This Is My Brain in Love - I. W. Gregorio Page 0,94
a little bit sweet, and I pack away my feelings, one by one.
By the time my bowl is empty except for a little bit of rice water at the bottom, I’m almost steady. Controlled enough to actually go up and pull on the jeans I wore yesterday and a V-neck T-shirt lying at the foot of my bed. When I brush my hands through my hair and throw it in a ponytail it looks almost presentable.
Here I am, ready to face the world. Or something like that.
Before everything went to shit, my plan for the week had been to work with Will to post some of Priya’s videos on Instagram or YouTube, maybe even try to brainstorm ways to spruce up our anemic Yelp page.
Now? That’s not going to happen. The thought of spending all day sitting next to Will at a computer, even with a chaperone lurking in the background? It makes me light-headed, makes a muscle just under my breastbone clench. I would literally rather do anything than go downstairs and have him avoid my gaze, or worst of all, look through me again the way he did last night.
So I take the coward’s way out and type up an e-mail, telling him that I am going to make some runs to new doctors’ offices, and can he look through Priya’s videos?
I decide that if he sends me a message back right away, we’re good. If it takes a while, there’s something wrong, and I’ll have to analyze what he says to figure out where we stand. I can’t envision a world where he wouldn’t respond—he’s too fastidious, to use an SAT word that I would never in a million years have thought was remotely attractive in a boy. But somehow, on Will, the attention to detail doesn’t seem picky or calculated. It seems careful. It seems kind.
After I hit send, I go downstairs to put together some of our samplers. When I’m done putting together the food and tossing in our new catering brochure, I open my laptop and bite my lip in disappointment when there aren’t any new messages, even though I know it’s only been about ten minutes.
I grab my bike and hit the road at ten thirty. We’re just hitting the dog days of August, so the air is thick, and I break a sweat within seconds. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to do this. I should have just left the job to Will, who could drive around in his air-conditioned zero-emissions car and show up all calm and collected with his J.Crew attire and trustworthy attitude.
I push through anyway. Just as I turn onto Genesee Street, my phone buzzes. At the next stoplight I pull it out. It’s Will, and a flood of relief pours through me even as part of me worries that it took him twenty-five minutes to write back, which might not sound like a big delay, but it is practically blowing someone off in Will time. He almost always responds to e-mails right away, unless they’re something that he needs to think about, that he’s not sure of.
What if it’s me he’s not sure of?
His e-mail doesn’t give me anything at all.
Happy to help. I’ll start looking at the videos right now. See you soon.
This is from someone who regularly sends me five-hundred-word texts that make my phone blow up because my texting app still insists on breaking messages into 140 characters.
An old pickup truck belches past me and I swing my leg back up to pedal grimly on. Every breath I take feels like I’m inhaling a furnace through a straw. What does he mean that he’s happy to help? Is that some sort of passive-aggressive statement that’s supposed to imply that I’m being demanding? And how is it that he still hasn’t asked me how the interview went?
Maybe it’s because he assumes that it didn’t go well, a voice in my head suggests, and boy, does that thought have the sting of truth.
When I walk into the first office building, I chain up my bike and sigh with relief when I step into the blessed AC. There’s a bathroom where I freshen up a bit so I look less like I’ve just ridden the Tour de France. As I turn on the faucet to rinse the street grime off my face, a woman with a Samsonite rolling bag and two-inch high heels clomps in. She has a name tag that IDs her as Brittany from East