Craving

• Little Promise

Normally I'm not the running type of person. I'd rather spend three hours in the fitness center lifting weights than one hour running. But lately, going for a run in the woods boosts my mood immensely, at least for a small amount of time. It's a nice change to my state from the past few weeks.

But not only me, Dodger also enjoys beeing outside so much. You should see him when I take his leash from the hook next to the front door, he jumps so much that it's a challenge to attach it to his collar. Since work was pretty intense before my break from filming I couldn't spend much time with him, but I plan on changing that.

I'm almost back home after a six miles run, leaving the woods as I turn into my street. My house is located on the outer edge of Sudbury, at the end of a quiet lane surrounded by nothing but fields and trees. There are only a few other houses appart from mine, spreaded with distance on the lane, giving everyone lots of privacy, one of the main reasons I picked it in the end. I know all my neighbours, most of them are already retired, and they understand that I prefer to live there without everyone knowing it.

Out of breath I reach the path leading to the front of my house and decide to walk the rest of the way to steady my breath. The wind swishes through the big sweetgums in my front yard, the swishing sound of air mixed with the swaying limbs and rustling leaves makes me feel at ease. Approaching the front of the house I open the door and step inside, unleashing Dodger before I close the door again.

"Good boy." I say and pat him on his back before he runs further inside the house.

I put my keys into the glass bowl on the small wooden bureau hanging across from the front door, before I head towards the kitchen, getting a bottle of water out of the fridge and emptying it in one take. When I hear Dodgers paws padding on the hard wooden floor I turn around to find him with his head already deep inside his water bowl. I guess he got thirsty too.

At the unpleasing feeling of my sweaty clothes sticking to my body I decide to head to the bathroom to take a quick shower when I feel my phone buzzing in the pocket of my sweatpants. I pull it out and when my gaze eventually finds the screen, reading the name of the caller ID, I stop in my tracks, feeling like I'm beeing pulled out of reality for a second. For weeks I've been waiting for this moment, waiting for her name to pop up on my phone screen and now when it does, I can't move. It must have been a few seconds that I just stood there, starring at the name before I manage to hit the green button, bringing the phone to my ear with shaky hands.

"Alison?" I say, finding it hard to believe that it's really her on the other side of the line after not hearing her voice for so long, the voice I have longed to hear every second of every day since I'd stepped into that plane.

But nothing's to be heard, nothing but deafening silence.

I wait for a moment before I say her name again, my voice barely more than a whisper, "Alison?"