PuckingSkylerShaw: See you soon?
Me: Sooner than you think.
PuckingSkylerShaw: Cryptic. I like it.
He didn’t know I was here.
He thought “sooner than you think” meant I’d see him at the bar later tonight, or maybe tomorrow. He had no idea I was sitting in a sad parking lot, watching his flight inch closer on a tracking app like some kind of maniac bent on egg-tossing or photo-snapping.
God, this was insane.
What was I even going to say when he got in the car? “Hey, I missed you so much that I couldn’t wait a few more hours to see you, so I drove to the airport like a crazy person?”
That sounded desperate.
It sounded like something someone with feelings would say.
Which I didnothave.
I refreshed the tracker again.
Fourteen minutes.
The waiting lot had filled up while I’d been spiraling. More gray sedans and more people staringat phones. A woman two cars over was having an animated phone conversation, her hands gesturing close to her windshield. A guy in a pickup truck was eating what appeared to be an entire rotisserie chicken with his bare hands.
Tampa was a weird place sometimes.
And I loved it here.
I hit refresh.
Eleven minutes.
Determined to not stare at the tiny plane, I opened Instagram again and scrolled without seeing anything, then closed it.
Then opened the flight tracker again. Closed it.
Opened my texts.
Sooner than you think.
What had possessed me to send that? It was flirty. It was suggestive. It was the kind of thing I should not be saying to a straight man I was trying to maintain a platonic friendship with.
But I didn’t feel platonic anymore.
Maybe I never had.
Two weeks of constant communication had stripped away whatever pretense I’d been clinging to.
I knew what time Skyler woke up (too early) and what he ate for breakfast on game days (eggs, toast with blackberry jam, and exactly one cup of coffee with exactly one Splenda and exactly one tablespoonof cream—which was weird because no one measured their cream in teaspoons).
I knew he called his mom every Sunday and that he had a secret fear of butterflies (“They’re moths in drag, Jacks, and moths are basically sky spiders.”).
And I knew the sound of his laugh through a phone speaker and the way his voice got soft and sleepy when we talked too late at night.
I knewhim.
And knowing him had made everything worse.
