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“Oh, and thanks for the ice cream last night. You didn’t need to buy three pints of it.”
“I didn’t know what you would be in the mood for.”
“I’ll admit I tried all three.” Chocolate chip, chocolate, and rocky road.
He laughed. “I would have expected nothing less. I hope you didn’t mind me using the housekey you gave me. I figured it was an emergency.”
“Feel free to put ice cream in my freezer anytime.”
“You got it.”
“I better go before I’m late.”
“Don’t forget your lunch.”
“I won’t.”
“I’ll call you after work.”
“Talk to you then. Bye.” I hung up, feeling all sorts of conflicted. On one hand I felt loved—you know, the platonic kind, which was not bad at all. On the other hand, it kind of sucked when you considered that he had the makings of the world’s best boyfriend. Not to mention my love for him went well beyond platonic. Maybe I could help him change his mind during this camping trip. I could accidentally fall into the river next weekend and fake hypothermia. He’d then feel obligated to strip down to his undies and cozy up with me in a sleeping bag. That would be great until he felt how squishable I really was under my clothing, which wouldn’t help catapult me out of the friend zone. And knowing my luck, Jenna would jump to the rescue first and we would end up in a very awkward situation like we did my senior year of college. A situation we shall not visit again either in my mind or in real life.
Fine. No faking illness or injury. Not sure what I had left up my sleeve. He already knew I could make any kind of pancake, his favorite food. Maybe I should get cozy in the friend zone.
I walked out the door when Sawyer’s reminder went off. I looked at my phone.
Go back in the house and get your lunch. Have a good day.
Oh crap. I marched back into my house to get my lunch. Sometimes I amazed myself. How could I be so forgetful, yet I had the capability to graduate from the Colorado School of Mines, one of the toughest engineering schools in the nation, with a B+ average? I probably could have had an A average except Jenna came to visit me one too many times and maybe I forgot a homework assignment or two. I’d needed Sawyer in my life then. Well, maybe. Not sure I could have handled over a decade of this kind of torture. In ten years, if I was still pining for him, I might move away and join a support group or something. Heck, make that a year. A year from now, if I couldn’t get over Sawyer, I was moving.
I had to stop and think about that. I never thought of moving out of Colorado. There was so much to love about every season here, from camping in the summer to skiing in the winter. Not to mention most of my family and friends lived here. What would I do without Jenna, Brad, and their little bambino who I was going to be godmother to? I could still be a rocking godmother from out of state and I would visit, of course, though it wouldn’t be exactly the same. However, if I moved, perhaps I could find someone. Perhaps my name only cursed me here. I doubted that, but it was worth a shot looking elsewhere. What if Mr. Right-After-The-Real-Mr.-Right had gotten the wrong GPS coordinates and he was waiting for me to find him? And it wouldn’t be all that bad living away from my wicked stepmother.
I grabbed my lunch and continued to give this some serious thought.
In the summers, I went to work earlier for two reasons. First, the steel plant became Satan’s spa in the middle of the day. The temperatures could get above 140 degrees near the furnaces in the melt shop. Also, summertime meant internship time, and for some reason I was in charge of babysitting them. That was, I was tasked with molding and shaping them. Basically, weeding out those who could hack it and those who, let’s say, needed a softer environment they could pin all their hopes and dreams on. Babysitting them meant I had to come in early, so I could get some actual uninterrupted work done. You don’t know how many times a day I was asked, “Can I take a break now?” or “What does KPI stand for again?” Was it really that hard to remember key performance indicator? My favorite was the guy last year who kept asking me how to do basic formulas like addition and subtraction in Excel. He went in the maybe you should think about a new career choice pile. I really wanted to tell him he should probably pick a new major altogether.
