“‘More scared’?” I whisper, trying to ignore the dread pooling across my insides at the thought. I break off a corner of Dane’s cornbread to try and wash the fear down with carbs.
“Hey,” she says, pulling the cornbread back toward her. She’s the most generous person I know, except when it comes to sharing mybaked goods. But then she turns back to the conversation at hand. “Yeah. The kind of man who can be pissed at histherapistinstead of himself when his girlfriend leaves him is not having some kind of self-reflection about whether he should pick a fight with a neighbor, you know what I mean?”
I sneer a little bit at the thought. “Yeah, probably,” I admit.
“And, as I’ve said to you before, he has all the actual legal rights to the space. So even if he’s going about it kind of in a dickish way, you don’t actually have any leg to stand on.”
“Thanks, Dane,” I reply sarcastically. “Super helpful.”
“Honestyishelpful,” she says while I try not to be too obvious about my desire to sulk. “You should definitely still try to stop it since, yeah, having people come in and out of your hallway at all hours of the night is annoying. I don’t blame you for trying. But I’m just saying, he absolutely has not given up. He’s clearly got something up his sleeve if he went silent. Don’t pretend like this is all going away simply because you want it to.”
“A girl can dream,” I grumble.
“A girl can dream, but a girl should also be prepared.Whenhe makes his plans known, send them to me. I can flag anything that doesn’t look kosher, from the soundproofing of his flooring materials to the drainage for his plants. And if he doesn’t have that level of detail, you can call him out on that too.”
“I thought you said I have no leg to stand on?” I remind her with a small grin, touched by her commitment to my lost cause.
“Oh you don’t, but let’s still make it as onerous and lengthy for him as possible. He doesn’t get to be mad at you for literally doing your job! Men with egos like that need to dance a little bit before they can get exactly what they want.”
She winks at me and takes a last bite of cornbread. Then she’s up and reracking, and I’m perfectly content for my hobby tonight to be watching my favorite friend prepare herself for her own battle of her weekly pool rec league. We both have to have hobbies, after all.
Chapter 8
I wake up the next day from George wandering onto my head. Sometimes when he wants to be extra moody, he just plops right onto me, as though my head is merely an extension of the pillow and it’s his for the taking. It’s not exactly feasible to keep sleeping when there’s a twelve-pound, breathing, furry object on your face.
I slide him off me and sit up. My phone is sitting on my bedside table, still totally dark and looming. It’s like it’s silently waiting for me to get a grip and turn it back on.
I have to admit I’ve kind of enjoyed a day without anyone having the ability to call me. When I got home last night, it was too tempting not to plug it in while still leaving it off.
But I can’t keep avoiding. I turn my phone on and wait as it boots up. I open WhatsApp first and see that right there waiting for me is a message from J.
J: Hello! So you do exist outside a file on my computer!
The message was sent right after mine, at 3:03 p.m. yesterday. I see there’s another one after that, though, at 4:23 p.m.
J: Obviously you exist. I just meant ... well, I was going to say it was nice to be able to say hello on a day other than Tuesday, but it’s still Tuesday, so ignore me.
Then below that, at 6:52 p.m.
J: (You know, you don’t follow my suggestions as astutely when they’re grammar notes.)
I’m trying to hold in the smile that’s slowly drawing across my face, but I can’t help it. This delightfully dorky man is just ashimselfover text as he is on the column edits. It’s like turning something from a 2D drawing on a page to a digital animation. There’s more flesh and bone to his words here, constrained less by immediacy.
Except I think about how nervous I’d been to text him and wonder ... is it possible he was nervous to text me too? If I’d texted him and then seen no response all day, I’d probably also have texted little quips (and then probably regretted them later). I get a little surge thinking that maybe I’m not so on my own here. Maybe Ari was right, and I needed to trust my gut and reach out.
And I definitely should not leave him hanging anymore.
Nora: If my phone was off all day at work, and then I forgot to turn it back on, and now it’s Wednesday morning—does that count as enough time of ignoring you?
??Oh so you were following my suggestions???he writes back immediately.
I purse my lips, trying to ignore my relief that he didn’t keep me hanging the way I obviously left him.
Nora: Promise just a busy day and then an evening out with my best friend that went too late! And sorry for texting you when it’s clearly already the middle of the workday in your time zone—but I didn’t want you to actually think I was ignoring you after berating you into giving me your phone number so I could steal all your best London recommendations.
Maybe I’m hedging; maybe I’m trying to create a little bit of plausible deniability. But I can’t help it. I’m out on a limb, and I want to stay close enough to the trunk that I don’t crack the branch.
The therapist in me doesn’t want to interrupt my own peace by adding a man into my mental load. The cynical part of me is insecure about whether I’m delusional to even consider that he could be.
