Page 9 of Not Catching Love

Feathers of panic brush my heart.

“Aggy … what would you do if Seven and Molly moved into their own place?”

She’s focused back on her knitting. “Buy them a toaster and pray they don’t burn it to the ground?”

“But they’d be gone.”

She glances up. “From Seattle? Where are they moving to?”

“Well, nowhere. But they might. They probably will—Molly’s dad lives in Massachusetts—and then where does that leave the rest of us?”

She fixes me with one of her stern looks. “Happy for them. That’s where it leaves us.”

“I don’t know if I will be.”

“You will.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“Because you’d never do anything to hurt either of those men.”

She’s got me there. Seven deserves the world, and I’d been—and still am—so happy that he found Molly. Molly is the pure sweetness neither of us ever had in our lives, and I love him to death, but they scare me. There’ll eventually be a day where it’s not Seven and Molly and Xander, just Seven and Molly, and I’ll never survive it.

“And they wouldn’t hurtyou,” Aggy says, pulling me out of my funk. “No one is moving to Massachusetts.”

She gazes at me with murky brown eyes, and I gaze back.

“You have a lot of cataracts,” I whisper.

“And you have a lot of nerve,” she whispers right back.

“Can you promise to live for another … fifty years so that I never have to be alone?”

“Nope. Come and teach some art lessons at the nursing home, then you’ll never be short on old people to dote on you.”

“I hate everything about that idea. Take one for the team, won’t you?”

She squeezes my knee. “No. Dear god, no. That sounds horrendous. But I will promise not to leave until I know you’re looked after. So, if you could get moving on that, it would be much appreciated.”

My thoughts drift to Derek and his gorgeous face and the way he both gives my heart little wings and makes me want to poke out his eyes, all at the same time. Emotions are complex, do not recommend.

It’d be so much easier not to have any.

I never learned that skill. My emotions are either happy orsulky orkill them all, and there’s no in-between. There’s also very little pre-warning, which will come out from one minute to the next. I can be having a great day, and then suddenly, everything will be shit, I’m shit, everyone is shit, and I take a very deep dive into a very shallow pool. I try to be cute and happy like Molly, but that sunshine doesn’t reach the swampy marshlands my brain bobs along in.

“Bit hard to do that when the man I want doesn’t want me back.”

“Your nurse friend?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I should think not.”

That surprises me. “What do you mean?”

“There are rules about patients and the people treating them for good reason.”

“Really?” I eye her skeptically. “You’re all about breaking rules.”

---