Page 53 of Grump Hard
So sad, I’m not sure if I’ll ever be quite the same.
Fifteen
Luke
Four days later…
* * *
The numbers on my laptop screen might as well be written in ancient Sanskrit.
I’ve been staring at the same quarterly report for the past forty minutes, and I couldn’t tell you a single thing it says. The cursor mocks me, waiting for me to input something—anything—but my fingers remain motionless on the keyboard.
My mind is elsewhere.
Specifically, it’s trapped in an endless loop, replaying two contradictory scenes like some kind of psychological torture device.
Scene One: Wednesday night. The window at the Reindeer Corners Inn. Holly in that narrow hallway with that man. The way he took both her hands. The way he looked at her. That tight, lingering hug.
Scene Two: Friday evening. The parking lot. Holly’s expression when I made it clear I didn’t want to see her again. The way her smile had frozen, then cracked. The genuine confusion in her eyes. The hurt—raw and unguarded—that flashed across her pretty face before I turned and walked away.
If she was moving on with someone else, if Wednesday night was what I thought it was, then why did she look so devastated?
The question circles through my mind for the thousandth time, wearing a festering groove in my thoughts.
I lean back in the desk chair, scrubbing both hands over my face. My rational, analytical brain, the one that’s built a business empire by reading people and situations with precision, keeps trying to construct a logical framework that makes sense of both scenes.
Maybe she and Hallway Man ended things between Wednesday and Friday?
That could explain her reaction, I suppose. Explain why she was hurt when I pulled away right after she’d cut ties with someone meaningful to her.
But that doesn’t track with her behavior. She wasn’t acting like someone nursing a fresh breakup. She was acting like someone who had no idea why I was being a royal dick.
Fuck.
I try to tell myself I wasn’t a dick—just cool, reserved—but deep down I know better. Deep down, I’m also starting to suspect I’ve made a serious mistake.
Maybe that hug wasn’t romantic at all.
Maybe she and that man are just friends, and I completely misread the situation.
But how do you misread a man taking a woman’s hands and pulling her into that kind of embrace? Friends don’t look at each other like that. Friends don’t hold each other like that.
Do they?
I think of Elliot and Nancy, how tender and playful they are with each other, and how—to my knowledge—they have never been anything more than good friends.
Maybe I don’t look at friends like that, but maybe other people do?
Maybe I’m the problem here, as usual?
But Holly doesn’t look at any of the other men she’s friends with that way. She didn’t look at Paulie like that or the accountant who stopped by to say hello at the bar, whom she’d introduced as a “long-time friend.”
And just like that, I’m back to the beginning of the festering thought spiral.
My coffee has gone cold on the desk beside me. The fire in the study fireplace has burned down to embers. Outside the window, grey December clouds hang low over the valley, threatening snow.
I should be working. I have actual responsibilities—board meetings to prepare for, strategic decisions to make. But every time I try to focus, my mind drifts back to that parking lot. To the way Holly’s voice wavered when she said “What?” Like she couldn’t comprehend what I was saying.
