Watch over Me
Page 4
She punctuates her statement with a short, loud laugh exactly like my mother's. For a moment, it's easy to imagine her sitting across from me instead of Dr. Thompson. I would have immediately taken her advice without a second though had it been my mother doling out words of wisdom.
I pull into the parking lot of the hospital at quarter past eight in the evening and have to wait another ten minutes for an elevator. Regardless of the fact that I absolutely hate these meetings, I hate the fact that they have to be here—the same place where I spent the better part of my last two years of high school. I hate the smells, I hate the sights, and I hate that I continue to come here week after week and subject myself to this torture.
At 7:50 I was adamant that I wasn't going to another meeting since it was pointless to keep going to something that clearly wasn't helping me at all.
At 8:00 I was starting up my car and cursing loudly as I backed out of the driveway of my apartment.
The elevator takes its sweet time going up and stops on almost every floor. I let out a growl of frustration as it stops on the seventh floor and my eyes pop out of my head when I see who gets on.
What the hell is HE doing here?
It's the guy from the coffee shop. The one I pretend to never notice but think about constantly. The one who always smiles at me and who wrote me a note on a napkin. A napkin I swore I would throw away, but now it sits next to my laptop at home, smoothed out from the irritated crumple I gave it.
His footsteps falter as our eyes meet, but he quickly recovers and smiles broadly at me as he gets on and stands right next to me.
"Ten, please," he happily tells the woman standing directly in front of the elevator buttons as he shifts his backpack up a little higher on the shoulder he has it slung over. I stare straight ahead at the closing doors, wishing I could make my feet move to run out of there. I refuse to look at "Napkin Guy" even though I can see him staring down at me out of the corner of my eye.
The elevator crawls up to the next floor and dings its arrival before the doors open again. I silently curse the person who gets on and stands right in front of me, blocking my escape.
"Fancy meeting you here, Bakery Girl," he finally whispers to me in the crowded elevator.
Bakery Girl? Did he just call me Bakery Girl?
I grind my teeth and finally turn to face him, my breath catching in my throat when I see how close his face is to mine. He's about a head taller than me, and he bends down so he can speak without being overheard. I've always noticed how cute he was from a few feet away at the bakery, but being this close to him is distracting.
"Are you stalking me?" I whisper angrily, saying the first thing that comes to my jumbled mind.
His smile immediately broadens and he chuckles to himself as he moves in even closer and speaks right next to my ear, his chest brushing up against my arm.
"If I was, this would be the most boring and depressing place for me to show off my mad stalking skills. This place is sick. Literally."
The clean, manly smell of his cologne is disrupting my concentration, and his nearness and joking manner make me feel nervous. Aside from Meg, people don't joke around with me anymore. Lately, I don't really have the type of personality that begs to be played with or teased in any way.
I take a step away from him, forcing me to bump up against the nurse in purple hospital scrubs on the other side of me.
I hear him chuckle under his breath again as I turn my body away from him and pretend like I am completely engrossed in watching the numbers above the door light up for each floor they pass.
"Are you visiting someone?" he whispers, close to me again.
Jesus, he's like a ninja.
I keep my face straight-ahead and don't acknowledge his question.
"You're not sick, are you? Maybe I shouldn't stand so close. You might be contagious."
His jovial demeanor makes me want to look him straight in the eye and tell him that I am indeed sick, but luckily for him, it's nothing he can catch. He's obviously not going to stop until I give him something. Maybe if I'm mean enough, he'll go away.
"The Stalkers Anonymous meeting is on the second floor. I think you made a wrong turn, Napkin Guy," I mutter angrily without looking at him.
"Did you just call me Napkin Guy?" he asks with a laugh. "My name's actually Zander. And Stalkers Anonymous is on the fourth floor, and they only meet on days when the person they're stalking is busy or when Creepers Consortium is cancelled."
As more people get on and off the slowest elevator known to man, I continue to ignore him, even though it's growing increasingly painful to keep biting my lip to stop myself from smiling at his quick comebacks. When the doors take too long to close after the last person exits, he reaches in front of me and hits the "close doors" button, his arm brushing up against me, and I have to force myself not to shiver.
