How much of what you do is choice, and how much is momentum?
I’d bristled when I first read that question. What the fuck was that supposed to mean? What kind of question was that?
I didn’t do any of these things on purpose.
I almost tripped over Boomer’s leash when he decided to cross to the other side of the path.
Well … sometimes I did.
Why did he have to go and ask me real questions? Plain rude to call me out like that.
You're not 'alarmed' because I’m not interested in frightening you. That tends to come later.
Somehow, the idea that he wasn’t trying to frighten me was more unsettling than if he were. There was a quiet deliberation behind his words that made my skin prickle, teetering on the edge between discomfort and exhilaration.
What would it look like if he actually tried to scare me? This thought lingered against my will, echoing through my mind and refusing to disappear.
That tends to come later.
Later than what? I was too fucking nosy for this shit. What the hell did he mean?
I shook my head, trying to banish the letter and Sasha from my thoughts. Giving Boomer’s leash a gentle tug, I attempted to coax him toward the park’s exit. I’d been following his fluffy booty for over an hour, lost in my thoughts. A strange warmth had spread to the very tips of my fingers. I wasn’t exactly flustered, but I was more aware of my thoughts and where they were leading than usual.
It was probably a bad sign to feel more grounded today after receiving Sasha’s letter than I had all week. Definitely more grounded than I had felt after my mom finally texted me back this morning, after almost two weeks of sitting on read, and informed me my cousin was getting married.
Not to invite me, but simply to inform me they were getting married.
After Dad’s death, Mom had barely coped. She couldn’t bear to see the bakery, our home, the restaurants he used to take her to for date night or the park where we used to have family picnics.
Basically anything reminding her of Dad … which unfortunately seemed to include me. Mom moved back to England, to be closer to her sisters, and I was partly glad she didn’t stick around to witness all of my failures.
She was desperate to leave this place and the painful memories behind, and I couldn’t blame her at all. If I lost the love of my life to a heart attack at forty-two, I probably wouldn’t take it well either.
While she didn’t say there was nothing holding her here anymore, I knew it to be true. And that was fine. I wasn’t angry. Maybe a little hurt, but she deserved to do what made her happy.
I had been an adult for years — at least in theory — and had refused to leave the bakery, while my sister had long since moved out of state with her husband.
I never had enough money to visit my mother in England, and I had no illusions of her ever coming back to see me. This led to the current status quo: daily texts turned into random ones every couple of weeks and weekly calls turned into calls for birthdays and holidays … if either of us remembered.
It would’ve been heartbreaking had I not been aware of the fact that her reactions to how my life turned out would have been even worse. I was glad she didn’t have a front-row seat. Glad no one was left to remind me not to be myself, because my current circumstances were the result of doing just that.
I blinked, tearing my thoughts away from this rabbit hole I had no intention of going down.
I guess I’ll be expecting another letter soon.
Instead, my mind fixated unhelpfully on Sasha’s final words. It should’ve come across as presumptuous and cocky, but instead it struck me as him warming to me and letting me in, if only slightly.
I coaxed Boomer out of the park and retraced my steps back to his parents’ house, lost in thought.
This was still safe.
They were just words on paper. We were hundreds of miles apart. He still didn’t know what I looked like, and he couldn’t see the way my hand kept fluttering to my pocket, making sure the letter was still there.
It was safe because he was locked up, living a life vastly different from mine, full of rules, restrictions and cold metal.
This was safe. Controlled. Hypothetical.
I was good at hypotheticals.