Avery pursed her lips. “Sort of is not the kind of talk I want to hear, slightly younger than me lady.”
“I’m a work in progress, okay?”
“Fine, fine. Just know I think he’s the one who should be asking if he deserves you.”
I really did love her sometimes.
“I know this conversation is about you,” she said after a beat, “but uh, what exactly was the key to getting you on the pathway to self-love? Was it yoga? Please, don’t tell me it was the yoga. I am really not bendy.”
“It wasn’t the yoga,” I assured her. “As for what did, I haven’t quite figured it out.” I had some idea, but Avery wasn’t the first person I wanted to tell.
She seemed to understand. “Well, when you do, you should tell him.”
...And now we were back to where we started.
“But he won’t talk to me.” I threw myself back into the couch, extra dramatic like because I was pretty sure she loved my flair despite constantly complaining about it.
“That is depressing.” She leaned back as well, a show of support. “Have you tried?”
“Enough to know he needs space. I’m trying to give it to him.”
She nodded. “Personally, I’d ignore that space, but as I’ve admitted, my ways are flawed. You should probably give him time.”
“Yeah.”
“But not forever. Figure out how to talk to him fairly soon. It seems he needs to know he’s worth fighting for.”
She’d confirmed something I recognized intuitively but hadn’t been able to articulate. I knew I needed to fight for him, which was partly why the time away from him had given me so much anxiety.
The other part was I just missed him.
“Okay,” I said, glad for the clarity. “I don’t know how I’ll fight for him exactly…”
“Then you need to figure that out too.” Clearly, that was the extent of her helpfulness.
“Thanks a lot.”
“I already admitted half my secrets. What more do you want from me?”
“Nothing,” I said, giving her one more side hug. “You’re perfect as is.”
Chapter Thirteen
I resisted reaching out to Brett for another week. I did want to respect his wishes, but honestly, the only reason I didn’t break down and contact him outside of work was because I hadn’t yet figured out how to fight for him.
The only way I made it through the next week was by convincing myself that giving him space was fighting for him. The first step, anyway, and other steps were starting to formulate in my mind. Small gestures I could make to prove my feelings. I wasn’t fooling myself—it would take time to build his trust. But I was experienced with sticking to relationships, even when they didn’t have a promising outcome. Surely, waiting for Brett would be worth the reward.
Still, it was an enormously hard task not to linger after staff meetings, not to stroll down to his office to ask if he wanted to grab lunch, not to text him with laugh-cry emojis when Silvia came in wearing that god-awful floral pantsuit. Not to drop my mat next to his at yoga and get in trouble for whispering to him the whole time.
At least he’d come back to class. Seeing him made me hopeful. And when he accidentally met my eyes across the room and offered a small smile before looking away, I decided it was time to launch into the next level of Project Win Brett for Keeps.
What I needed, though, was a big gesture to kick everything off. The following week, Scott’s assistant, Sadie, inadvertently came up with a perfect opportunity.
“What does she want us to do, exactly?” Julie asked after the assistants’ staff meeting that Monday.
Strangely enough, I’d actually been paying attention this time. “She wants us to type up our favorite moments with Scott so she can hang them in the break room and make sort of a memory wall. No names. Leave it anonymous.”
Julie made a judgey face. “Um, that’s dumb.”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
Sadie had admitted she’d heard about it at a team building workshop, and that the assignment was originally supposed to be to share memories about everyone in the workplace, but she’d decided to modify it as a tribute to Scott, who was being promoted out of the department. As the originally intended team bonding experiment, the project might not have been half bad.
As it was now set up, it was bullshit for a variety of reasons. First, it was cheesy, and I hated cheese. Second, Scott’s job as VP kept him tied up with people in other departments and outside of the company. He didn’t intermingle with half of the staff and probably didn’t know many of their names. Third, Scott was the last person who needed smoke blown up his ass. Fourth, even if he did, he never set foot in the break room, so he’d never see it.
Fifth, I was absolutely not relating any of my favorite experiences with Scott. Not only were they private, but they were also X-rated. Besides, after Brett, those once cherished memories with Scott had lost their shine.
I was absolutely not participating.
Until I found a way to make it better.
First thing Friday, I approached Sadie and offered to print, frame, and hang the memories that had been typed up. She’d already bought a bunch of generic standard-sized frames and she handed those over and emailed me all the submissions that had been sent to her over the week.
I spent the morning working on it at my desk. Thankfully, it was an easy enough task, and I had all the submissions done by midday, including my own, which I’d placed in nicer, more ornate frames that I’d purchased myself the day before.
I waited until after the break room was cleared from lunch so I’d have the room to myself, and then, with a level, a hammer, and a box of nails borrowed from maintenance, I spent the afternoon arranging the frames artfully on the wall.
When I was done, I stood back and admired my work. I’d done a relatively good job with the composition, only having to move a couple of my nails when something wasn’t even (a sixth reason why this project was bullshit—all the holes that would be left in the wall when these memories were finally brought down), but those were barely noticeable. The important thing was that my frames—the ones that contained the memories I’d typed up—stood out, and they did. Anyone who decided to read these would naturally start with mine simply because that’s where the eye landed.
I felt good about it.
Mostly.
A little excited.
A lot nervous.
God, I hoped someone actually did read these and that Brett would find out before my additions were taken down.
And that I wasn’t in too much trouble over it.
And who was I kidding? Sadie would definitely come look at it before she left for the day, and she’d surely take mine down immediately.
My plan suddenly seemed as stupid as the memory wall for Scott was in the first place, and I was seriously considering taking my frames down when the break door opened behind me.
I turned around, expecting to have to explain myself to Sadie, and instead, saw Brett.
Well, okay. Kismet.
Except that I hadn’t wanted to be anywhere around if/when he read them. Fortunately, since we’d been avoiding shared spaces anyway for the last couple of weeks, it wasn’t weird for me to immediately gather my things.