Page 22 of Text Me A Kiss
Chapter Eight
Kady
L’Art_of_Illusion: Sure.
I stopped with an orange slice poking out of my mouth, staring at the messages between me and Logan and waiting.
Ten seconds, fifteen seconds, twenty, thirty…. Clearly, I could wait any number of seconds, minutes, or maybe even hours—and still, no second message from Logan would appear.
It had been a week since Logan flew to Manhattan on his business trip, which meant it had also been a week since we’d finally done it.
“Girl, I don’t need to hear the juicy details of last weekend,” Olivia said, glancing over her laptop at me. We were sitting in a coffee shop near the Juilliard campus, getting some work done. Or, Olivia was working. I was staring at my phone like a dog waiting for its owner to come home—and, apparently, muttering out loud. That, or Olivia was telepathic.
“Done it as in met in person, Olivia.” I rolled my eyes at my dirty-minded friend.
“But you did have sex.”
“Well.... yes.”
“Alright.” Olivia sighed a massive, exaggerated sigh, slapped her laptop shut, and leaned forward. “Talk to me. What’s up between you two?”
Now that I’d got my best friend into her listening mode, I dug into my worries and laid them out for her to examine. “Since he left last weekend, he keeps sending me these one word responses.”
“Is that all? Men don’t know how to have conversations.”
“This man does,” I snapped, tired of her offhand dismissals and attitude. “That’s one of the things I like so much about him. We can talk about ballets we’ve both seen, history, the French language…. or we could do that, anyway. We’d have these long, in-depth conversations that could last over an hour. He just doesn’t talk to me anymore.”
“Sorry. You’re right. That is kind of weird. Has he said anything?”
“No.” Remembering how dramatic Olivia’s sigh had been, I swallowed one of my own. “But I kind of don’t want to ask, you know? What if it has nothing to do with me and he’s just stressed about work or something?”
“Okay, listen,” Olivia said authoritatively. “If it’s work, he probably doesn’t even realize he’s acting different and he’d actually be grateful that you brought it up. If it’s you, you deserve to know why. Either way, you shouldn’t sit here and ask for my advice. You should call him and talk to him. You’re doing that now, right?”
“Yeah. When we talk on the phone he sounds like the man I know… but then, I guess I don’t know some of the little things about him. How to see when he’s tired, or happy—things that you only get when you spend a lot of time with someone, you know?”
“I do know. That doesn’t give you an excuse not to just call him and clear the air between you.”
An excuse. I opened my mouth to tell Olivia that I didn’t need excuses because I wanted to understand what was going on and sort this out, but I ended up just taking a sip of coffee instead.
What if it was me? What if something about me that Logan hadn’t known until we met in person had been extreme enough to drive him away?
No, that wasn’t it. The whole weekend, every second that we spent together, I had been acting like the woman on the dating app whom Logan had spent so much time getting to know. On the app, I’d kept no secrets. I had talked just like I did to Olivia or any other friend.
Finally, I found it, buried deep in my mind beneath a barrier of explanations and diversions: the real cause of my distress, and now it ran rampant in my mind. What if… what if, when Logan had finally met me in person and realized exactly how much time and passion I devoted to ballet, he had decided a future with me wouldn’t work? After all, if I was constantly travelling to performances in the United States or even other countries, how could he expect me to be there for him when he needed me?
“I don’t know what you’re thinking about, but crushing your coffee cup and destroying your laptop won’t help.”
Olivia’s comment startled me into glancing down at the plastic cup in my hand. The sides were no longer round and the lid had popped off under the strength of my grip. “Whoops.”
She shook her head at me. “Seriously, just talk to him.”
* * *
Five hours later, I took Olivia’s advice. Armed with a soft, fuzzy blanket, a cup of tea that steamed with the perfect temperature, and my favorite pillow, I leaned my head back against the sofa bed and tapped the little green call button next to Logan’s name.
Just as the sixth ring began, right when I had nearly lost my conviction, Logan picked up. His low, sexy voice sent my mind scrambling for words. “Hey, Kitten.”
What was I going to say? Logan’s voice always made me want to think and say nothing but naughty, dirty things…. Oh yeah. One-word answers. Odd tones. Me worrying, maybe for no reason.