Chapter Twenty-One Amanda
Chapter Twenty-One
Amanda
A manda felt like a glutton for punishment. Dominic had left early that morning to go to New Jersey for his interview, and Amanda couldn’t stop checking her phone every few minutes to see if his plane had landed yet. He’d texted her when he got to the airport, when he’d been in his seat, and when the pilot had said everyone had to turn off their cell phones as they were about to take off. She’d wished him luck. She genuinely meant it, too, but the selfish part of her that had spent the last four straight days with him was also whispering in her ear that it wouldn’t be the worst thing if he didn’t get the job.
She hated that she was even thinking that, but the thought was there, nonetheless.
After their first date at Naan Sense, they hadn’t stopped dating. Even though nothing physical had happened that night between them outside of a foot massage, she’d felt a physical intimacy with him that actually felt wonderful. Like there was a middle ground between no touch and full-blown sex that she could genuinely get behind. The way he’d touched her—just rubbing her legs and massaging her feet—had felt like she was being cared for in the best of ways. She almost began to wonder if she might be able to make a romantic relationship work. It wasn’t sex, but it was physical touch, and, like Dominic had said, that meant a lot to him. And it didn’t have to be sensual.
She felt the tiniest bit of hope blooming in her chest at the possibility that she might be enough without anything more, without sex and all that it entailed.
The following day, they had gone on a hike alone together and had a picnic on the edge of the lake. He’d put together an entire charcuterie tray and a bottle of her favorite wine, and she hadn’t had to plan a single thing. The day after that, they’d gone kayaking and then gorged themselves on take-out pasta from the Italian restaurant in the next town. He’d slept over that night—just slept—and they’d woken up this morning and had bagels and coffee delivered. They ate them on her back porch, looking out on the lake and watching Tom run around in the yard, pouncing on different blades of grass and the occasional bug here or there. He wasn’t an outdoor cat, but Dominic let him wander around when they were watching, and Tom was already getting used to coming back and forth between their two houses. So much so, in fact, that Amanda had put a pellet litter box in the front closet of her home for Tom.
There wasn’t a topic that they hadn’t covered at that point, it seemed. They talked about his childhood and what it was like growing up with his mom, and how their relationship had changed, and he’d grown closer with her now that he was an adult. She told him about her childhood also with a single mother, and how her relationship with her mother only seemed more distant with time. He told her about getting married and falling head over heels in love in a way that never seemed to make sense, like he and Melinda were always living a fairy-tale romance that looked perfect in the tabloids and from the outside looking in. But when it was just the two of them, things felt… forced. He actually described it as feeling like Melinda and he were the married version of “friends with benefits.” They had had lots of physical chemistry for a time, and they had a strong friendship, but nothing between them was a partnership or based in deeper emotion. He admitted that he might not ever have pulled the plug on the two of them if Melinda hadn’t initiated the divorce. It wasn’t that he was still in love with her—or maybe he never had been—but rather that he felt a sense of loyalty he wouldn’t have walked away from.
Amanda admired that part of him, and also his honesty about how things had transpired across his life. She wanted to open up and tell him about herself, too, and she did to an extent. She spoke about her family and her friends and her life here in Heart Lake. She told him about being lonely and wanting a partner and companion in the future, and how her dating history had been sparse and sporadic over the last fifteen years because she simply hadn’t been very interested in getting out there. The part she didn’t expand on, however, was why. She just left it at that—it hadn’t been a priority for her. And that was true. But she tiptoed around the topic of sex and physical intimacy and that she was genuinely afraid she’d never be enough for a partner when she wasn’t naturally interested in a sexual relationship like most women she knew were. After their physical intimacy on their first date night together, she knew that it was something Dominic wanted and that the conversation would have to happen eventually.
Despite that one omission, things felt like they’d gone from fast to hyperdrive overnight between her and Dominic. It was wild how quickly they’d settled into what a life together could look like. She knew she was getting ahead of herself, but it was like they’d been tempting that line for the last month, and now that they’d crossed it… things just were falling into place. She could picture this cadence for the rest of her life, and she couldn’t help but hope he was thinking the same thing.
