Chapter Twenty-Six
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
JOEL
I n the middle of my weekly session with Dr. Adams, my phone buzzed. I glanced down, torn between wanting to answer it immediately or pick it up and throw it out the window.
Dr. Adams watched my internal struggle. “Is that her?”
He’d caught onto my despondent mood the minute I walked in and had focused much of the session so far on how to overcome this setback.
“Yes.”
“Would you like me to step out and you can take the call?”
“No.”
“Joel, what is bothering you the most from this situation?”
I picked at a thread on the hem of my shirt. That single question had lived as my shadow for the past forty-eight hours. There wasn’t one answer I could consistently land on. It changed by the minute. Right now, I was mad at myself. Mad I got oddly attached to a stranger so fast. Mad I let myself think I could even be happy again. Mad she meant more to me than I did to her.
“I let down my carefully constructed wall and it screwed me over,” I finally said.
“Do you regret it?”
The answer came without a second thought. “No.”
He didn’t directly respond to my admission. Instead, he suggested double sessions the next two weeks to make sure I didn’t overextend myself in the name of heartache. He reminded me I needed to embrace change and take time to do things that brought me happiness. Usually, I appreciated his counseling insight, but not tonight. I spent the last ten minutes staring at him in what became the world’s longest non-blinking standoff.
I left the session and pulled up the voicemail. What I heard was worse than anything I prepared myself to hear Natalie say. All she did was bawl before eventually hanging up. Did she want me to call her back? What was I supposed to say when she answered?
Unable to trust I wouldn’t say something instantly regrettable, I didn’t reply. After a few days, Natalie stopped reaching out. I took that as a sign she had moved on from her vacation fling. It was time for me to do likewise.
Island Water Sports was thrilled when I called on the fourth day and asked me to pick up Sunday shifts. I decided what I needed was to stay busy. Busy had worked for me the last two and half years. I could do busy again. I needed to get out of my head.
The fifth night, I joined the gym around the corner from my apartment. A good weight training session had been missing from my workouts for too long. An hour disappeared while I put together a playlist for runs and a playlist for the gym. It was cathartic.
On the sixth day, I recommitted myself to better runs. With five months until the Honolulu Marathon, I needed to focus so I could set a PR this time around. I’d spent time looking online for other marathons I could sign up for—two years’ worth of collected time o! was calling my name. Lots of cities I hadn’t visited and lots of race courses to run. That would keep me busy too.
Then on day seven, I got a series of texts while out on a run after work .
I had never been one to listen to music while I ran. I liked being completely aware of everything around me. I found I focused better on my breathing and pacing if I wasn’t distracted. In the name of starting over, it was time to shake things up. With my new purchase of wireless earbuds and a new pair of the latest running shoes, it was time to test everything out.
According to my favorite running app, the loop from my apartment around the base of Diamond Head was seven miles. Easy enough. I popped in the earbuds and had made it halfway through the route when my phone kept dinging with incoming texts. I stopped at Fort Ruger Park and unstrapped my phone from my chest harness to find a handful of photos from Lea.
Natalie and I with Annie and Jeff after the ceremony. In one of them, Natalie laughed at something Jeff had said—my attention was completely on her, watching her be wholly immersed in the moment. We both looked so in sync, so full of joy. Another photo of us with Matt and Emma toward the end of the evening; Natalie had leaned into me, resting her body in a natural, relaxed way against mine, and I had enveloped her in my arms. I noticed she was the only one not looking at the camera, but instead tilted her head up to sneak a peek at me.
In all of them, she looked like she liked me. I thought she did. Everybody thought she did. She played us all for fools. Yet I couldn’t tear my eyes away. I kept swiping through them and scrutinizing every detail.
We looked comfortable with one another, and the way she leaned on me or found ways to touch me would have suggested there was major chemistry from both of us. We undeniably looked like we had known one another more than a week. The worst part was, I saw life back in my eyes.
The last photo was all of us dancing with Ben and Lea. Everybody appeared to be having the time of their life. Under any other circumstances, this would be a photo you enlarged and framed, keeping it displayed forever. Natalie looked beautiful .
I screamed. One loud, short, exasperated crazy-person release of aggression and then snapped my phone back into place and kept the course.
Pound.
Pound.
Pound.
Seeing those photos made one thing abundantly clear: Regardless of how this had turned out, I still wanted her life to be everything she hoped for. I wanted to know she was happy. The fact that she didn’t give me the same respect drew an expletive from my lips.
Pound.
Pound.
Pound.