Words by You

Highs and Lows

I made it three days without calling. The fact I had to 'make it' instead of bide my time felt a little ridiculous. Spontaneous decisions never felt good. The potential consequences and alternative paths always sat like stone bricks in my chest afterward, slowly sinking me down into anxious what-ifs and regret. I liked my look-once-check-twice approach to things (even if it earned Sunnie's teasing). I liked having a clear view of the ground before I jumped, but I didn't get a clear sense of anything with Dean. A lot of him was still shrouded in mystery. He seemed to like it that way.

Unfortunately, that hadn't made talking with him any less pleasant. There'd been something easy about it, kinda like we almost, well, clicked. He wasn't shy. He certainly knew how to flirt too, but he could listen just as well.

Despite the soulmate logic shovelled into movies and tv shows, we didn't jump from strangers to lovers in the span of a night. Still, those couple hours had taken my initial distrust and left me with something much more complicated. I blamed that muddled mix of emotions for the steady itch to call. As a compromise, I let myself open up his contact ID. Just to look and think about my new predicament.

I ended up doing that a lot. I found myself staring at it when I got up, on my lunch break, even before I went to sleep. My phone would be in my hands and before I was really conscious of it, "Plum Cheek" was on my screen along with those damn seven digits. I felt like a teenager who just got her crush's number. Or a stalker with a stolen lock of hair.

I wasn't really worried about being a crime statistic anymore, but I still had reservations. His roguish charm held a glint of something dangerous, like trouble hid in his shadow. The way he handled Suit jacket proved he wasn't afraid of a fight. He didn't seem like the type to lose one either. Then there was the way he'd danced around his 'animal attack'.

Maybe there was a reason for the caginess, some convoluted but authentic excuse I wouldn't be able to guess. But holding onto the hope that that was true without a shred of evidence felt naive, especially considering the way he reacted to my probing. He didn't try to mask or divert from the obvious fact he was hiding something. If anything, he almost seemed a little... satisfied at my skepticism. As if he liked that I was able to pick up that something was off. But then he'd just expected me to drop him.

Does he want me to reject him? Does he not want a soulmate?

Nothing about what happened afterward said so. He'd seemed anything but opposed to me, which left me even more confused. The questions kept turning and turning in my head, making my head feel like it was stuck in a blender. The only relief I had was through work. It was its own whirlwind of sutures, bandaging, catheters, and whatever the hell else demanded focused control. There was barely any space to breathe let alone think of my walking enigma of a soulmate. So I walked into my day shift with my phone on mute and shoved deep into my pocket, ready to stop obsessing for the next couple hours.

"I-ris," bellowed a nasally voice.

"Trissa," I answered, forcing my grin to pitch as high as possible. Of course there had to be a different test of patience waiting for me today. "I didn't know you were in."

"Those idiots in staffing called saying it was my shift even when I told them it's not. And of course when I get here I look and see that my name is not on the schedule board." She looked up from her phone for a dramatic eye roll. "I told them I would help them out this time because they're so damned disorganized, but I made it clear if they do it again I'm not coming. I mean it's not like I just sit around all day waiting for a call–"

I nodded along, letting the rest of her volcanic eruption of a rant spew over. The beauty of them was that they required no interjections or opinions. She could talk herself through the whole thing without any help. My cue to tune back in came five minutes later when she gave herself a second to inhale.