“Are you going to stop being glued to your phone at any point today?” Nola finally asked, refilling her passion fruit mimosa at Amanda’s kitchen table.
Rosie glanced in their direction, polishing off her mimosa as well and holding out her glass for Nola to refill. “We’ve never seen Amanda in a relationship before, and clearly, this is why.”
Both of her best friends had come over to keep her company that afternoon, mostly because she’d promised to fill them in on why she’d been missing in action the last few days. They knew she and Dominic were hitting it off and had been dying for the details.
Amanda shot them both a look. “I’m not in a relationship.”
“Uh, the way you’re staring at that phone since Dominic left says otherwise,” Nola countered. “Not that I blame you one bit. Tanner never travels for work, and I prefer it that way.”
“Evan does occasionally,” Rosie volunteered, petting her hand across Tom’s back as he was stretched out asleep in her lap. That cat was the biggest snuggle bug she’d ever met. “But the biggest issue with that is that it leaves me with four kids on my own, and that’s some bullshit.”
Amanda laughed and shook her head. “It’s fine that he’s traveling. I’m glad he’s going. It’s a great opportunity, and he needs to see it through.”
“Yeah, he definitely does,” Rosie agreed, sipping at her mimosa after Nola refilled it. “But have you two talked about what it means if he gets the job?”
She shook her head. “No. It seems too soon for a conversation like that, don’t you think? It’s just an interview. And he and I are just… I don’t even know. He was honest about the interview before anything started. I can’t blame him for any of that.”
“Yeah,” Nola agreed. “I know you two are just starting whatever this is between you guys, and this situation is kind of unavoidable, but the idea of it being time limited right from the start would really freak me out. My anxious attachment style would not allow me to open up to something like that.”
Amanda remembered Nola’s story with Tanner, and how she hadn’t been sure if she’d stay in Heart Lake for quite some time.
“Same,” Rosie agreed, then made a protesting sound as Tom jumped off her lap and walked over to a sun spot on the floor and stretched out his back. “I’d have my therapist on speed dial. Is it bad I hope he bombs the interview?”
Amanda tried to stifle her laugh but was unsuccessful. “I have been trying to push away those same thoughts.”
“It’s really hard,” Nola said, sitting back down and picking up her own mimosa as well as a store-bought cookie from the small plate between them. “I can’t imagine being in your position. I mean, I moved to be with Tanner, but it’s not the same. I had roots here and knew people here. I can’t imagine up and moving across the country to a strange new place at this point in my life.”
“Wait, Amanda isn’t moving. She can’t move to New Jersey,” Rosie said loudly, almost as if she were offended by the suggestion. “She just started the job for Mrs. Crawford. Her career is just taking off, and moving would completely derail that.”
“Or moving now would be perfect because she’s starting fresh,” Nola countered. “She could start fresh there just as well as she could here.”
“Not with the wealthiest client in Heart Lake, she can’t,” Rosie argued back.
“There are wealthy clients in New Jersey, too, I’m sure,” Nola replied.
Amanda put her hands up. “Guys, guys! Stop! No one is moving. Even if he does get the job, who says we can’t make it work long distance? He still owns his house here, and those kinds of jobs aren’t nine-to-five. Maybe he would split his time and fly back and forth, and I can, too. People live bicoastal all the time, and this is less than half that distance.”
“That’s a lot of frequent-flyer miles,” Nola mused. “But yeah, you two could possibly make that work.”
Rosie was quiet for a moment, staring at her thoughtfully. “You’d really do all that for Dominic? I know you’d do that for us and people you love. I’m not questioning that about you. But I’ve never seen you do anything remotely close to that for a man.”
People you love. The comment struck Amanda deeply. There was absolutely no way she felt anything close to love for Dominic. She’d only known him for a month, and, technically, they’d only been dating for four days. Love would be absolutely ridiculous.
