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Don’t meet him. Don’t sit in his office or drive around town on his business errands or chat while playing darts in some saloon.
Just wait, like I’m nothing more to him than his employee.
Which, I suppose, is exactly what I am.
And he couldn’t have made it clearer that that’s all he wants.
Chapter 21
Every hour of the last two weeks has crept by like a creaky carousel on its last legs.
When I was under a month-long writing deadline, the days flew by, terrorizing me. Now every minute crawls by, also terrorizing me.
“You know, you’re acting kind of crazy,” Olivia says as I hit the Refresh button on my email for the 4,586,345th time of the day.
To her credit, she’s sitting on the couch, having discovered something I introduced her to three days prior: popcorn covered in chocolate chips. And she’s enjoying herself.
The result of the microwave popcorn and thorough dousing of chocolate chips is a sticky, melty chocolatey mess—a fact that normally would have led to a half-hour lecture about salt, sugar, and the importance of eating at the kitchen table. But here she is, in actual pajama pants at ten in the morning, eating popcorn on the couch.
Honestly, I have never been prouder.
“And that’s coming from me,” she adds, giving me a little eyebrow wiggle before popping another piece of popcorn into her mouth.
Two nights ago, after she caught me checking my email every other minute, I finally let her in on my little secret. Told her the truth about how I’ve secretly longed to establish myself in the book world, not just as an editor but as an author. And to my surprise, she didn’t balk at it. Not even when I told her my chosen genre.
“I’ve always secretly wanted to go into fitness,” she said when I told her, digging her way through a bowl of popcorn in her yoga pants.
“Fitness?” I exclaimed. “Like . . . as a job?”
She looked at me and shrugged. “I know it’s not the most unique idea out there, or profitable, but I love working out. I love everything about it, really. The smell of a newly unrolled mat. The look of those large glass doors I walk through when I enter the gym. The sweat rolling down my arms as I push to new limits. I love it. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to own my own.”
I stared at her. It was the first time in my life she had ever said anything, anything, about anything outside finance, and yet . . . it made sense. In fact, as soon as she said it, I couldn’t imagine her doing anything else.
“You should do it. You should own a gym.”
She gave an incredulous laugh. “Yeah, right. Why work on two degrees when you could be working on two degrees while opening your own business? You sound like me.”
“No. I mean, drop out of school. You’ve only got so many hours in this life. You may as well spend them doing something you’re passionate about.”
She raised a brow. “You’re stealing from my speech now.”
I grinned. “I’ve heard them so much, the words just pop out of my mouth sometimes. I’m like a walking motivational poster.”
“Yeah? Then here’s another one that you should consider,” she said and glanced at the phone in my hand. “Waiting impatiently for something that will inevitably happen either way is a waste of time. Enjoy the journey, not just the destination.”
And begrudgingly I put my phone away that evening and sat beside her for the movie.
It was a movie we’d seen several times before but that, as I could hear it for once without the Peloton whizzing in the background and the distraction of captions in French, felt like the first time.
But the fact is now, despite all the positive messages about enjoying and living for each moment, I can’t escape the reality that it has been fourteen days with no email from Claire.
Fourteen.
And regardless of how much better off I’d be embracing the mild Saturday morning without checking the screen, the fact is I need to know.
I need to see what she thinks the second the email arrives.
I need to finally have this torturous waiting end.
