30. Lucy
“Alright,I’m heading downstairs to the gym. You sure you don’t want to come?” Gracie raised her brows at me.
“Uh, yeah. I’m fine right here.” I reassured her by pressing my ass further into the window seat cushion.
I had only been to Knightwood once growing up, I think we drove through it to get to Maine, but never spent any time here.
“Okay, suit yourself!” She placed her headphones over her ears, but stopped before the doorframe. Distracted by whatever was on her phone.
“What, can’t find the right song to listen to?”
“Huh?” she mumbled out but kept her attention on her phone. “Oh, ha, yeah.”
“What’s going on? Are you and Asher back together?”
She snapped her head up at me. “Oh, fuck no!”
I waited for her to continue, as she is not one to shy away from gossip hour, but nothing. Whatever it was—whoever it was—surely held her attention in a way I’d never seen before. Her head hovered over her phone screen. I walked over and waved my hand in between her and the screen. “Just the other day you were crying over everything with Asher. Don’t tell me you already started dating someone else.”
“If you must know, I am texting Mel.”
“Mel. Mel? Sawyer’s Mel?”
Her mouth was agape. “That is the first time you have said his name in almost a month.”
My face burned as I let my subconscious thoughts surface. Despite everything on my plate, all that is “Sawyer Banks” managed to flood my brain at the worst of times. As much as I tried not to talk about him, he still rented a space in my head despite my best efforts. Biting my lip, I looked away. His name left a familiar taste on my lips, one I’d been craving—a craving I was fighting.
“That is so not true,” I spoke into my next bite of food, then sat up straight, ignoring her moment of deflection. “Don’t do that, don’t make it about me and what I don’t want to talk about. Let’s talk about what you aren’t talking about. Mel. How are you talking to her?”
“We exchanged numbers at Sawyer’s Fourth of July party while you were off doing whatever you two were doing. It’s no big deal, we sort of became friends.”
“Friends.”
“Yes, friends.”
“I don’t see friends texting like that. I don’t think I have ever seen you that giddy while texting me. Seriously, who are you texting?”
A distraction over Gracie’s new beau was exactly what I needed. I wanted to get excited over love and something new and shiny.
“How would you know? I’m texting you, which implies you’re not around. For all you know, I kick my feet and twirl my hair.”
Gracie has spent a lot of the time that I’ve known her in tears over Asher, years that were once Instagram captioned as “some of their best years” before she archived them all.
I never understood it. She always brought happiness to those around her, but now it seemed like she was finally allowing herself to feel that same happiness. I didn’t want to push it anymore. Whoever, whatever was going on between her and the person on the other side of the screen, I didn’t mind all that much. As long as she was smiling again.
“I gotta get going,” she said, letting the door slam behind her.
I’ve always hated that habit of hers, letting the door slam shut behind her. She always seemed to have earlier days whenever I had the chance to sleep in, and she would let the door become my new alarm clock. It’s safe to say that is one thing I hadn’t missed about being away from her this summer.
I closed the laptop from my completed video call with one of my students; it felt great getting back into the swing of things, scheduling more tutoring sessions than I had been this summer. A lot of them were spent over my phone as I rode shotgun—Gracie and I have spent the last three weeks road trippin’ through New England—but it still felt like I had a purpose again.
I sunk into the couch this time and became familiar with the ridges and paint strokes of the ceiling as I waited for my food delivery to arrive. Falling into a deep haze over whether it was marshmallow white or off-white was the most tranquil thing I’ve done in weeks.
Sometimes I mourned my summer, the idea of what it could’ve been. I meant it when I said I wanted everything with Sawyer. But I’m thinking that that’s all that it was—an idea. It didn’t mean that I don’t still daydream about the possibilities that could have come with staying the remaining seven weeks.
Would we have had more farmer’s market dates? Would Leanne and I have been able to make pies and pastries? Would Sawyer have taught me how to make a Manhattan? Would I have fallen in love with him?
I guess I’ll never know.