“I wish I knew how to describe to you both what I feel with Dominic,” Amanda finally began, trying to make sense of it in her head at the same time. “It’s not like what I hear you describe with Evan, Rosie. It’s not like you and Tanner, Nola. I’m not sure I’m capable of feeling those things—that heat and passion and all-consuming fire you guys talked about when you first started dating them. It doesn’t really exist inside of me—it never has. I think that has made me keep a lot of people at arm’s length, because I honestly have spent a lot of time feeling ashamed that that part of me is missing. I see it everywhere—movies, television, books, in all my friends’ lives… so it just feels isolating that that doesn’t exist in me.”
Rosie let out a heavy sigh. “Amanda, you don’t know that it doesn’t yet.”
“Yeah,” Nola agreed. “Maybe you just haven’t met the right guy yet.”
“Or maybe I’m just not a very sexual person, and that’s also okay,” Amanda countered, because those types of responses were what she hated and why she rarely talked about this side of herself. She knew people would feel sympathy or pity or tell her she just had to hold out for the right situation or person or whatever, but it wasn’t that. She knew in her gut that she was built differently than her friends. She was a romantic at heart, but it didn’t extend past that.
Her friends traded nervous looks for a moment then returned their gaze to her. It was clear that neither of them knew how to respond, and, frankly, she didn’t blame them. None of them had been raised in a world that embraced women as anything other than sexual beings, so the thought that maybe that wasn’t a defining characteristic for her was going to be confusing.
But Amanda was finding her way to a place where she refused to be held back by that. She refused to think of it as a defect or something being wrong with her. She just wanted to be embraced for everything she was, as it was.
“Dominic feels like family,” Amanda continued. “He feels like a teammate I was always meant to have. I know he’s attractive—drop-dead handsome, even. I have eyes. But none of that pulls at me the way his heart does when he’s talking to me about his insecurities or his fears for the future or the way he misses his grandfather. I honestly don’t think I’d care if he looked like Quasimodo because I’m just so enamored by who he is on the inside, and I don’t want to let go of that.”
Nola reached a hand forward and placed it on top of Amanda’s. “Sex is only one part of relationships—and it doesn’t have to be a big part or any part. There are so many marriages out there that are super healthy with tons of sex and super healthy with none at all. The reverse is also true. You know Jessica from Mommy and Me Gymnastics? She brags about having sex with her husband twice a day, but I’ve never seen two people who hate each other more.”
Amanda let out a laugh. “See? That’s what I’m saying. I just want to embrace who I am, and whatever that looks like in a relationship. I don’t know if that makes Dominic the person for me, or if a person for me even exists. I know it’s something I’ll need to keep talking to him about, but I’m okay with putting myself out there for now and giving this a try. I think… I think it could be something. I think he and I could be something, and after this job situation becomes clearer, I’m going to talk to him about it.”
Rosie’s phone buzzed on the tabletop with a new notification. She glanced down at it for only half a second but then quickly did a double take and picked it up to read more closely. “Oh my gosh…”
“What?” Nola removed her hand from Amanda and turned to Rosie. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
Amanda grabbed at her phone, as if she might have the same notification, but her screen was blank.
Rosie lifted her eyes to Amanda, and her face had turned completely pale. “Amanda, I think this might be about Dominic.”
“What?” Amanda could feel the air being squeezed from her lungs as she leaned forward and took Rosie’s cell phone from her. She turned it to face her and read the recent local news notification that was on the locked screen: Former Detroit Tigers Player Suffers Medical Emergency on Flight, Emergency Landing Initiated in Cleveland, Ohio .
“Oh my God,” Amanda gasped, quickly clicking on the notification to read the full article. It pulled up but literally only included maybe one more sentence than the title itself and had no additional information, including a name. “Wait… what? It doesn’t say who or what happened. It just says it’s an ongoing story. What the hell kind of reporting is this?”
Nola grabbed the phone from her and caught herself up on the sparse storyline. “I mean, there’s no way it can be anyone else, though, can it? He got on a plane today, and Cleveland is only ninety miles from Detroit’s airport. An emergency landing there would make sense if the medical issue happened right after takeoff.”
“And it doesn’t say current player. It says former,” Rosie added. “What are the odds it could be about someone else?”
Amanda hoped beyond all hopes that it was talking about literally anyone else, but Rosie and Nola were both right. This was most likely about Dominic. “I need to call him.”
