Page 123 of Townshipped
I love Em. She’s the one for me. No one else ever has, or ever will make me feel this way. I’m a lovesick fool and I’m not even a little embarrassed about it.
“I wanted to hear your voice,” I say.
I clear my throat to get rid of this gravelly hoarseness that came out after first hearing her speak.
“Oh. I thought you were just sick of texting me,” Em says.
“Not at all. I just meant I’d rather talk. How are you?”
Her voice loses some of its brightness. “Fine. I’m fine. You know?”
She’s not fine. I can hear it, sense it.
“Tell me what’s not fine.”
Her heavy sigh scrapes across me like fingernails on a chalkboard, making me want to abandon everything and go to her—to erase whatever isn’t right in her life.
Em’s quiet for a few moments.
“It’s just hard. I’m back in Boston. You’d think I’d feel settled, since this city has been home to me all my life. But I’ve never felt so out of place. Even at your house. Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever felt out of place at the farm.”
“Because you weren’t.”
The words are out before I think of what I’m saying. I want to reach through the phone and hold her, to see her face, to wrap a lock of her copper hair in my fingers and gaze into her translucent green eyes before I bend in to kiss her.
“It’s probably going to take time to settle back in. Give it time,” I tell her.
“You’re probably right,” she says. “I just need to give it time.”
“It’s so good to hear your voice,” I say, apparently unable to keep my thoughts from exiting my mouth.
“Yours too.”
“Yeah?”
“Mm-hmm.”
That hum of hers revives dead places inside me. Maybe Duke was right. I’ve been a dead man walking.
“So, you miss me, huh?” I’m pushing my luck, but she did type those words:I miss you.
“Again, the text-erase feature would be extremely handy. I didn’t mean to send that.”
“And yet, you did.”
“I did.”
“I miss you too,” I tell her.
“So you said.”
Her voice has that playful flirting edge to it. The one she would put on when she knew she was getting to me. I picture the morning she taunted me after our first kiss. All thoughts of why I let her go seem like madness.
“So tell me about the kids. I miss them,” Em says.
I’m tempted to push her, but I shouldn’t. She’s bringing up the kids instead of responding to me saying I miss her. Does Em miss me the way I miss her? I don’t know. At least she texted. And she answered my call. And she said she missed me. She said it twice. That has to be enough for now.
I launch into a story about the food fight Ty started two nights ago at dinner, and Em laughs hard. We spend another half hour on the phone with stories of bedtime and the baby goats, and then her telling me about Gabriela and her parents.
