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CHAPTER ELEVEN
No need to be sorry.
Duncan stared at the text for a while.
His father was already asleep in the other bed, snoring in the way only a late-middle-aged man whose nose had been broken multiple times could snore. Duncan had his AirPods in and was watching motorcycle travel videos on YouTube; Phoebe’s text had popped up over the latest one.
He’d sent his latest text about an hour earlier, and it was an hour later in Tulsa than in Tucumcari. After midnight there. Though his time with her didn’t support the assumption, he’d figured her to be a habitual early-to-bed, early-to-rise chick. Farmer’s hours.
Well, whether she was not an early-to-bed type or she just couldn’t sleep tonight, she was awake now, and a sense of urgency tweaked him. He wrote back.
I got the sense you were mad when I left.
The message went read at once, and dots popped up. Her phone was in her hand. It was stupid how much that charged his blood.
Not mad. You could have just said no,
tho. You wimped out on that
Little disappointing tbh
Was his leaving the disappointment, or his freezing up when she asked if he’d keep in touch? The evidence of the order of her thoughts suggested the second, so he went with that.
Didn’t wimp out. Just didn’t
know the right answer.
Again, she read his message as soon as it was sent and began at once to reply.
You didn’t know if you
planned to be in touch?
Was there someone else
you needed to consult with?
Duncan laughed. Some girls might attempt a complicated linguistic dance, trying to draw out the words they wanted him to say without putting too much of themselves out there first. He thought he understood why they did it; his mom and sisters had riffed often enough about the challenges of being a woman dealing with men. He would play the game and try to make things easy on them, but he preferred just being straight. It got tiring to constantly try to figure out what they meant, like every interaction was a puzzle to solve. It was probably equally tiring to try to create that puzzle. Relationship shit was hard—one reason he’d been planning to avoid it for a few more years.
Phoebe was always straight, usually with a side of snark or sass. That was his favorite kind of woman. Maybe it meant that she didn’t care enough to start the game, but he didn’t think that was it.
So he was straight right back.
No, snarkypuss. I didn’t know what
I wanted this morning. Felt like we
were at a
He paused for a second, trying to come up with the right word, and eventually decided on
threshold, and I needed to think if
I wanted to cross over.
