Bittersweet Expectations (Hate at First Flight #0.5)

17. Guessing the Name

For the next week, everything went by smoothly.

I got up in the mornings, had breakfast, went to Building X and did my work, left at four and after a couple of hours went to volunteer at the hotline.

By smoothly, I meant that I didn't butt heads with Ethan Clarke anymore. In fact, for the past week, I hadn't seen him at all.

By the time I got to Building X in the mornings, he'd already left, the only visible sign that he was in the house at all was the note on the fridge detailing my tasks for the day. By the time I finished working there, he still hadn't returned.

I didn't mind the lack of fighting and bantering that we usually had in each other's presence. In fact, I wished it would continue for the rest of the time I had working at Building X.

There was only two weeks left in the one month period that we had agreed on, and I only hoped that the peace would continue for that long.

Instead of getting into it with Ethan Clarke, in the time that I had free before I went to volunteer, I usually spent it with the Senior Mr Clarke, his father.

Of course, he wasn't really that much of an active participant during those times, I enjoyed spending the time with him.

On the first day that it happened, I had gone to the library to read and saw him sitting by the window overlooking the garden outside. I walked over and talked about how beautiful everything was and wondered who had the idea for the house.

The next day, I asked him if I could read a book for him. He stared back blankly, but I smiled and took it as an assent. I read him The Alchemist, the book I'd been looking over before Julian had disturbed me. Even though he didn't say anything, move or react, I kept reading until Genevieve came and told me that I was going to be late volunteering.

We continued like that, sometimes I told him stories about my childhood and how my parents and I had talked about going to the Grand Canyon someday. Even though he never said anything back, as the days went by, I could almost see in his eyes that he was enjoying my company too.

After that I usually went to volunteer. The hotline was getting busier than before, with more people calling than what had become a norm. As soon as we hung up, the phone rang again. Even though I knew that I shouldn't, the weariness and exhaustion usually seeped in and took a toll on me.

What usually brightened up my day was talking to Mr X. We had spoken three times since that day he had called to apologized. During all three encounters, he still refused to give me a name to call him with that wasn't an obvious alias.

I didn't mind, because I knew that I myself wasn't being completely honest with him, having given him my middle name instead of my first one.

During one of those calls, he had tried to guess my last name. He said that if he managed to guess what my last name was, then we should meet in person.

When I had asked him why we needed to meet up, he said that he wanted to know the face of the person behind the phone and that he had been going crazy trying to figure out what I looked like. The only hint I had given him was that it wasn't an extreme name and that it meant something in the English word.

He had started from the later Z.

Mary Zahara. Mary Yale. Mary Yank
Mary Willow.

The names were endless and I laughed at the ones that seemed incredulous to me.

We had slowly gotten more comfortable with each other, or as comfortable as we could be with a totally stranger that we hadn't seen before.

The list of what I knew about him other than his ex cheating on him with his best friend has slowly built up as we talked.