Page 59 of Mark my Words

“I’m trying to get work done.”

Sam was quiet for a few moments, staring at me with a little frown pulling at his mouth as I stared at my laptop screen, entirely unable to focus. I knew it was rude, but I needed space.

“Do you want me to go?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. Part of me wanted to say yes, pushing him even farther away. But the other part of me wanted to go home and cuddle up in bed with him, pretending that the advancement of our professional careers wasn’t in direct competition with each other.

“Hey.” He pressed the lid on my laptop shut. I sat back in my chair and pulled my coffee cup up for a drink. Anything to avoid looking at him or touching him. “What’s wrong? Did you hear something from HR already? They were supposed to send information to the people going forward in an hour or so.”

“No,” I shook my head. “I haven’t heard anything.”

“Do you want to try to get some work done in the conference room until we find out? Keep our minds busy while we wait?”

“What do you think I was doing here, Sam? I’m trying to work, but you won’t leave me alone. If I wanted to work with someone else right now, I would have stayed at the office.”

“Seriously?” He was looking at me like I was acting unreasonably, and maybe I was, but I wasn’t used to all these feelings that had been developing under the surface. This was why I had only wanted one night with him. Now it was complicated, and there were feelings involved I wasn’t sure how to process.

My parents weren’t exactly great role models for conducting a relationship, choosing to plaster on fake smiles and avoid spending time alone together. Once that new love luster had worn off when I was a toddler, my parents barely tolerated each other.

I didn’t know how to be in a relationship, and Sam had grown up with June Cleaver for a mother and a slew of older sisters who all were in happy marriages and had kids they weren’t actively fucking up. We weren’t from the same world, and eventually, he was bound to see how emotionally stunted I was and would walk away.

Maybe it was better if I did it first.

“I’ll email Isobel to let her know I will be out of the office for the rest of the day. Congrats if you get to the next round. I’m sure they loved you.”

“Are you brushing me off? Again?” Sam reached forward to grab my hand, but I jerked it away at the last second. I wouldn’t be strong enough to follow through if he touched me.

Leaning over to grab my bag, I shoved my laptop inside and pushed the trash from my lunch back inside the paper bag from the coffee shop. “Sam, I asked for space, and you’re not giving it to me. You’re not my boyfriend, so please stop acting like you are.”

“Wow, nice, Kristine. Fine. Whatever. Run away. That seems to be what you do best.”

My eyes stung as I strode toward the exit without looking backward. I knew I was fucking this all up, but I didn’t know how to stop.

KRISTINE

BOSTON

My phone chimed with a text message as I went through the small stack of mail I’d retrieved from the lobby of my apartment building when I got home, and I looked at my bag like a bomb had gone off. Was it going to be him? Did it matter?

Nana: When are you coming to see me?

My heart dropped as I looked at the message on the screen. It wasn’t him, but my grandmother didn’t deserve to be ignored because of my disappointment at blowing up my nonexistent love life.

Kristine: Hey, Nana.

Nana: Don’t Hey, Nana. me.

Kristine: Are you at the house on the Cape?

My phone started ringing, her name filling the screen. Oh, come on, Nana. I don’t want to talk. She hated texting. She’d do it to get my attention, but she didn’t like to have conversations via text messages.

“Oh, you’re going to answer this time, I see,” she laughed as the call connected.

“You act like I don’t answer your calls most of the time, old lady.” We didn’t talk frequently, but she’d call me every few months to check in and see how I was doing. My mother never called me to talk. There always had to be something she wanted from me, and she accused me of being a terrible child if I didn’t answer her calls while I was at work, so I just stopped responding altogether. She could pull her toxic codependent crap on Gregory. She loved him more anyway, and everyone knew it. I’d always be her disappointment.

“Who are you calling old?” Nana laughed, her voice husky. She’d stopped smoking years ago,when I was a little girl, but her voice still had that deep, gravelly tone of someone who used to chain smoke when they were younger.

“I’m not the one turning eighty this summer.” It felt unreal that she was that age already. It didn’t feel like we had a fifty-five year age gap between us. But Mason hadn’t settled down until he was over thirty-five, and my mother was already pregnant with Gregory then. Sometimes I wondered if their relationship would have died off without my brother. They claimed they loved each other, but as a person who grew up living with them, I wasn’t sure how they considered how they treated each other love, more like grudging tolerance that included a side of avoidance.

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