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Along with two phone numbers, office and cell, there was a tagline at the bottom. Epic adventures you’ll never forget.
Somehow, looking back up at him, she didn’t doubt it.
five
“How have things been since we last met?”
For once, Galen didn’t mind that question.
Every two weeks since the start of summer, he’d been driving to Braddock for a session with Theresa Billingsley, licensed counselor. It wasn’t just his haircut phobia that had propelled him into therapy. He’d also been having bad dreams, nightmares that woke him up in a sweat. His father was in those dreams, but when he tried to bring them into focus, they got blurry. Much of his childhood was also fuzzy, especially everything having to do with his father. It was weird.
There was also the fact that some of the people closest to him were falling in love and starting families, and he still…wasn’t.
And he wanted to.
For years he’d never thought about things like that. “Survival mode,” his therapist called it. She was right. She was starting to help him see things about himself that he’d never realized, like maybe he felt more comfortable in the wilderness because it seemed more truthful to him—life is precarious and dangerous and your only mission is to survive.
But Thomas was doing more than surviving. He had a wife and a new baby. So was Jason. Galen had been watching him fall in love with Kendra Carter. It was real between those two. Any day now, he’d have to attend another damn wedding.
“Interesting,” he answered his therapist’s question.
Theresa waited patiently for him to say more.
“There’s a woman. I’ve…I haven’t talked about her, but…well, I have a…” He couldn’t come up with a better word, so he shrugged and spat it out. Patient confidentiality and all. “I have a crush on her.”
“A crush. Tell me about her.”
“She’s perfect. She’s kind. Beautiful. She has this red hair and these eyes that are like…that color when you’re cruising across the lake on a calm day and you look down and the water’s so clear you can see the bottom fish.”
Good God, that was a terrible fucking description.
“I’m not a poet. I can’t say what her eyes are like,” he said grumpily.
“Let’s agree that you find her eyes beautiful. What else do you know about her? Have you ever talked to her before?”
“I knew she was a teacher, so I never bothered. Why would a teacher want to talk to me? I hated school. The only reason I graduated was because I chopped a winter’s worth of wood for the principal, and he felt sorry for me and let my F in English slide. She’s a writer too. So that’s two reasons why she’d never want anything to do with me.”
Theresa tapped her pencil on the arm of her cushioned chair. The one Galen sat in was just as cushy, and sometimes he was tempted to take a nap in this relaxing office, with its quiet beige carpet and slight hum of air conditioning.
“I’ve noticed that you have a habit of dismissing yourself.”
“I like to be accurate.”
“Okay then. You also said that you talked to this woman for the first time. Did she seem to want nothing to do with you?”
“No,” he admitted. “That’s not how she seemed. She smiled. We talked. But that might be because I drove her grandmother home from a fire.”
“So your actions endeared you to her.”
“I guess so. She took my number. I gave her a business card. But she hasn’t called, so she probably took one look at how grubby it was and decided not to.”
Theresa smiled. She was in her sixties, and he happened to know she was married with one grown son, and that she ran marathons. Other than that, all they did was talk about him.
“Maybe you should give it time,” she suggested gently. “In the meantime, there’s something you can do.”
“What?”
“You’re doing it. You’re trying to prepare yourself to be in a real relationship. You’re looking at yourself and some of your old habits and patterns. A crush can be useful because it can tell you something about yourself.”
