Page 8 of The Art of Catching Feelings

Chris was typing his response when another message popped up on the screen.

Have a good night!

He should be relieved that duckiesbooks had read the room correctly. It was the closure he’d wanted. And yet suddenly he realized he didn’t want to drop the conversation just yet. He had no idea what time it was—his phone had probably updated to the local time zone for wherever they were flying over, but where that was, he had no clue. But for once, he wasn’t thinking about baseball or about his brother, and that was hard to pass up.

C: For someone living aggressively in the present, that’s the second time you’ve brought up your childhood.

D: I guess you can’t escape the past after all.

D: anyway, you started it

Nope. He wasn’t touching that.

He flicked back to Duckie’s profile. There were her pronouns, right next to her username—she/her. And her bio was only a single quote—“A well-read woman is a dangerous creature,” attributed to Lisa Kleypas. Although none of the thumbnails he scrolled through showed Duckie’s face, there were several that showed part of her hands. In a recent one, she was holding up a green-and-black hardback book, an artistically blurred couple embracing behind the bold white brushstroke title. She had pretty hands from what he could see of them, graceful fingers. Her nail polish was chipped teal.

You could imagine so much of a stranger’s life from these little moments. Already he was calling herDuckiein his head, like that was her actual name.

C: What time is it in South Carolina?

Full minutes went by without a response, longer than it should have been given that she was clearly active on the app—that littleSeennotification had popped up again—and the time would be displayed on her phone or computer. He didn’t know if he’d crossed a line by referencing their home state. But he’d figured she would be local—it wasn’t like the Battery were a large-market team. And one of her recent posts had been of a book stack in front of the Charleston Library Society, the forced perspective making the books seem like the steps to the building.

The question had seemed safe when Chris volleyed it over. It was a simple request for factual information, an acknowledgment of the temporal moment they found themselves in. But the longer it went unanswered, the more the words seemed to pulse on the screen. The question peeled back so many layers he’d worked hard to reinforce. How distant he felt, how alone. Suddenly he could think of nothing more desperate than asking a stranger what time it was.

Then the dots appeared, blinking before her response came in.

FOUR

Daphne didn’t know what to do.

She’d barely expected Chris Kepler to check his messages, much less actually respond to her. Even in the alternate universe where he read her message, and decided to reply, she’d figured he might have some words of admonishment. Something about how he was a person, too, and maybe she should think about that next time she decided to mouth off at a game. Or he’d say something dismissive that made her feel ridiculous, like she was making a big deal out of nothing.

But instead he’d written about his childhood dog?

She scrolled back up to her first message, still trying to make sense of what was happening. And that’s when she saw it. She’d typed and retyped her message a hundred times, trying to get the tone right—contrite but lighthearted, remorseful but friendly—and then when she’d cut and pasted it over from her Notes app she’d deleted the most important paragraph. The one where she actually said,I was the heckler, and I’m sorry.

SHE’D SENT AN APOLOGY MESSAGE AND DELETED THE APOLOGY.

There were still references to her being sorry, but without that introductory paragraph, it read more like she wasgenerallysorry.Instead of unmasking her as a piece of shit, if anything her message had made her seem like an evenbetterperson for caring enough to reach out.

And now he was writing about his childhood dog and asking her what time it was, and it was all so normal…sonice. It would be beyond awkward to say something now, like,Oh, by the way, I’m the one who made fun of how bad you were at the game? But anyway, let me tell you more about my cat.

Milo had that judgy face on again, and this time she knew she deserved it. She took a deep breath, trying to ignore the slippery feeling in her stomach as she typed her response to Chris’ question.

D: 11:43.

She could’ve left it there, closed the door behind her. But damned if she didn’t want to open the door a little bit more, even if it meant that she was crossing a line she couldn’t venture back over.

D: Where are you?

“Stay in the present,” she murmured to Milo, who’d flipped over onto his back, showing his belly even as he hid half his body underneath her bed. It was one of his favorite things to do, inviting tummy scratches while simultaneously making it impossible to administer them unless she crouched down and wedged her hand uncomfortably between the bed frame and his body. She leaned over to try her best, but Milo immediately rolled back over and slunk over to his favorite spot, curled up in the laundry on the floor of her closet.

C: Two hours behind. Not sure exactly where.

While they’d been talking, she’d pulled up the Battery’s schedule. They were playing the Dodgers tomorrow, so she assumed that Chris was typing these messages from thousands of miles away and many more feet above the ground.

D: Now look who’s in the past. What kind of plane traveler are you? Like do you put your seat back, earbuds in, do you prefer window or aisle, etc.? Once I got stuck sitting in the middle seat between an older couple and they talked about his golf game and her pecan pie recipe the entire flight right over me like I wasn’t even there.

C: We have a private plane.

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