Page 46 of Who's Playing You
But it wasn’t that serious because even if I did decide to move, I couldn’t do it until like ten months from now, so it was premature to be looking at townhouses and apartments right now. I didn’t dare point that out to Nat though, you should never crush anyone’s excitement nor enthusiasm.
So my idle mind was back in full force. In an attempt to again keep my hands busy, I’d already cleaned out my office at the school and organized it ahead of the start of the semester. I’d then done the same thing with my studio space.
Next I’d deep cleaned my apartment and purged all the things that didn’t bring me joy. After that, I attacked my poor car. I don’t think that Element had been that clean on the day it rolled out of the factory. Bessie was sparkling!
But in my Element cleanse, I’d taken her for a service and my mechanic, Dom, had told me he wasn’t sure how much longer Bessie would have. She was a 2005 model and had over one-hundred-fifty-thousand miles on her.
She was tired.
But I knew she was sturdy. Bessie could do it. We could get through another year together. Dom wasn’t so sure but he went through her and did everything that he could for her.
That was my Monday.
Today was Thursday and it felt like I’d done jack shit since Monday. As pathetic as it proved to be, I had nothing else to do, and so in a weird way I was looking forward to school starting up again. All of my other teacher friends, my girl squad, would also be back by then.
Much to my disappointment, and perhaps also a culprit of why this week dragged, was that I had heard less from Nicholas this week. He had warned me on Sunday that this would happen.He had said that he’d be traveling with the team this week because their season was about to start.
I guess him having to travel with the team meant that he was some sort of big-to-do who was important to the players, because I assumed that they weren’t having every staff member of The Rage travel with the team when they went somewhere. I assumed that the players probably needed their coaches and maybe some supporting staff and a waterboy when they were on the road.
With those assumptions (and boy was I making a lot of them), I thought maybe Nicholas was a coach or assistant coach, maybe an athletic director if that was even a position. I laughed to myself at the idea of him being the waterboy.
I could easily have Googled The Rage and their staff to assuage my curiosity, but that felt like cheating.
Nicholas and I were getting to know each other, so why would I ruin part of the discovery you get while you’re getting to know someone? That’s like reading the last chapter in a book - only monsters do that.
I only wanted to learn about NicholasfromNicholas, and to learn what he was willing to share freely with me. That’s how I’d always been, and it’s what I believed in. A person would always show you their true colors, you just had to have your eyes open and be receptive to it. Some people lived in denial about other people’s actions and never saw the red flags that were being raised right in front of their faces.
I might be oblivious to pop culture, technology, and most often time, but I was pretty intuitive and perceptive when it came to people’s true characters. Well… I used to be. After the whole “Earl incident” that was known as our courtship, marriage and divorce, I had begun to doubt my instincts. Maybe my People Character gauge was broken. If it wasn’tbeforeEarl, itcertainly wasafterEarl because I had been having doubts for a few years now.
In all fairness, I had been second guessing just about everything in my life since he pushed those divorce papers across the table. I’d been so caught up in my little bubble of a life that I hadn’t caught the flags, forget about seeing what had been obvious red flags, I hadn’t even noticed the orange, yellow or even pink ones.
So when it came to this thing, whateverthiswas, between Nicholas and me, I felt totally in my head about the whole thing, second and triple guessing absolutely everything. I’d catch myself talking myself out of every comment he made, every flirting he did. My gut was telling me that it was all new and exciting andreal. The butterflies were confirming it. But my jaded past had my brain throwing the handbrake on every thought and emotion, because these things couldn’tpossiblybe true.
This beautiful, sexy, smart, complex and interesting man couldn’tpossiblybe what my gut was telling me. My gut was saying all those things, and it was also telling me that it was okay for me to be enamored with him, flattered even. But then my reality meter would start blaring at me with the loud alarm noise and flashing red lights and sirens that it was all BS because I’d learned that most things were BS and couldn’t be trusted. ThatIcouldn’t be trusted.
The battle within me was real. It was exhausting too.
So that had been my week, a merry go round that had me floundering back and forth, but ultimately it had just left me tired, confused, and emotional. It didn’t help matters that I had only heard from Nicholas a handful of times, so in my very needy and pathetic state, the limited contact wasn’t swaying my thoughts one way or the other. And here again is a reason I found myself feeling like a teenager with a crush again.
I was too old for this shit.
As I lay on my couch with my feet dangling over the back of it, my head kind of upside down where it hung precariously from the front of the seat cushion, I felt like a kid though. I’d always liked being this kind of upside down on the couch. I looked at the opposite wall, upside down, from where I lay sprawled out. I eyed my photos on the wall, seeing them from an entirely different angle.
I could still make out all of the birds in every photo though. They were ravens, if you wanted to get technical. And with the blood rushing to my head, it gave me a little rush while I imagined myself flying so freely with them.
Imagine that? Just floating in the air - weightless - without a care in the world. No responsibility. No questions. No doubts. No loneliness.
There wouldn’t be any loneliness because you’d be free.
An annoying buzzing noise broke my daydream, and the trance I had found myself in. I found the culprit, my phone, which was lighting up on the coffee table. The vibration of the phone from being on silent was making the annoying buzzing noise which had me letting out a heavy sigh. I really hated that phone.
Then in the same second the butterflies returned at the possibility of it being Nicholas.
I swiftly and so un-graceously went to grab for the phone, but the momentum of my legs swinging from over the back of the couch was too great that it ended up knocking me off balance and had me totally flat on the ground between the couch and coffee table.
“Son of a bitch,” I groaned out as the wind had been knocked out of me.
I grabbed at the phone with my left hand and brought the screen to my face to look at who was trying to get a hold of me. Ihad absolutely zero desire to move from my new-found spot on the floor considering it had originally been the thief that stole my breath.
