AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Her voice trembled slightly but did not threaten to break. “She was the only person who was there when I came into the world, the last connection to … dunno,me. Little me. Riding her shoulders, birthday cakes, all that. You know?”
The only responses Evan could think of were trite and dismissive.
He heard a slurping sound—Dog licking Joey’s salty face. Evan had rescued the Rhodesian ridgeback as a puppy from a dogfighting ring and given him to Joey. She’d refused to name him properly, not wanting to grow attached, and by the time they’d become inseparable, the name had stuck.
Evan listened carefully, his senses on high alert. One of the goals of the meditation he practiced was to experience everything as if it were happening for the first time. Because everything always was.
“It just … came on,” Joey said. “All thisstuff. Gawd, feelings suck. And they’re all up in my face. Like, I got sad today at an old man sitting alone at a bus stop. He had a little hat and everything.” A pause. “Come on, Dog. Let’s get some water.” She made a faint groan as she rose.
Evan zeroed in on the noise. “Why are you groaning?”
“I’m notgroaning, X. Jesus. I made a delicate feminine exhale.”
“Why?”
“Nothing. I’m just tight in my hip.”
He closed his eyes, focusing. “Ache in the front of the socket?”
A longer pause now. “Yeah. How’d you know?”
“Did you get scared today? Something startle you?”
“No,”she said, with readily accessible teen irritation. “I didn’t get—”
Some epiphany made her cut off. He gave her the silence.
“Well, some dipshit in a Volvo almost hit me earlier,” she conceded. “At an intersection. But, you know, I’m a trained tactical driver so it’s not like I wasscared.”
He waited.
“But maybe I tensed up. For, like, a femtosecond.”
He waited some more.
“Why? Why’d you ask that?”
“The psoas is the first muscle to engage when you go into fight or flight. You know how to release it?”
“Of course I know how to release my psoas. I’m not anamateur.”
Abrasive noises as the phone got tossed down. He waited while she grunted and shuffled around. Then he heard her breathing turn jagged, move to shuddering releases, and then finally even out.
When she picked up the phone again, her voice was much more subdued. She sounded exhausted, wrung out. “Can’t I just, like, not deal with any of this?” she asked. “Emotions or whatever.”
She was generally so energized and caffeinated that he relished these softer moments with her, even over the phone. He pictured her big smile that put a dimple in her right cheek. Those translucent emerald eyes, pure as gemstones. The tousle of black-brown hair heaped to one side to show off the shaved strip above her right ear.
He knew she was sleepy now, could hear it in her voice, how the words got slower, her upper eyelids heavying the way they did. She’d be curled up on the bed right now with the hundred-and-ten-pound ridgeback, winding herself into a cocoon. He knew that phase. The chrysalis when everything puddled together, formless and hopeless, a primordial reset before new structure and meaning took hold.
He said, “Sure.”
“Then what?”
“You won’t feel as much …”
“I choosethatone.”
“… of anything.”
