Page 28 of Life, Love, and Other Messes

“Thanks,” I said. We hesitated there, both focused back on Ollie, who grinned around his droopy tongue like he knew he deserved the attention.

“Well.”

“Well,” I returned. “I’ll see you later, I guess.”

Lisa nodded, smiling back. “See you later.”

I fell asleep at the usual time but woke up around three and couldn’t get back to sleep. My mind was racing and I tossed and turned for what felt like forever. At first it was about the usual stressful things like bills, but after a while, I realized I was replaying my walk with Lisa, trying to remember it word for word.

She’d said she was lonely. She’d asked who I hung out with. But it felt like she’d sounded surprised when I gave her my number. Was that too forward? Had I made her uncomfortable? I thought we’d had a nice time the other night when we split a bottle of wine and she got over the initial upset of talking about the divorce and confiding in me. We’d talked about work, mostly. We’d laughed over stories about her four-year-olds and I told her about some of my students and how I sometimes felt like I was really making a difference. Hadn’t it been nice? Or had she intentionally been hiding from me since?

She was the one to initiate our walk, I remembered. I hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary like passing her house extra times or huddling in the bushes down the street until she finally came out to do yard work.

Yeah, she was okay with being friends. I found myself smiling at the ceiling, and hurriedly closed my eyes and rolled over, burying in the covers. If we were going to be friends, I needed to stop crushing on her. I couldn’t say something awkward and ruin things. I rolled over to the other side, and accidentally kicked Ollie, who was asleep at the foot of the bed. He huffed and stretched his legs out into my space. Instead of moving over to give him more room, I got out of bed entirely and threw on underpants and a T-shirt. Ollie didn’t even lift his head.

I hadn’t tried to write in the middle of the night while taking my meds for a long time. Instead of turning on the overhead light in my office, I switched on a lamp across the room and opened up my laptop. A chapter of my unfinished book was staring at me. Instead of working on that, I opened a new document and started fresh.

Words came slowly, but they came. They weren’t part of my murder mystery, though. In an hour, I had part of a completely different scene, a sweet one between two co-workers in a brand-new, delicate friendship tinged with the tiniest bit of awkward electricity. I hadn’t written a romance in a while, but it was like I had something brand new to me: a muse.

Hey. How’re you doing?

I’d thought that for sure I’d overstepped by giving Lisa my number, and that she’d never actually use it. She’d waited two days, granted, but here she was, texting. I had finished dinner and was going to dive into grading papers for Comp One, but I could toss those aside in a heartbeat.

Okay. You?

She texted back right away. Fine. Are you busy?

Not really. Just about to grade essays.

There was a pause. Would it bother you to have company?

Not at all. I can do the papers later.

No, no, I have lesson plans to work on. Like maybe we could sit together?

That was interesting. Sure. Here or your place?

Maybe your place would be easier with Ollie?

Ten minutes later, Lisa was settled on the sofa and I was on the loveseat. She’d come with an armful of binders, folders, and colorful books. It was fascinating compared to what I had: my laptop, a manila folder full of papers, and a gradebook. I wanted to sneak the top book, Hop Little Frog, and read it myself, or even better, to read it to Ollie, who was sleeping under the coffee table.

I expected to be self-conscious, but our parallel play worked well. I marked up papers, scribbled in grades and some short thoughts into my book, then set them on the coffee table. Lisa worked with a pen in a notebook, paging through binders, sifting through folders. Every once in a while, she would pull out a sheet from one of them and use a paper clip from a pouch in one of the binders to attach it to what she was writing.

I’d finished my morning class’s essays when I realized she was mouthing words to something and making hand motions. It looked like something was hopping. It was about the cutest thing I’d ever seen. While I was watching, she looked up, mid-hop. “You’re going to ask me what the hell I’m doing.”

I shrugged. “I assume it goes with the frog book.”

“It does. We’re studying amphibians. I promise not to sing out loud.”

“I don’t care.”

“You’d care, trust me. It drove Corey crazy.”

I’m not Corey. I couldn’t imagine anything she could do driving me crazy, at least in a bad way. “You did work with him?”

“I used to sit in the den with him while he played video games.”

“You work better with company.”