I glance at him out of the corner of my eye while he stares straight-ahead and hums along to the muzak version of Stairway to Heaven that's being piped through the speakers in the elevator. He looks to be in his early twenties. He's got short, black hair that appears to have been freshly cut by how clean the lines are at the edge of his neck and around his sideburns. He wets his lips with his tongue, and when I manage to tear my gaze away from those lips, I realize he's staring at me again and has caught me practically drooling while watching him. I quickly turn my eyes away and feel a blush form on my cheeks.
I don't know what he's doing here, and I wasn't really joking when I called him a stalker. While I should probably be nervous that he seems to be following me around, there's something about him that puts me at ease. I've kept myself closed off from people for so long that the feeling of my heart rate quickening in excitement instead of dread is a strange sensation. It should make me happy that something has the ability to do that to me, but all it does is irritate me. I don't need some weird guy trying to get in my pants, which I'm sure that's what this is about. Or he's just a friendly person who will talk to anyone no matter where he is, just like my mother.
"I've been lucky. I haven't had any nausea at all with the chemo. My sister had breast cancer about ten years ago and it was horrible for her. She would throw up for days afterward. My doctor still gave me a prescription for Zofran just in case."
I walked up behind my mom who was in a deep discussion with the cashier at Macy's. I pulled my cell phone out of my purse and started scrolling through texts to distract myself from the topic of my mom's cancer. She was having a good day, and I didn't want anything to ruin it, especially my worries.
"Make sure you tell Dr. Fuller I said hello. She was wonderful. I still get a Christmas card from her every year," the cashier told my mother as she slid the receipt into her bag and lifted it over the counter to her.
"I will, Debbie. I'll also tell her about your new granddaughter."
"That would be wonderful. Take care and I will make sure to keep you in my prayers," Debbie, the cashier, said with a kind smile on her face.
My mom said good-bye and we made our way out of Macy's and head towards the food court for lunch.
"Where do you know that Debbie person from?"
My mom looked over at me and shrugged. "I don't. I just met her."
The elevator stops on Zander's floor before I realize it, and I quickly dig through my purse looking for my phone to busy myself before he tries to engage me in more conversation or God forbid ask me out. It's not until the elevator doors are closing behind him, and I'm still pawing through my purse, that I look up and realize he didn't even look my way or make an attempt to talk to me again before he got off. I don't realize how much I actually wanted him to do something like that until I feel a twinge of disappointment as he walks away from me.
"See you around, Bakery Girl," he says over his shoulder as I watch the doors close and feel the elevator start to move again with my mouth wide open.
I'm distracted.
My mind is a jumbled mess ever since Zander walked away from me in the elevator almost two weeks ago. I've burnt cupcakes, dropped entire trays of cookies, and snapped at Meg, which I never do. She's the nicest person in the world, who doesn't look at me with pity, and I bit her head off about an order that I wrote down wrong.
I skip the following week's meeting, not wanting to chance running into Zander again with his easy laugh or pretty eyes or the way he completely shocked me by just walking away. Even though I hate those damn meetings, I feel uneasy after missing one. I keep checking to make sure I don't leave the oven on, and I keep patting my pockets to make sure I still have my car keys. After running back into the apartment this morning to make sure I unplugged the iron, I kicked the front tire of my car when I got back outside, frustrated that all of this nonsense is over me feeling guilty about skipping a stupid meeting—a meeting that never helped me and never made a difference in my life.
My frustration is the only explanation as to why I am currently stalking over to the table in the corner—the table where Zander currently sits reading the paper. It's the same table where I found six more notes that followed in the first one's wake, each one reminding me that I'm much more beautiful when I smile or trying to fool me with humor like yesterday's note. "Every time you frown, God kills a kitten." I should have known that skipping the meeting wouldn't just make him disappear. And of course Meg has been having a field day over those stupid napkin notes, telling me that it's something right out of a Hallmark made-for-television movie.
Who the hell does he think he is?
"Who the hell do you think you are?" I ask angrily as I stop right next to his table and fold my arms protectively across my chest.
He glances up from his paper and my breath catches in my throat. I was too distracted a few weeks ago by the fact that he was at my hospital in my personal space to notice anything other than how good he smelled or that he was cute. Staring at him now, I notice that his eyes aren't just blue. They're crystal blue. They sparkle as the sun shines in from the window next to him, and incredibly long, dark lashes frame them.
