AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter 15
Nate stayed in the house just long enough to leave a note in the kitchen. There wasn’t paper, but he found a napkin and a Sharpie.
Keep the stove and everything in case the power doesn’t come back. Take care.
He stood with the tip of the marker hovering over the napkin. He wanted to write so many things, to put in written words the things he could not say. But it turned out he couldn’t bring himself to write them either. A napkin felt too small. And an apology on a napkin was a joke. Nate didn’t sign it, but left it near the stove. Locking the lower handle of the doorknob, he went out the front.
The street was beyond dark since the power was out. No streetlights, no porch lights. The moon cast a glow that reflected in the puddles stretching from the curb a few feet into the street. Nate pulled away from the house, unsure where to go. It was almost midnight and he didn’t know what areas were flooded or impassable. He didn’t think he could sleep and had no desire to sit in his apartment alone.
As he drove, thoughts began to creep out from the dark places. Driving was motion and helped him the way that walking or running did. Nate headed toward the highway. He had to turn around at a few points where the roads were blocked off with high water. A few times he saw cars floating in the deeper waters. It seemed obvious not to drive into high water, but people often underestimated the depth until their cars were submerged. The highway was higher ground, so he got on I-10 and headed west.
Movement helped, but on a night like tonight where Nate had hard, heavy, clinging thoughts, it also gave him too much time to think. When he had described how anxiety felt to his therapist, he said it was like a single worry sprouted like kudzu in his mind.
Nate learned about kudzu when he took a trip with the guys to South Carolina one summer. He didn’t know why they drove all the way to Hilton Head, but they did. All along the highways were lush, thick vines covering the grassy embankments and even the trees. Sometimes they’d pass an area where the vines were all dead, like they’d been torched with something, brown and lifeless.
For some reason, he got interested and spent some of the drive researching the vine. It was introduced from Japan at the 1876 World Fair Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. In the Depression era kudzu was touted as a miracle plant to bring back barren Southern farmlands only it went wild, particularly along the highways. Growing at the rate of a foot a day, it’s a plant whose growth you could actually see, if you stopped to watch.
Nate’s anxious thoughts were like that—only worse. Springing from a single seed of a thought, nightmare vines shot out, clinging and cloying and clambering for his attention all at the same time. Kudzu grew up over the tops of trees and the edges, not penetrating forests, but covering them in darkness. These thoughts were like that, skimming the tops and the edges, blocking out the light and leaving Nate in the middle, hidden in the shadows and the darkness.
They weren’t silent, either. At times the thoughts would seem to tumble over themselves, shouting like children vying for attention by trying to see who could shout the loudest.
As he drove, Nate tried to push them down, focusing instead on mile markers, not counting them, but reading them aloud as he went. Numbers, formulas, problem solving—all of those helped him avoid the tangled thoughts and retain order. Separating one thought from the others helped, but sometimes it became impossible.
He was so used to breathing exercises that he started them without consciously thinking about it. Just after he left Colby’s, his skin had started the buzzing that sometimes happened before an attack, but it was quieter now. The tightness in his chest eased and his thoughts stilled. He felt nauseous, but that was a product of guilt as much as anxiety.
Colby. How much more could he have screwed that up?
He had been so foolish to think that he could secretly date her on the app and then reveal it to her with a grand gesture. It did look creepy. She would probably never believe that he didn’t set it up on purpose or that he hadn’t used the data in her profile to find out where she lived. Intentionally getting a job on her mail route would have been impossible, but with everything else, it seemed totally suspect. He looked like an obsessive creeper. A dishonest, obsessive creeper.
She practically begged him to tell her why he stood her up. If he had told her the truth about his anxiety, would it have made up for hiding the fact that he was Napper? Probably not.
But what if he had told her the truth?
What if he had texted or called her four years ago?
She said she wouldn’t have left him. She would have understood. Even though they’d never been on a date. There was something powerful between them, even though on paper they barely had a relationship. What did they really have? Three mornings a week for fifty minutes for a whole semester. An intense twenty-four hours in the midst of a hurricane. It didn’t seem like much, but it was enough for him to know that he loved her. She seemed to feel the same way until he broke her trust.
What if he went back and told her now?
What if he had mentioned this in the hallway, when she first asked?
What if he hadn’t been careless with the phone and she hadn’t realized that he was Napper?
What if he had kissed her in the kitchen?
What if Todd hadn’t fixed the app?
What if he kept driving and didn’t turn around?
What if he did actually disappear?
What if he drove into the concrete barrier with his car?
Mile 730. Mile 729. Mile 728.
Breathe.
Nate realized that his forefinger was tapping out a rhythm on the steering wheel and he stilled it, taking control of what he could. Breathing. Counting. Not letting the thoughts take over.
He was doing so much better. Despite the worries that Zane and Todd had. He could hear the concern etched in their voices every time they talked. But he could manage. Even without a Xanax, though he probably should have taken one leaving Colby’s.
Colby.
He had done it all wrong. It was so obvious to him now. She wanted something so simple: She wanted the truth.
Nate felt the curl of disappointment in his gut. Too bad the truth was one thing he couldn’t seem to give her. And now she would never believe that the app paired them up or that he just happened to get on her mail route. What he had hidden from her said enough. She didn’t trust him and probably never would.
No, it was done. Colby was gone. He had lost her four years ago, but now it was like getting the final paperwork in order. It was official and final. It was over.
Mile 715. Mile 714. Mile 713…
