Everly
“So he just walked out on you?”
Making herself at home, Oakley tugs her pajama-clad legs into a cross near my sheet-encased feet. She shakes open the woven throw folded there and spreads it over her, shivering the mattress in the process. She pestered me the entire weekend about Knox. Now, on Tuesday night, after yet another frenzied and frigid day that’s made my tired bones literally ache, she’scornered me and pinned me down, leaving me no choice but to field her questions.
“Pretty much.” One minute Knox was asking me out, and the next,poof, a vanishing act. “I guess he doesn’t take rejection well.” Only, Iwasn’trejecting him. I needed to figure out if me taking Friday evening off was workable.
Her makeup-less eyes are wide, her mouth open. “That seems…childish.”
I shrug. “Yes, it does.” And I have no space for that sort of man in my life.
The part of me that loves control, order, and the known breathes a sigh of relief at being able to check Knox off my list. Relationships can be such drama. Break one’s stride.
But much like a pesky younger sister, my emotional side, the one with tamped down longing, the one that occasionally permits my heart to take over for a spell, feels the sting of tears. The metaphoric kind, of course. I could never cry over a man I barely knew, much less a hypersensitive, overreactive kind.
With a head tilt, Oakleyhmms. “He didn’t seem childish.”
No, no he did not. I smirk. “You spent five minutes with him, Oak.”
“Sometimes that’s all that’s needed. Besides, I’m a master at reading people.”
I’ll take this moment not to remind her of her freshman-year college boyfriend, the guy she was one security check at the airport away from eloping with back in the day.
Starting at the base of her skull, she slowly combs the long strands of her shampooed hair with her fingers. “That’s so weird. I’m telling you, something doesn’t add up.”
“Two and two pretty much always make four, Oak.”
She swats my logic away. “Says miss black-and-white attorney.”
“Hey, miss med school, miss woman of science, facts are facts.”
She snorts. “Doctors have to think outside the box sometimes, too, you know.”
This conversation is a deteriorating one, if not flat out pointless from its inception.
“I’m sorry, sis. I know you were into Knox.”
Those are not words I ever spoke. Words have a way of returning to haunt.
“Maybe he’ll come back.”
“At this point, I hope he doesn’t.”
Snuggled into the blanket, Oakley huddles forward. Fuzzy tassels brush against her chin. “Maybe something happened. Maybe he got an important phone call.”
And walked out without a word? No thanks. “He still could have come back later on, or at any point over the last two days. Besides, all the coworkers he eats lunch with have been in twice, but not him.”
“You didn’t ask them where he was?”
“Not on your life.”
“Of course, you didn’t. That would have made too much sense.”
“If you’d met the rest of the guys, you’d understand. Trust me.” That one guy, Mike, I think, leers nonstop. I get away as fast as I can. Besides, Marlene is usually happy to wait on them.
Oakley taps the blanket to her chin. “I still say there could be an explanation.”
“Nope. His face changed when I didn’t accept his invitation to the cantata.”