One side of his mouth turns up in a smile, and a dimple I never noticed before pops up out of nowhere on the lower part of his left cheek. His jaw is smooth and freshly shaven, and he has a small scar above his right eyebrow that I have an unnatural urge to run my finger over. I'm so busy blatantly staring that I momentarily forget my purpose for coming over to his table. My eyes are taking in his soft, full lips, and after a few seconds of ogling them, I realize they are moving and he's answering my demanded question.
"I think I already established in the elevator that I'm Zander, but I could be wrong. You sound really pissed, so how about you just tell me who I am," he says me with a grin.
"I don't care what your stupid name is. I care about why you keep leaving me these annoying notes." Ignoring that stupid dimple, I smack the handful of stupid napkins with the stupid messages on them on top of the stupid table in front of him. His coffee cup rattles against the table with the force of my hand, and he glances back and forth from the pile of napkins to my face.
"You kept all of my notes?" he asks softly, his eyebrows rising in shock.
Seriously? That's the only thing he has to say?
"Stop leaving me notes. Stop staring at me. And stop smiling," I growl before turning on my heels and walking away.
"Is it okay if I still breathe? What about blink? Is blinking allowed, Bakery Girl?" he calls to my back.
"Stop calling me Bakery Girl. My name is ADDISON!" I shout in irritation over my shoulder as I round the corner of the counter and walk past a smiling Meg resting her elbows on the counter with her chin in her hands. She opens her mouth to speak, and I hold up my hand in front of her face.
"Don't. Not one word," I warn her before I keep going, slamming both of my hands into the swinging door that leads to the back room.
I start dragging mixing bowls and pots and pans down from the cupboards, banging them onto the counter and cursing at myself as I go.
What in the hell possessed me to talk to him? He's going to be like a stray cat that you feel sorry for and feed out on your front porch. I'm never going to be able to get rid of him now.
I grow increasingly angrier at myself when I realize that I'm not exactly sure if I'm happy or pissed that he might keep coming back, and I wonder if Dr. Thompson will be pleased that I showed him who I was AND told him my name. It's probably not exactly what she had in mind when she told me to share part of myself with someone, but I don't really care. Now he knows I'm a bitch, and if he's smart, he'll change his mind and won't want anything more to do with me.
Chapter Four
"When was the last time you did something just for you? Something that made you happy and had nothing to do with anyone else?" Dr. Thompson asks as I curl up in my usual position on her pristine white couch. She stares at me and then twitches her nose like Samantha on the old television show Bewitched. My mother had the same facial tick. We used to joke with her that it wasn't something she did unconsciously, but that she was secretly casting spells on all of us.
Dr. Thompson's question should be an easy question to answer, right? I mean everyone does something for themselves every now and then, whether it's getting a manicure, taking a nap, or sitting outside on a nice day and reading a book. It shouldn't be that hard for me to think of something, ANYTHING, that I've done for myself recently. Unfortunately, I'm coming up blank.
"Addison?"
Dr. Thompson sits with her hands folded in her lap, waiting for me to answer her. But I can't. I don't have an answer. I haven't done anything for myself in longer than I can remember. I run the bakery every day and sure, it pays the bills and keeps a roof over my head, but I do it for my mom, not for me. I do it because it's what she would have wanted. I go to support meetings every week, and supposedly they're to help me, but they aren't really for me. They're for my dad and because of my dad, and it makes HIM happy that I go to these meetings week after week.
I pull into the parking lot of the hospital at quarter past eight in the evening and have to wait another ten minutes for an elevator. Regardless of the fact that I absolutely hate these meetings, I hate the fact that they have to be here—the same place where I spent the better part of my last two years of high school. I hate the smells, I hate the sights, and I hate that I continue to come here week after week and subject myself to this torture.
At 7:50 I was adamant that I wasn't going to another meeting since it was pointless to keep going to something that clearly wasn't helping me at all.
At 8:00 I was starting up my car and cursing loudly as I backed out of the driveway of my apartment.
