Total pages in book: 124
Estimated words: 117415 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 587(@200wpm)___ 470(@250wpm)___ 391(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 117415 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 587(@200wpm)___ 470(@250wpm)___ 391(@300wpm)
As if I need reminding how close my life sentence to office purgatory is … “I need a breather,” I decide, turning to him. “Can I take one?”
“Of course, no customers. You don’t need to ask,” he chuckles. “Take the rest of the day if you’d like.”
“Nah, I … I need to keep busy. But thanks, Mr. Bill—uh, Billy. Just plain Billy. Totally mature, adult-to-adult, Billy. I’ll sweep the front,” I decide. Billy looks like he wants to say something else, but I’ve already come around him, snatched the broom from the back, and am out the front door with a cute little ding of the bell.
The air today is unseasonably mild. Which is saying a lot for a summer day in Spruce where you can normally cook a decent pair of sunny-side-ups on the sidewalk at high noon. There isn’t much to sweep, but I do it anyway. I wander a bit from the front of T&S’s (to avoid the eerie suspicion that Billy is watching me through our giant front window with concern in his sensitive eyes) and sweep the walkway, lost in my thoughts. Mostly thoughts of an office I did not expect to fall in love with so quickly. A view that makes my house look like a new exotic place, even if it’s just the same ol’. Things I love surrounding my desk, keeping my mind and heart alight as I do my work.
But that bright, wonderful office is going to shrink.
I already know it. Like my dorm room on campus. Like every classroom I’m in. Even my bedroom in the main house. Even this town. Shrinking and shrinking until it’s all I know.
My phone buzzes. Thought I left it in the Shoppe. I pull it out to find a text from AJ. They made it to the west coast. He’s chilling on the beach in the pic he sends me, but he’s scowling. His bad handwriting is scribbled over the corner—IT’S BALLZ HOT—with a couple sweaty red-faced emojis stamped next to it.
Can’t help but feel like he’s really playing up the worst parts.
Y’know, so I feel less like I’m missing out.
He’s more likely having the time of his life.
I type back, “Don’t forget your sunscreen,” and hardly a second later he hearts my text, and that’s that.
Maybe it’s an errant gust of wind, or a cloud’s shadow passing over the screen, I don’t know why, but I pick this exact moment to look up from my phone.
A guy walking past.
Loose heather gray t-shirt, V-neck.
Old faded jeans, frayed at the bottoms of the legs.
Baseball cap on, shadowing his eyes.
And those eyes catch mine the next second.
Recognition strikes him at the precise moment it strikes me. I point at him and blurt, “You,” stunned.
His eyes widen like he sees Jesus.
The next thing he sees are stars as he smacks face-first into a lamppost.
He grunts—the lamppost rings out like a bell, hat knocked off and tumbling onto the ground—and he grabs his face.
“Sorry!” I shout. Wait, was it my fault? Why am I apologizing?
He pulls his hands away to sneak a look at them. There’s a big gash on his eyebrow he doesn’t see.
“You have a gash,” I tell him, still pointing for some reason.
“No, I don’t,” he mumbles, then starts walking off.
“Hey, where’re you going?” Then I yell, “I know who you are!”
He stops, his back to me.
His gray shirt is sweated through, especially the pits. It’s not a forgiving color for perspiration in this humidity, admittedly, even when it’s mild outside. He just stands there taking one breath after another, fingers fidgeting as his arms hang at his sides.
Then, as if somehow pained to do so, he finally turns.
Meets my eyes.
“You do?”
I nod and cross my arms, crinkling my T&S apron. “You bet I do. I mean, it’d be absurd not to recognize you.”
He seems disproportionately unsettled by that fact.
He hasn’t blinked.
“You’re the Chase Holt groupie,” I state simply.
He flinches, appearing unsure how to respond.
“And I’m the deranged guy who trauma-dumped on you in a hallway,” I say, coming closer, “which obviously you know, seeing as you’re here. I assume you did not, in fact, track me down to my hometown like a stalker …”
“Stalker …?”
“… and instead assume Chase Holt’s next stop is … just going out on a limb here … another college in the area? It’s his College Country Crash tour, after all. Is it Fairview Community? Didn’t see Fairview on his schedule—had to check it when I got tickets to the Horseshoe—but maybe there were new locations sprinkled in here and there I don’t know about. Makes sense, with you being here, since Fairview is just half an hour that way,” I say with a nod of my head. He literally peers over his shoulder as if we can see it from here. “And, oh, I don’t know, maybe the words we shared in that old back hallway of said Horseshoe hit you harder than I thought—sorry, was having a rough day, still no excuse for being a dick—and you’re probably here to tell me how so-very-wrong I was about Chase Holt, defending your bias. Or … and color me stupefied … this really is just a coincidence, and you just happen to be strolling around my town, bored between concerts, looking to kill time, and instead just broke your face on a lamppost.”