She’s halfway through a bite when she looks at me. “I’m kind of seeing someone.”
“Like, steady?”
She nods. “We’ve been going out for a few weeks now.”
Shelby squeals. “We need details. Like, length, girth, stamina. Let me live my life vicariously through you now that I’m stuck to the same D for the rest of my life, and I can’t question Mor because of TMI.”
Meggy sits back and starts talking. I love seeing her like this. She’s beaming and happy, and almost glowing. For someone who doesn’t want to settle down, she seems to have found some happiness. I wonder if this is what people saw happening to me whenever I fell in love. If I had the same glow. Somehow I doubt it. Most of the time I was just convinced I had found true love, in love with the situation instead of the guy I thought I had fallen in love with. With all my experience in love, I wonder if I ever had genuinely loved one of them.
I zone out as Shelby and Meggy talk all about her date’s cock and I bask in a sadness I haven’t realized I was feeling. All my ideas of what my future should look like were all wrong suddenly. Is this the quarter life crisis thing? Because it sucks that I no longer have any direction. Having fun was a good option for the time being, but I wouldn’t want to do that forever. How am I going to find out what I do want? Hell if I know. Perhaps I should take a page out of Meggy’s book and sleep around as much as I can, to get all my what if’s out of the way. And then bam! I would fall head over heels in love for real when I’m least expecting it. It sounds like a good plan, but my mind goes to the boys I'm having fun with and somehow I can’t see a future without them in it. Things are just really complicated.
Meggy shakes me out of my thoughts when she asks me if Dean or Jonah has the biggest dick and I get sucked back into the conversation. I’ll just have to deal with all my love problems when girl time’s over.
After girl time I go home and spend some time working. When I see O’s car standing in the driveway after it’s been gone all day, I swiftly put on my shoes and head over to his house, not caring that I left my phone at home. Everyone who needs to reach me can reach me through O or will probably just barge in. He’s been at work, and I’ve been meaning to go over and talk to him. Sure, we’ve texted some during the day, but it’s not really the same. Having Celia locked away surely has done something to him. He was her obsession, so it must be a relief that she is no longer running around and making people’s lives miserable.
I knock on the door, because having her locked away doesn’t mean the door suddenly is unlocked again. Celia really did a number on us. I wonder if O’s sense of security will ever fully return. Guess that applies to me as well. O answers the door in his work attire, his face lighting up as he sees it’s me.
“Howdy neighbor.”
“Hey Mor,” he says as he opens the door further to let me in.
“Do you mind me hanging out for a bit?”
“Never.”
We silently walk to the living room, where the TV is on, and some sort of documentary kind of show about drug cartels is showing. I guess our idea of what’s fun to watch after getting home from work differs. O points to the couch with his chin and I sit down, following his silent command.
“I’ll be right back,” he says as he leaves the room. I mindlessly watch whatever is going on in the show, but it doesn’t register what I’m seeing. The house is silent and somehow it soothes whatever thoughts are in my head. It’s weird how a change of scene can do that for me sometimes. Most of the time, I have a challenging time making my endlessly yapping head shut the hell up.
When O walks back into the room, he’s changed his work attire for sweatpants. He’s carrying a pile of blankets in his arms. I thought he didn’t like them, living in Arizona and all? There’s different colors and varied materials and they all look pretty, even if the colorful cloth they’re made of looks severely out of place in O’s black and white styled home. They look comfy too.
“What are you doing with those blankets?” I ask him, as I put my feet back on the couch.
He looks at me in confusion. “You like blankets,” is his answer.
“I know I like blankets. I also know you don’t like blankets. So why do you have blankets?” I was firmly in the lead for the world record of saying blankets as many times as possible in a single conversation.
“I got them for you,” he softly replies, looking at me with his big hazel eyes.
Suddenly I’m looking differently at the pile he’s holding. I love him. It. I love it. I love the gesture. Not him, now that would be silly. He walks over to the couch and dumps the blankets right next to me as I keep staring at him like some kind of creep. I pick the yellow one out of the pile and drape it over my legs, while all I say is “Thanks.”
“So, what’s up?” he asks me as he sits down next to me.
“Just wanted to check in with you. I haven’t seen you in a while and now that Celia's gone, I wondered how you were doing.”
He looks away and falls silent. When he doesn’t answer, I do.
“It’s weird isn’t it?”
“Yeah. I just keep convincing myself this is just temporary, and she’ll be let go and it will all start over again. Somehow it seems wrong to hope it'll really be over.”
I agree with him. Celia really did a number on us. The idea that someone could do something deranged and possibly dangerous at any given moment, without you having any control over what was happening, was scary.
“Yeah, I understand. I keep looking over my shoulder, waiting for the next crisis.”
O grabs my hand and I watch it while it’s happening. It’s strange to get comfort out of someone just holding my hand. We’ve hugged before and pecked each other’s cheeks. But somehow this is more intimate.
“It’s over. At least for now. We’ll get notified when she gets out. And hopefully she’ll be herself again when she’s out of her psychosis and the meds will prevent her losing touch with reality again.”