The elevator takes its sweet time going up and stops on almost every floor. I let out a growl of frustration as it stops on the seventh floor and my eyes pop out of my head when I see who gets on.
What the hell is HE doing here?
It's the guy from the coffee shop. The one I pretend to never notice but think about constantly. The one who always smiles at me and who wrote me a note on a napkin. A napkin I swore I would throw away, but now it sits next to my laptop at home, smoothed out from the irritated crumple I gave it.
His footsteps falter as our eyes meet, but he quickly recovers and smiles broadly at me as he gets on and stands right next to me.
"Ten, please," he happily tells the woman standing directly in front of the elevator buttons as he shifts his backpack up a little higher on the shoulder he has it slung over. I stare straight ahead at the closing doors, wishing I could make my feet move to run out of there. I refuse to look at "Napkin Guy" even though I can see him staring down at me out of the corner of my eye.
The elevator crawls up to the next floor and dings its arrival before the doors open again. I silently curse the person who gets on and stands right in front of me, blocking my escape.
"Fancy meeting you here, Bakery Girl," he finally whispers to me in the crowded elevator.
Bakery Girl? Did he just call me Bakery Girl?
I grind my teeth and finally turn to face him, my breath catching in my throat when I see how close his face is to mine. He's about a head taller than me, and he bends down so he can speak without being overheard. I've always noticed how cute he was from a few feet away at the bakery, but being this close to him is distracting.
"Are you stalking me?" I whisper angrily, saying the first thing that comes to my jumbled mind.
His smile immediately broadens and he chuckles to himself as he moves in even closer and speaks right next to my ear, his chest brushing up against my arm.
"If I was, this would be the most boring and depressing place for me to show off my mad stalking skills. This place is sick. Literally."
The clean, manly smell of his cologne is disrupting my concentration, and his nearness and joking manner make me feel nervous. Aside from Meg, people don't joke around with me anymore. Lately, I don't really have the type of personality that begs to be played with or teased in any way.
I take a step away from him, forcing me to bump up against the nurse in purple hospital scrubs on the other side of me.
I hear him chuckle under his breath again as I turn my body away from him and pretend like I am completely engrossed in watching the numbers above the door light up for each floor they pass.
"Are you visiting someone?" he whispers, close to me again.
Jesus, he's like a ninja.
I keep my face straight-ahead and don't acknowledge his question.
"You're not sick, are you? Maybe I shouldn't stand so close. You might be contagious."
His jovial demeanor makes me want to look him straight in the eye and tell him that I am indeed sick, but luckily for him, it's nothing he can catch. He's obviously not going to stop until I give him something. Maybe if I'm mean enough, he'll go away.
"The Stalkers Anonymous meeting is on the second floor. I think you made a wrong turn, Napkin Guy," I mutter angrily without looking at him.
"Did you just call me Napkin Guy?" he asks with a laugh. "My name's actually Zander. And Stalkers Anonymous is on the fourth floor, and they only meet on days when the person they're stalking is busy or when Creepers Consortium is cancelled."
As more people get on and off the slowest elevator known to man, I continue to ignore him, even though it's growing increasingly painful to keep biting my lip to stop myself from smiling at his quick comebacks. When the doors take too long to close after the last person exits, he reaches in front of me and hits the "close doors" button, his arm brushing up against me, and I have to force myself not to shiver.
I glance at him out of the corner of my eye while he stares straight-ahead and hums along to the muzak version of Stairway to Heaven that's being piped through the speakers in the elevator. He looks to be in his early twenties. He's got short, black hair that appears to have been freshly cut by how clean the lines are at the edge of his neck and around his sideburns. He wets his lips with his tongue, and when I manage to tear my gaze away from those lips, I realize he's staring at me again and has caught me practically drooling while watching him. I quickly turn my eyes away and feel a blush form on my cheeks.
I don't know what he's doing here, and I wasn't really joking when I called him a stalker. While I should probably be nervous that he seems to be following me around, there's something about him that puts me at ease. I've kept myself closed off from people for so long that the feeling of my heart rate quickening in excitement instead of dread is a strange sensation. It should make me happy that something has the ability to do that to me, but all it does is irritate me. I don't need some weird guy trying to get in my pants, which I'm sure that's what this is about. Or he's just a friendly person who will talk to anyone no matter where he is, just like my mother.
