Sometimes I forget that Annie is an artist—a real, legitimate creative person—and then she’ll say something like that and I remember again. But today, I’m too much of everything—angry, hurt and exhausted—to appreciate anything that she’s saying.
I just want to win the argument.
Annie goes on, “How much does he even know about you? And I don’t mean the stuff with Richard. I mean the accident, your appointments with Dr. Koftura, the way your brain works sometimes?”
I ignore her.
“What happens when you let him see who you are? What happens when everything’s not perfect?” There’s a pleading edge as she asks, but I don’t want to get into this. Not now.
“You know what it is, Annie?” I put extra emphasis on her name, and draw out the last vowel until it squeaks in the back of my throat. “You’re jealous. You can’t stand the fact that I have a man who loves me—”
Annie cuts in, “Has he said he loves you?” But I ignore it.
“—and who wants to spend all his time with me and take care of me, and you can’t stand that I have someone else in my life besides you.”
I don’t wait to hear her response. I hang up on her, too embarrassed to deal with the aftermath of what I’ve said. Instead, I listen to the pounding of blood in my ears until I reach Justin’s apartment. It’s only after stepping inside, after Justin peels my coat off me and brushes the snowflakes from my face, when I remember I never found out why she was calling.
4
I hold office hours at 8am twice a week. It’s a trick I happened upon early on in my career (I’m still early on, I suppose, so I guess I mean “earlier”) to schedule office hours at the undergraduate equivalent of the crack of dawn. It helps weed out ambivalent students from showing up just to fish for extra points in the last exam.
Typically, I spend the hour reading the news headlines and checking my Google alerts for updates to developmental topics—the world is obsessed with growing our children healthier, smarter, and prettier—but today I can’t help myself. I have to post something about last night.
I log into my Twitter account and scan the most recent trends before opening up a new tweet box.
Hah—that should be something, shouldn’t it? Tweet box.
Despite my fight with Annie, I’m in a good mood this morning.
Today, at 6:12am, as he was handing me a cup of tea in bed, Justin said he loved me.
I almost dropped my cup.
Sure I deflected the whole question of “Did he say he loves you?” when Annie asked me last night, but it burned me all the same. One thought kept skittering through my head. Why was I talking about love when he wasn’t? To be honest, it felt a little sickening.
Growing up a ward of the state, love can be a touchy subject.
But then I wake up today and Justin is standing there looking at me with this expression on his face, and before I’m even fully with it he says, “I love you.” Plain and simple. And then he kissed me, and so I found myself saying it back to him against his lips. And then, well—afterwards I had to rush into work this morning.
@NotThatKindofDoctor Good morning, Tweeties! Have a love, love, lovely day