I hate it.
I mean, technically, I’m just where I started. Alone.
Maybe I need to get another part-time job. My goal for the summer was to have a distraction, and I did. A big one too. One so big that my fear of never meeting “the one” is gone and a new fear unlocked. I’ll never meet someone like him.
Last weekend, I thought maybe I stood a chance, then he never said a word this week, and tonight, when Calla begged me to sit in the back again so she didn’t have to sit next to her screaming husband, I thought maybe that Simon would remind me to sit with him. It would be this cute moment when he asked me again, and I would say yes, and then somewhere in the night he’d hold my hand, and we’d slowly drift back to us.
But that didn’t happen.
At the end of the night, he just saidbye. Not to mention, the last time he saw me talking to Walker Blue, he jumped at the chance to claim me. Tonight, my attention to another man didn’t even faze him.
My hope got the best of me.
My doorbell rings. I groan and once again drag my feet there. I swing it open in a dramatic fashion, assuming it’s Calla or Willa on the other side.
But there isn’t anyone there.
“What the hell?” I whisper. I poke my head out and look around. Nothing.
Figures. I’m trying to soothe a broken heart, and someone decided my house was the perfect place for ding dong ditch.
But just as I’m closing the door, a blue sticky note on the door catches my eye.
Please come next door in thirty minutes. —Simon
I read it over and over, my heart racing faster each time. I stand there long enough for Calla and Willa to both arrive and join me at the door.
“What are we looking at?” Calla asks.
I hold the note up.
She takes it and grins.
“How long ago did he leave this? And why is it on a sticky note? Why not just text you?”
“I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here.”
I don’t answer her sticky note comment because my mind is running wild with what this means. He knows what sticky notes mean to me. Is that why he left one? To show me that even though he hasn’t been here, he’s been thinking of me?
I spin back around and race up to my room.
Calla and Willa are right behind me.
“I take it we’re getting out of the sweats.”
“We’re getting out of the sweats,” I repeat and flip through shirt after shirt and dress after dress until I find the right one.
I don’t even know what I’m going over there for, but I know he wouldn’t have left the note if it weren’t for something big.
The doorbell rings again.
The girls and I all make eye contact in the mirror on my dresser as I’m putting my shoes on.
“I’ll go get it,” Willa says and runs downstairs.
I nod, moving to the bathroom to fix my hair.
Calla comes in with a huge smile.
