Page 49 of How To Not Need You

My desk lamp casts a warm circle of light across my keyboard. The window above my desk is cracked just enough to let in the salt air.

My phone buzzes beside my tablet. I don't look at it straight away. I'm working. The creative kind of working, where your body is technically sitting at a desk but your brain is wandering around somewhere else entirely.

Buzz.

Ugh, I hate my own procrastination sometimes. I pick up my phone.

Jake: Tilly asked if you'd like to come to the park with us this afternoon.

I smile at my phone.

Which is fucking embarrassing.

I set the phone down a little harder than necessary, as though that might somehow undo the effect of those perfectly innocent words. The park. An ordinary park, on an ordinary afternoon, with an ordinary man and his five-year-old daughter.

There is absolutely nothing remarkable about this invitation. Nothing that should make my heart do whatever it's currently doing against the inside of my chest. I lean back in my chair and stare at the ceiling.

This is the part where I'm supposed to say no. I have rules. Good rules.

I have rules. Good rules. Sensible rules created by someone who learned the hard way what happens when you don't have any.

No moving in together. No shared bank accounts. No conversations that begin with Where do you see this going? And definitely no needing someone enough that a single text can derail an otherwise productive morning.

A trip to the park shouldn't feel dangerous.

And yet, it still does.

My phone sits on the desk with its screen dark, Jake’s words still unanswered. Tilly asked. Not Jake. Tilly. The small human with eyes so big that she makes it almost impossible to say no to her.

I pick up the phone. Open the text. Stare at it.

Then I type: sure.

One word, but it feels like I just took a sledgehammer to my own boundaries. I hit send before I can delete it.

I stare at the message for a moment. Then I shove away from the desk before I can change my mind.

I grab my jacket from the back of the chair and my keys from the hook by the door. All of this happens so fast that I take a second to reflect on what I just did.

What are you doing?

“She’s five,” I mutter to the empty apartment. “She’s five years old and she has more power over me than any adult I’ve ever met. This is pathetic.”

It is. It’s also true. Tilly got me to a primary school art fundraiser with a sad face drawn in crayon. Tilly got me to Jake's house for a first date that somehow involved burnt garlic, Hades and a children's movie. Tilly’s drawings are currently taped to my refrigerator now, which is something that I don’t want to examine too closely.

None of this was part of the plan. The plan was work. Friends. Page & Grounds. Wine. Repeat. A good life. A safe life.

The plan did not include afternoons in parks with a firefighter who kisses like he’s got nothing to prove and a five-year-old who thinks I smell like flowers.

Apparently the plan has gone to shit.

I pull out my phone again and open the group chat.

Type: I am now officially in uncharted waters. I am off on a park date! Me!

The responses start immediately. My phone buzzes in quick succession. I don’t look at it though. I already know what they’ll say. Luca will be insufferable. Harper will be quietly smug. Elsie will type something warm that makes me want to throw my phone into the ocean.

I shove the phone into my pocket, grab my bag and leave before one of them can call me.