“Yeah. I can do that,” she shrugs. "It won’t be as bad as the last trip. Lily and Janice are gonna be there too, they’re ok. Well, I like Lily alright, and she always invites Janice. But she's never been a dick to me.”
“Sounds like it’ll be fun,” I lie, a little deflated to remember Janice, and how she reacted when she saw me. Kathy might not care, but clearly some people are bothered by my presence alone, now that they know what I am. And for that much, I’m reminded that I was right to break things off with Vlad. Maybe I shouldn’t have yelled or run away like that. But it had to be done.
My heart is still beating rapidly at the thought of seeing Vlad again, I’m not sure if it’s dread or something else, when Kathy pushes away from the table, says some brief farewell as she heads out, that I return without thinking.
The impulse that moved me to speak still flutters hard in my chest. I want to see Vlad again, if only to apologize for how I ended things between us. He deserves that much. And perhaps selfishly, I want every second of him that I can have.
I open a drawer on my desk and brush a handful of paperclips into it haphazardly, stuffing the debris out of sight. If only it was that easy to stuff away the rest of my feelings. Everything he made me feel just by being around him and talking to him hasn’t left me just because I’m alone now. It sits inside me, making it hard to fully breathe.
I leave work a little early to get to an appointment. The dentist’s office is the first bit of unabridged quiet I’ve had since getting back home. There isn’t even music playing in the waiting room. The silence weighs heavy on my chest.
Usually seeing Dr. Lucille isn’t my favorite thing, because she’s so chatty and overly friendly, and her hair snakes don’t know the meaning of personal space. But there really isn’t anyone else who takes my insurance in the area.
“Girl. What did I say about taking care of your enamels? Are you back to grinding your teeth again?” Dr. Lucille says while poking the little mirror tool in my mouth. I’m trying not to breathe in her face, but it’s a little difficult while she’s peering at my back molars.
She adds a little threat when I fail to answer, “Just look at these scrapes on them. I will send you home with a mouth guard.”
“I’m not grinding my teeth,” I say around her plastic-gloved fingers, but it still comes out a little garbled. She’s probably used to it.
“Taking Abyssal lessons again?”
“Nmo,” I reply, and accidentally lick her finger in the process of trying not to. One more thing to add to my list of reasons I need a break from existing.
“Hm,” she says, and adjusts the overhead light. “Oh, look at this bruise.”
“Wheh?”
“On your soft palette,” she mutters, drawing the back of the mirror tool against the roof of my mouth to let me know where it is. She hums again, before presuming, “Aw, good for you, getting out of your house.”
She takes her tools out of my mouth momentarily, landing in her little swivel stool and rolling back across the room to flip the page in my chart and glance at it.
I sit up and frown at her. “What do you mean?”
She cracks a wide smile and gestures at her own mouth, indicating the roof. “The blowjob bruise.”
I don’t have the energy to be scandalized that she can tell.
“Oh. Yeah,” I mumble, and sit back in the chair. Distantly, it all kind of clicks into place, a mystery that didn’t really need solving. “That’s probably what scraped my enamels up.”
“Oh. Well, I can set you up with a different kind of mouthguard for—” she says and looks too excited at the prospect of telling me how to protect my teeth against stone cocks for all the mouth-bruising fellatio I want.
“I don’t need a mouth guard, I’m not going to see him again,” I insist, cutting her off quickly. I really don’t want to hear about it right now.
She nods and goes back to the manila folder with all my previous visit’s records in it, making a note. She continues chatting over her shoulder. “I miss the days when it was just tooth keys and crushing teeth to bits. Now it’s all X-rays and submitting health insurance paperwork.”
She’s gone on rambles about the good old Dark Reigns before, and usually that’s my cue to nod along and say something about the weather and the state of the roads, to try to remember something I liked about the last century. But I can’t. I can’t hear a thing she’s saying, because I’m thinking about everything I was holding at bay.
I told him no because I didn’t want to get hurt. But now it hurts so much. I liked him so much; I couldn’t bear the thought of what it would feel like to find the same disappointment with him I always feel when someone shows me their true colors.
I’m not about to be crying in my dentist’s office over a guy I had an office fling with. I’m not. I’m really not.
I head to the front of the office, and Dr. Lucille’s hair snakes flick their little tongues out goofily, trying to lift my mood with their own.
“Since you didn’t bite me like my last patient did, I thought I’d let you take something from the treat bowl,” she offers, a kind little gesture. I return a fraction of her smile and look into the plastic bowl full of sugar-free lollipops and glow in the dark keychains.
She shakes the bowl a little as she holds it out, and in the tumble of fun little nothings, a sheet of shiny, star-shaped stickers is unearthed.
And there goes my composure.
