Page 14 of As You Ice It

We’ll see how they taste, I guess.

With my shoulder, I hold the phone to my ear and push through the door, precariously but successfully balancing the box and my latte. Outside, wind whips straight through my hoodie and down into my bones. Immediately, my eyes start to water.

I hate winter. And I hate it more in the mountains where it’s not buffered by the mildness the ocean brings.

“The job is … fine,” I tell Eloise.

Finewould be a glow-up for my current position.

On career day in elementary school, I guarantee that no child ever says, “When I grow up, I want to be an office administrator.” Because what evenisan office administrator? It’s the position Pam Beesley invented out of thin air inThe Office. That’s how they should have described it on my company’s website: a made-up job from a fictional TV show.

Back on Oakley, I was an administrative assistant, which meant loads of paperwork, making copies, and sometimes fetching coffee. With my oh-so-glamorous office administrator upgrade, I still do some of that, plus now I order the paper and coffee. Technically, I think I’m also supposed to oversee the administrative assistants, but no one has explained what that entails, and the women in my new office don’t seem towantto be overseen. At least, based on the way they clump up together and shun me.

All in all, it’s unpleasant at best. The raise that looked good on paper somehow translates to only a few hundred more per month. Nothing life changing, and hardly impactful in the end.

“In other words,” Eloise says, her happiness now sounding a little bit more like sage smugness, “youdon’tlove it, the raise isn’t worth making the move, and you should have kept working at the bed and breakfast right here on Oakley with your family. Got it.”

She’s right, at least about some of it. But it would take actual torture to make me admit it. Or the threat of torture. Because all someone would need to do is pull out a pair of pliers or show me a sharp blade and I’d sing like a canary auditioning forAmerican Idol.

But no one is threatening me, and I refuse to cave so quickly and admit to Lo that she’s right about anything—especially after only a week. It would invite a hugeI told you so.

Even if she’d never say it, she’dthinkit.

Because Eloisedidtell me the job I took at a real estate title company four months ago wasn’t going to make me happy. And she repeated it when I told her I was moving for a job with the same company. Before that, I’d been working at the bed and breakfast that Lo and her sisters started out of their grandmother’s old house, and things were good. Family and friends as coworkers can be a challenge, but not with Eloise and her sisters. I liked the hours and the ability to look out almost any window and see the ocean.

I can’t fully explain why I became discontented. I’ve never been able to put logical sounding words together in a way that adequately describes the restlessness that seems to live underneath my skin. It goes dormant sometimes, though I’m always aware of its presence inside me, waiting, building, humming like an electric razor. When the hum becomes a persistent and unignorable buzz, I have to find a way to get it out of my system.

Usually through a new job. A new apartment. Sometimes picking up a new hobby will suffice. This is usually when I try a new hairstyle or color. It just depends how loud the noise becomes, how strong the buzz.

Had I been born in a different time period, I would have really rocked the nomad life. Hoisting all my belongings into a bag I’d sling over my back, ready to pull up roots like tent stakes.

But I wasn’t born in another age, and in our current cultural climate, my urge to cut bait and run makes me look irresponsible and flighty.

It also wreaks havoc on the ability to maintain a relationship, as one might imagine, though Jake says my bad luck is more about the quality of men I pick. He’s not wrong, though I’m self-aware enough to know there’s a heavy dose of self-sabotage thrown in there. I have a hard time imagining myself in a serious, committed relationship. At least while Liam is young.

It’s so much work to find a good guy to date, but I’d also need someone who could do double duty as a dad or father figure. The idea is so intimidating to me, that I feel like I’ve essentially given up and resigned myself to short-lived relationships until Liam is out of the house. They’re too risky, too much pressure.

There’s also the memory of Liam’s biological father and the way his whole face went feral when I told him about Liam. Not that I knew Liam was Liam then, so it was more me telling him about the miraculous kumquat-sized human we had unintentionally created together the one and only and regrettable time we slept together.

Christopher’s eyes went wide, his mouth went slack, and I’m still shocked he didn’t dive straight through the glass window of the coffee shop where we met in order to escape the truth. I guess he did the figurative version, which was backing away from the table, hands up like I had a gun trained on him. I guess that’s how it felt to him.

“It’s not mine,” he said first. “You need a paternity test.”

I sipped my decaf peppermint tea, which wasn’t half bad even if it wasn’t coffee, and declined to answer. What was the point? Christopher was the only guy I’d slept with, and only the one time. No paternity test needed on my end.

More than once I’ve thought about taking money to Vegas since I clearly am good at beating the odds.

Christopher took my silence as some kind of threat because then he moved on to point a finger and tell me he wouldn’t pay for anything without a test and that he would call the family lawyer—his family was one of the old Savannah kinds who likely had a lawyer on retainer—and that we were done here.

Then he left. And that was that.

While I wasn’t sad about Christopher, the moment did leave me with the impression that my newfound growing baby made me part of a potentially undesirable joint package for men. And I know Christopher was a tool—which I realized long before that conversation—and shouldn’t get to represent all men, but it’s hard to shake the sense of doom I felt at his visceral reaction.

Sitting alone at that coffee table, swiping the whipped cream from Christopher’s untouched white mocha, is the first time I ever told Liam, “It’s you and me versus the world, kid.”

Even if I ever decided I was ready for something serious, I’m not sure anyone would be good enough to earn my big brother’s approval. The only one who came close was Cam. But since I never explained the breakup to Jake, I’m pretty sure my brother blames Camden.

Just as well. Not like it matters now.

---