Page 74 of Finding Jack
That wasn’t on me, so I raised my eyebrows at him.
“We’re not in a relationship, are we?” he asked.
That was a question I hadn’t expected. “I don’t know. No? No, we’re not in a relationship.”
“Because a relationship is where you date each other. But only each other, right? And don’t see other people. And you make that decision because you’ve spent time together and you both agree you don’t want to date anyone else. So you don’t. And you hang out with each other and do couple stuff, like go to each other’s boring work parties, or take bike rides, or fight over the remote.”
“I don’t fight over the remote. I don’t care about the remote. That’s why Ranée and I get along so well. She would marry the remote if she could.” I threw out the joke because I didn’t know how to process everything else he was saying. It sounded like he was working out something aloud, so I’d sit here and let him, to see where he went.
“See? I would know that if we were in a relationship. But we can’t be. Because you’re in San Francisco.”
A faintly acid ripple burned through my stomach. I was having the exact conversation I’d played out in my mind a week ago and filed under, “Conversations Never to Have.”
“You’re on an Oregon mountain. Maybe that’s the problem.”
“It is. It’s just as much of a problem. But I don’t plan to change that any time soon. Do you?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so, either. So why keep talking? All it does is make me want to come down off the mountain. Or talk you out of the city. I want to be sitting right across from you when you make me laugh. I want to make you laugh, and hear it myself. It kills me to hear it filtered through a screen. I want to…”
He trailed off. He wanted to…? Whatever he wasn’t saying, I wanted it too.
He shoved his hands through his hair. I was learning this was a sign of his frustration. “It gets worse every time we talk, not better, so it made sense not to talk anymore. There is literally no point, is there?”
It was a hopeless question, but I felt a smile tickling the corners of my lips anyway, because…
He wanted to sit across from me and watch me laugh.
“There’s no point,” I agreed. “Not if the goal is for us to be in a relationship.”
“And we can’t be, right?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t make sense.” But it was even harder to fight my smile. It felt so good to know I wasn’t the only one who’d been driving myself crazy with this.
“It’s not funny,” he said, narrowing his eyes at me.
“No.” But I realized the smile had won anyway.
“The thing is, it’s kind of sucked for a few days without your texts. Everything is boring and stupid.”
“Wow, Dr. Jack. I had no idea doctors were so articulate.”
“Stop making fun of me.” He leaned in until I got an extreme close up of his glare. “We should still talk.”
“Okay.”
He leaned back to a normal distance. “Okay?”
“Okay. But.”
“But…?”
“I’m tired of off-limits topics. It’s like trying to do the tango on eggshells except if the eggshells break, everything blows up. I’m over it.”
“I’m tired of off-limit topics too. I get it. But we still need ground rules.”
“Oh, yay. Ground rules.” A text alert came in at the top of my screen. I didn’t know who it was from, but suddenly I wanted to check that much more than I wanted to keep having this conversation.