“Yeah,” Rosie agreed, wide-eyed.
Both she and Nola leaned forward as Amanda picked up her cell phone and quickly clicked on Dominic’s contact information. His number came up and she hit the call button, holding it up to her ear. It rang six or seven times, but no one answered. Instead, it clicked over to voicemail and Dominic’s prerecorded voice came on.
“He’s not answering,” Amanda said, hanging up the phone without leaving a message. Instead, she typed out a quick text message to him asking him to check in and saying she’d seen a news story that was concerning. “I don’t know what to do. Do I keep calling him? Do I call his mom?”
“Maybe the news channel’s social media has more news,” Rosie said, picking up her cell phone again and tapping away at it like it was her job. “Social media always has the latest information even if the news websites aren’t updated yet.”
“If theirs doesn’t, someone else’s might. Maybe someone on the flight is posting about it,” Nola offered. “Not that that would be good, either. I mean, I can’t imagine my personal medical information or emergency being put out on the World Wide Web like that.”
Amanda knew that Dominic would absolutely hate that but that he was also accustomed to the lack of privacy his lifestyle had given him. He’d told her before that the large paycheck wasn’t worth the invasion on every part of who he was, and she hated to think that might be happening to him again today, even almost eighteen months out from that life.
“Oh, God.” Rosie groaned loudly and turned her phone screen around to face Amanda and Nola. “There’s a video. It’s Dominic.”
Amanda grabbed at her phone and quickly hit play on the short cell phone video that another passenger on the flight had shot of Dominic. He was standing up in the middle of an airplane aisle and shouting for a doctor, holding the palms of his hands over his eyes. A half-open suitcase with clothes strewn about was lopsided on the seat in front of him and the overhead bin was wide-open, like it had just fallen from there. She couldn’t make out what he was saying in the garbled video, but it was definitely Dominic. The person taking the video was laughing in the background and joking that “a passenger got hit in the head with a suitcase.”
Amanda felt her entire body fill with rage at the poster and she tossed Rosie’s cell phone back down onto the tabletop. “I have to get to Cleveland right now.”
“You don’t even know where he is,” Nola reminded her. “It’s not like they’re going to keep him at the airport if there’s a medical emergency. Plus, it looks like a suitcase fell on him. I don’t know how that would constitute a medical emergency.”
Amanda had an idea but didn’t want to say it out loud in case that might make it real.
“So I’ll go to the closest hospital, then,” Amanda said. “They’d bring him there if he landed in Cleveland.”
“It’s still a five-hour drive, Amanda,” Rosie added. “What if he’s not there by the time you arrive?”
She pushed her chair back and stood up quickly. “I can’t just sit here, Rosie. I can’t just do nothing. Look at him! He’s clearly in pain, and people are laughing at him!”
Rosie didn’t respond, closing her mouth and nodding instead.
Nola stood up, too, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a set of car keys. “Okay, but take my car. It’s faster and has better gas mileage. Plus, if you have to drive him back, it has more space for him to lay out than your sedan does. There’s also a bunch of bags of Goldfish crackers in the center console if you get hungry. And a secret stash of Hershey’s Kisses in the glove box.”
Amanda took the keys to Nola’s SUV and nodded, her brain feeling like it was going into autopilot. “I will text the group chat when I get there. If you hear anything in the meantime, let me know immediately. And can one of you watch Tom?”
Rosie saluted her like she was in the military. “On it. I’ll take Tom to my house for the night, or until whenever you get back. I’ll take his litter box, too. The kids will be ecstatic. They’ve been begging for a pet, so maybe this will shut them up until Christmas.”
Amanda just nodded, not really able to meet Rosie or Nola at their humor right now. She shoved her own cell phone in her pocket and grabbed a bottle of water out of the fridge and her purse off the kitchen counter, then headed out the front door to Nola’s SUV in the driveway.
As she started the car up and put in directions to the hospital closest to the Cleveland airport, she couldn’t stop replaying the image of Dominic standing up in the center aisle of the airplane and screaming in pain. If anything happened to him, she wasn’t even sure how she’d react.
All she did know was that she needed to be there with him, and she needed to be there now.