“What are you doing walking around a dark street at night with a piece of equipment that probably costs more than a normal week’s paycheck?”
I drop the phone down onto the passenger seat, leaving FaceTime on so he can stare at the ceiling of my Wrangler. “I don’t recall agreeing to be your concern, Brody,” I tell him, starting the ignition.
“Well, I didn’t ask,” he counters. “As a human being with a brain, I’m just calling out a blunt fact that a beautiful woman like yourself shouldn’t be walking down a dark street alone with expensive equipment.”
“I can take care of myself. I’ve been doing so for quite some time now.”
“Is it that you can take care of yourself, or do you tiptoe through life thinking you’re tougher than shit?”
“Shit isn’t very tough, bright one. It’s actually pretty—”
“Okay, enough. I’m serious. Do you even lock your doors at night?”
I roll my eyes, though he can’t see me anymore. “Sure,” I tell him.
“You better.”
“Okay, I’m in my locked car, driving down the street where I can run someone over if need be. I think we can end our call now, but it was a pleasure.”
“This conversation isn’t over,” Brody says.
“All I have to do is push the ‘end’ button, and it will be.”
“Meet me at Peak Pub tomorrow at eight,” he says.
“No thanks,” I sigh.
“How many times do I have to ask you to meet me for a drink before you will agree?”
I smile, feeling the warm sense of sin flare through my cheeks. “So many, you won’t be able to count high enough.”
“This isn’t helping our game,” he informs me. “Don’t forget about your threat to win.”
“What game?” I stick my tongue between my teeth, feeling like I’m holding power in this conversation that needs to end.
“Fine. You get the first point,” he says. “Goodnight, fireball.”
I grab my phone and hit ‘end’ button without saying goodbye.
It’s a long fifteen-minute drive filled with racing thoughts before I’m pulling into the parking lot of the old-stone-mill that houses my studio apartment.
I find myself peeking over my shoulder while clutching my phone in one hand and my keys in the other, wishing the landlord would add a couple of lights to this parking lot. It isn’t until I’m inside my eight-hundred square-foot open space that my shoulders relax, and my pulse slows. With another peek at my phone’s dark screen, I toss the device onto the counter.
The quiet hits me as I stare out the dark windows, knowing there is nothing out there but the view of cloud-covered mountaintops that can’t be deciphered at this time of night.
I drop down onto my sofa and toss my head back, staring through the window, upside down, toward the slight blur of the hidden moon and stars. “I miss you so much,” I utter. “It hurts. It hurts like it was yesterday. I hope you can hear me.”
2
When the dawnlight used to leak into iron-framed window, I would pull my weighted blanket up over my head, blocking out life for a few extra minutes until the rush of adrenaline sparked my desire to grab my camera and seek a unique snowflake glimmering in the sun, or the moment when a cloud would bear the peak of a freshly coated mountain. There hadn’t been a day I could remember where I didn’t have the Christmas-morning-excitement to start snapping stills of the moving world around me.
Until lately.
It’s been just over a month since Dad passed away for the ugly c-word. Each morning when the subtle hints of sunlight glow across my closed eyelids, I’m pulled from a place where my heart feels intact. He’s alive in my dreams—his voice, his all-knowing life explanations—I can still hear him. Then, I question ifmy head is playing tricks on me.
There’s a heaviness on my chest, one that holds me down like the weighted blanket I haven’t slept without this past month. It’s more comforting to stay in bed;easier than facing another day filled with a roller coaster of emotions, points where I forget, moments where I remember as if it happened five minutes ago, and flashing memories that bring me to my knees.
I stretch my arms out across the sheets, feeling the familiar emptiness beside me—a blank space which has never bothered me before. After Dad died, thoughts of investing time into a loving relationship just to reach a point where one person has to say goodbye began to feel more pointless than any reason I’ve had to appreciate my independent lifestyle. Then, something changed.
