarbone that I'm going to have to cover with concealer tomorrow because I teach kindergarteners and they notice everything—last week Marcus asked me why my shoes were different colors when I accidentally wore one navy flat and one black, and that was a fifteen-minute conversation I wasn't prepared for.
I absolutely cannot explain a hickey to a room full of five-year-olds.
I drive home on autopilot, park in my usual spot, and sit in my apartment parking lot for another ten minutes. Hands on the steering wheel. Engine off. Staring at the dashboard like it might explain what just happened.
That just happened. In the station kitchen.
Against a counter. With Bryson Holloway, the man who communicates in grunts and wrench turns, who hasn't smiled in the entire month I've known him, who looks at people like they're equations he doesn't feel like solving.
That man just pinned me between his arms and took me apart like he'd been studying the blueprints for weeks, and when he was inside me he looked at me like I was the first good thing to happen to him in years and I can still feel his hands on my hips like they left impressions in the bone.
I go inside. I shower. The hot water runs over my shoulders and I press my forehead against the tile and try to make the math work. Because it doesn't. The math of Bryson Holloway wanting Bree Atkinson does not compute, no matter how many times I run the numbers or rearrange the variables.
He's built like a superhero. Six-four, shoulders that fill doorways, hands that could palm a basketball or, apparently, my entire waist. He's got that brooding, sharp-jawed, dark-eyed thing that makes women walk into lampposts.
I've seen the way the other women on the fundraiser committee look at him—the sidelong glances, the whispered assessments, the way they accidentally position themselves in his sightline.
Debra from the garden club asked me for his name three times in one meeting and she was already looking at his left hand for a ring.
He's objectively, categorically, absurdly gorgeous in a way that suggests God has favorites and the rest of us should accept it.
And I'm me. Five-three. Size sixteen on a good day, eighteen when the stress-baking gets out of hand, which is most days.
Round face, round hips, round thighs, round everything.
I'm cute. I know I'm cute—I've got good skin and nice eyes and my hair does this wavy thing that people compliment at parent-teacher nights.
I have a great smile. I've been told my personality could power a small city.
But cute and gorgeous don't live in the same zip code, and men who look like Bryson Holloway don't pin women who look like me against kitchen counters and say things like I want to hear every sound in a voice that could strip wallpaper.
Except he did. He said it. He meant it. I heard the truth in it the same way I hear when my kindergarteners are lying about who knocked over the block tower—you learn to read sincerity when you spend all day with five-year-olds.
Bryson wasn't performing. Bryson couldn't perform if his life depended on it; the man has the theatrical range of a cinder block.
He wanted me. In that kitchen, in that moment, with those hands and that voice and those eyes that looked at me like I'd detonated something in his chest.
I text my best friend, Lila, at midnight. Three paragraphs. No punctuation. Pure unhinged energy that autocorrect has given up trying to fix.
She responds in thirty seconds: GO BACK. DO IT AGAIN. STOP SPIRALING. I CAN HEAR YOU SPIRALING THROUGH THE PHONE.
Then, a minute later: You always do this.
A man shows actual interest and you convince yourself it's a mistake or a fluke or a pity hookup because you can't imagine someone wanting you on purpose.
It's not a mistake. He wanted you on purpose.
He held a door for thirty seconds, Bree. Go the hell back.
I stare at the message. She's not wrong.
This is a pattern—a groove I've worn into my own neural pathways through twenty-eight years of repetition.
Someone shows interest, I feel it, and then the voice kicks in.
Not a mean voice, exactly. A reasonable one.
The one that says he's just being nice or he was lonely or you were there and available and he hasn't been with anyone in a while.
The voice that sounds like every boy in middle school who asked the thin girls to slow dance and gave me a shoulder pat and a "you're really funny, Bree" that landed like a consolation prize.
I don't go back. Not the next day, or the one after that.
I skip the fundraiser prep meeting on Saturday and tell Mrs. Henderson I have a cold, and the lie tastes like the brownies I burned at midnight.
I grade papers instead. I eat cupcakes from the batch I stress-baked at two in the morning while watching a show I'm not paying attention to, and I tell myself I'm being realistic, which is the word I use when I mean afraid.
By Monday I've almost convinced myself it was a one-time thing.
Adrenaline. Proximity. A man who hadn't been touched in four years and a woman who was there, convenient and available, wearing a flattering sweater in a small kitchen at the right time.
He probably regrets it. He's probably relieved I stopped showing up.
The grumpy loner gets his station back—no cupcakes, no chatter, no mess.
Except I don't feel like I'm winning. I feel like I left something in that kitchen—not just my dignity but something deeper, a door I cracked open and then slammed shut because the light on the other side was too bright and too warm and I didn't trust it not to burn.