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I ended the call and blew out a long breath, trying to ward off my panic by grounding myself in my surroundings. Whoever came up with that coping mechanism hadn’t spent any time in an airport on Thanksgiving Day.
The boarding gates to my right were half-full at best, thanks to the holiday… except for the gate where the passengers for the flight to Newark were assembled, where every single seat was occupied. A woman in a large hat argued stridently with the gate attendant, possibly about the giant, plastic-wrapped turkey she was carrying like a toddler. The sign next to the gate still showed no availability on the standby list, but that didn’t stop an elderly man from complaining loudly that he needed to make it to New York in time for the Black Friday sales. To my left, a young girl attempted to play “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” on a wooden recorder while her little brother ate only the orange M&Ms out of a bag. Their mother had brilliantly brought a giant pair of noise-canceling headphones and was happily bopping her head to happy mom music of unknown origin.
Without thinking about it, I opened my phone’s camera app, ready to capture the scene and send it to Oscar just for the fun of hearing his snarky commentary on the chaos, but I forced myself to stop at the last minute.
You’re not doing that with Oscar anymore, remember?
Making the choice to cut down on my communication with Oscar earlier this month had been even harder than I’d expected, which only showed how necessary it was. Somehow, over the past three months, our all-day text conversations had gone from being a fun diversion to a habit and then to an addiction. I’d gone from being surprised and pleased to see his name appear on my notifications to being wildly disappointed when it didn’t. Our virtual friendship had become a little too real.
Oscar had drawn clear boundaries back when we’d first embarked on this text friendship experiment. Hell, he’d strung barbed wire at the edge of the friendship cliff and hung an enormous flashing sign that spelled out DO NOT FALL FOR ME.
If he had any idea how close I’d come to taking that plunge over the past few weeks, he’d be horrified.
You are on a mission to find The One, he’d told me in one of his first texts. If I’m in your bed, you’ll be too busy to keep looking for him. But the truth was, having Oscar in my phone wasn’t any safer. Not when he was so fucking gorgeous in his mirror selfies with Frank, so wry and funny in every story he told, so sweet beneath his hedgehog prickles. Not when he was so entirely averse to the very idea of romance that falling for him would definitely, no question, mean I was falling alone.
Four dates and he’s already taking you home to meet the parents? Oscar had demanded when I’d told him I was invited to North Carolina. I don’t like it. What’s his angle? Is he pregnant? Are you the father? I refuse to attend your shotgun wedding.
It’s romantic, I’d insisted, instinctive annoyance at Oscar’s attitude making me ignore all my own misgivings about the situation, all the red flags flapping in the breeze.
It’s desperate, he’d countered.
But, I’d pressed, still pretending to myself that we were talking about the guy I was dating and not about Oscar himself, haven’t you ever just known from the very beginning that someone was different? Special? And that you’d do whatever it took to be with them?
The dots by Oscar’s name had swirled for a long time—long enough for my racing heart to pound out the first few notes of a wedding march—and then they’d stopped.
No, he’d written.
And that had been that.
I’d only sent him a handful of texts since then, none at all in the last few days, and the fact that Oscar had been absolutely correct about the North Carolina trip being a shitshow from the moment we’d arrived yesterday had only reinforced my decision. I needed to focus on finding a guy with actual romantic potential, on growing my photography business and my social media followers, on repairing things in my own life, like?—
My phone buzzed with a text from Oscar, as if I’d conjured it into existence. My heart jolted, and I immediately clicked on it. It was a photo of Frank in a tiny black top hat, facing off against a pine cone decorated as a turkey.
Oscar
I think Frank finally met his soulmate. Who knew he was into the whole strong, silent type?
Oscar
Happy Thanksgiving, Hugh.
It was his use of my name that struck me hardest. It felt so… personal. Intimate somehow. I scrolled back to our last exchange, except it hadn’t even been an exchange at all. He’d texted a picture of himself in a heather-gray T-shirt, with Frank curled up in a ball on his shoulder. I’d saved the image but forced myself not to reply. I hadn’t texted him in days, and still he’d reached out to wish me a happy Thanksgiving.
Suddenly, I didn’t just want him. I needed him. I was stranded alone in North Carolina with my sister hurt in New Jersey, and I needed someone familiar to keep me from spiraling and imagining the worst-case scenarios.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I clicked the phone icon at the top of the text chain.
Oscar’s voice, when he answered seconds later, was smooth and cultured and achingly familiar, despite our time apart. “Hugh? To what do I owe the pleasure?”
After all these months without talking to him, his voice was like a hit of a very powerful drug. I felt a kind of frantic energy churning through my blood.
“Hi. Hey. I, uh, I know calling is breaking the rules…”
“What’s wrong?” he asked immediately.
I opened my mouth, then shut it, not quite sure how to respond to that. Had we really spent enough time texting for him to know something was wrong?
Through the phone, I heard china clink, then someone tittered loudly. “Hang on,” Oscar muttered. After murmuring something I couldn’t hear, he came back, this time with faint traffic noises in the background. I remembered vaguely he was spending the holiday weekend in the city with his mom, but I was hazy on the details. Oscar rarely discussed his family. “Sorry about that. What’s going on?”
