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“Better than sleeping like the undead.”
“How do you figure?”
“You’d be a zombie. They shamble.” He stuck his arms out and groaned, shuffling toward me until his arms collided with my back.
“Stop! That’s not even scary.”
He grinned. “Hey, speaking of scary. The bat. I’m calling animal control.”
Our wake-up routine had distracted me from our current circumstances. I felt so oddly normal chatting with him about anything and nothing while the coffee brewed.
Adam disappeared into another room as I finished preparing the coffee. He liked a tiny sprinkling of sugar in his. Only enough to almost not be worth adding, but he swore he could tell the difference.
He returned a few minutes later. “Someone is coming by to humanely handle the bat.”
“Fantastic. I’m going to take my morning essential to the back deck.”
“Mind if I join?”
My brain fast forwarded to a future time where he wouldn’t ask. He’d just join me. And we weren’t at this house, we were back at the other house, the rental. The worn deck as familiar in my mind as if I’d been there a week ago.
For some reason the thought didn’t freak me out. If I wasn’t afraid of imagining a future with Adam, then I must believe, deep down, a future with Adam was possible.
I pressed my lips together to hold back a smile. A future with Adam. It seemed…exciting. Lots of unknowns, but the rest of my life had a plan. An extra toss of the dice could spice up my life.
We both sat on the deck and looked out over the water. A few boats coasted at a low speed since the no wake curfew remained in place for another twenty minutes. Weird how I remembered lake curfew times.
“I still want the girls to come up some day,” I told Adam. “They would love it here. Well, Hudson might not. The rental might be too much roughin’ it for her.”
“She’s the famous one?”
“Viral video famous, yeah. Speaking of the girls, I should check in with Marcy about her dad.” Funny, I hadn’t even brought my phone outside with me. Usually, I was attached to the thing.
I retrieved my phone from the spot in the kitchen where I’d charged it overnight and returned to the deck. Trees gently rustled in the wind as I wrote a text to Marcy. Keeping with my quasi-Zen state of mind, I snapped a quick pic of the lake and texted it to all four in our main text chain.
Me: I’m gonna get you all up here together some day. Promise. Miss you.
While Haley and Hudson had both given very little information for their cancellations, I wasn’t interested in holding onto the hurt for being slighted. They were my friends. They deserved a second chance. Many second chances.
I switched over to email and my chest tightened at the number of messages in the inbox. Did my spam filter quit working? For the love.
Several messages were from my mom related to the rental booking and having tried to contact Adam’s parents while they were overseas. I could deal with those later. I definitely wasn’t ready to hear a massive I told you so for not actually hating being here with Adam.
I skimmed past daily newsletters I kept meaning to filter into different inboxes. “Oh, good,” I said out loud, though it was mainly for myself. “I asked about my start date at the university.”
Adam nodded as he watched the lake.
A dull throb hit my chest. My vision grew fuzzy. I blinked to properly see the screen. “Wha…” I made a sound but not much came out.
“Is everything okay?” Adam asked.
“This is a mistake. Okay. Mistake, definitely a mistake.” I stood and paced the deck. I read through the email again as Adam asked me what was happening. “There’s something messed up with my post-doc. I have to call the university.”
“It’s the weekend. Are the offices open?”
Shoot. No, the offices were not open.
The throb in my chest turned sharp. “I don’t understand,” I said to my phone. “This doesn’t make sense.” A vice squeezed my lungs and I gasped. Hands came around me, gently. Adam asked again if I was okay. It was like hearing him call to me from above water.
