+ MARK +
"You know, a watched phone never rings."
Like Chica's, my ears perked up, eyes jolting to meet with Lindsay's as she continued putting groceries away. I'd completely forgotten she'd been there the entire time – she'd stayed at the hospital so long, it was miraculous she'd even come home within the same night.
This one will, the voice in my head said. Undoubtedly.
My actual lips, though, spoke otherwise.
"Just waiting for a friend to call," I fibbed, giving her my most genuine beam. "More of a business friend, actually."
"Someone from work?" she half-asked, half-demanded. "Is it that Danny fellow? The one that's dating Arin?"
I didn't respond just yet, having forgotten completely that he was the entire reason behind why I'd become a security guard in the first place. Arin, my closest friend outside of the band, had hooked me up with the job opportunity when times had gotten tough so long ago. It was a huge part of the reason behind why we were still together; he had his raging fits and his... "moments," but, through thick and thin, he was always the guy who'd be first to make you smile even on his darkest day, somehow still managing to take the whole world seriously despite the childish side of him.
And then there was his partner-in-crime, Danny. "That's my Danny Sexbang," he'd whistle whenever he walked by, earning a pose in response followed by "I'm a sexy widdle baby." (It was some kind of skit between the two of them.) Whenever they did it, it was, of course, awkward for me, but I absolutely adored watching how they flirted with one another, how Arin teased his curls or how Danny always told him to "look on the bright side." But now? Now, Danny's back to where he started, hooked on drugs yet again – I only hope that Arin will be capable of convincing him to go to rehab, or, heaven forbid, have Danny end up OD'ing and earning himself a forceful visit. I never wished for a friend to get hurt, but this case was surely an exception.
"He's just so different when he's on drugs," Arin said to me once. "As if something takes over him, as if he's completely different. Nowhere near the man I first fell in love with."
In some sense or another, the very memory of him saying that reminded me of every time Lindsay and I fought. No matter what the argument was over, whether it be a strange pair of panties scrunched up in the bottom of my underwear drawer (long story) or the bad meat left in the fridge, she always tended to change personalities, to swap out of her own corpse completely, earning an entire new person to replace the soul that'd seemingly disappeared. It was as if she transformed, as if she was someone else – just like Arin had said. Nowhere near the woman I first fell in love with.
The main thing we fought over was work. She worked too much, I worked too little. Our schedules could never synch because of it.
When I first lost my job, she got two. A small job unloading boxes at some nearby factory, one that only took up a short (but grueling) three hours of her day. The other job was stored somewhere within the top few floors of a glass business building, the kind that loomed over an entire city and could knock down all of the other glass business buildings if it someday decided to fall. I'd only been inside of it once, and even that one time was enough; the people, the atmosphere, the very look of such a formal surrounding was far too intense for the likings of a guy like me, which may be the reason why I got fired in the first place.
Eventually, she quit the boxing job and focused mainly on the business one, thanks to a promotion from her boss (who reeks desperately of cat piss). This, at first, sounded like astonishingly wonderful news – we went out to a dinner we could barely afford to celebrate. What we didn't know at the time, though, was that this promotion required a lot of dedication, far more than we'd been willing to give; she was forced to take on lengthy business trips across America, hauling suitcases every time she walked in the door (which became rare for a while). Every time I saw her, I felt like I was seeing an old friend I'd lost touch with – I promised myself that we'd never feel that way again.