"I've been lucky. I haven't had any nausea at all with the chemo. My sister had breast cancer about ten years ago and it was horrible for her. She would throw up for days afterward. My doctor still gave me a prescription for Zofran just in case."
I walked up behind my mom who was in a deep discussion with the cashier at Macy's. I pulled my cell phone out of my purse and started scrolling through texts to distract myself from the topic of my mom's cancer. She was having a good day, and I didn't want anything to ruin it, especially my worries.
"Make sure you tell Dr. Fuller I said hello. She was wonderful. I still get a Christmas card from her every year," the cashier told my mother as she slid the receipt into her bag and lifted it over the counter to her.
"I will, Debbie. I'll also tell her about your new granddaughter."
"That would be wonderful. Take care and I will make sure to keep you in my prayers," Debbie, the cashier, said with a kind smile on her face.
My mom said good-bye and we made our way out of Macy's and head towards the food court for lunch.
"Where do you know that Debbie person from?"
My mom looked over at me and shrugged. "I don't. I just met her."
The elevator stops on Zander's floor before I realize it, and I quickly dig through my purse looking for my phone to busy myself before he tries to engage me in more conversation or God forbid ask me out. It's not until the elevator doors are closing behind him, and I'm still pawing through my purse, that I look up and realize he didn't even look my way or make an attempt to talk to me again before he got off. I don't realize how much I actually wanted him to do something like that until I feel a twinge of disappointment as he walks away from me.
"See you around, Bakery Girl," he says over his shoulder as I watch the doors close and feel the elevator start to move again with my mouth wide open.
I'm distracted.
My mind is a jumbled mess ever since Zander walked away from me in the elevator almost two weeks ago. I've burnt cupcakes, dropped entire trays of cookies, and snapped at Meg, which I never do. She's the nicest person in the world, who doesn't look at me with pity, and I bit her head off about an order that I wrote down wrong.
I skip the following week's meeting, not wanting to chance running into Zander again with his easy laugh or pretty eyes or the way he completely shocked me by just walking away. Even though I hate those damn meetings, I feel uneasy after missing one. I keep checking to make sure I don't leave the oven on, and I keep patting my pockets to make sure I still have my car keys. After running back into the apartment this morning to make sure I unplugged the iron, I kicked the front tire of my car when I got back outside, frustrated that all of this nonsense is over me feeling guilty about skipping a stupid meeting—a meeting that never helped me and never made a difference in my life.
My frustration is the only explanation as to why I am currently stalking over to the table in the corner—the table where Zander currently sits reading the paper. It's the same table where I found six more notes that followed in the first one's wake, each one reminding me that I'm much more beautiful when I smile or trying to fool me with humor like yesterday's note. "Every time you frown, God kills a kitten." I should have known that skipping the meeting wouldn't just make him disappear. And of course Meg has been having a field day over those stupid napkin notes, telling me that it's something right out of a Hallmark made-for-television movie.
Who the hell does he think he is?
"Who the hell do you think you are?" I ask angrily as I stop right next to his table and fold my arms protectively across my chest.
He glances up from his paper and my breath catches in my throat. I was too distracted a few weeks ago by the fact that he was at my hospital in my personal space to notice anything other than how good he smelled or that he was cute. Staring at him now, I notice that his eyes aren't just blue. They're crystal blue. They sparkle as the sun shines in from the window next to him, and incredibly long, dark lashes frame them.
One side of his mouth turns up in a smile, and a dimple I never noticed before pops up out of nowhere on the lower part of his left cheek. His jaw is smooth and freshly shaven, and he has a small scar above his right eyebrow that I have an unnatural urge to run my finger over. I'm so busy blatantly staring that I momentarily forget my purpose for coming over to his table. My eyes are taking in his soft, full lips, and after a few seconds of ogling them, I realize they are moving and he's answering my demanded question.
"I think I already established in the elevator that I'm Zander, but I could be wrong. You sound really pissed, so how about you just tell me who I am," he says me with a grin.
"I don't care what your stupid name is. I care about why you keep leaving me these annoying notes." Ignoring that stupid dimple, I smack the handful of stupid napkins with the stupid messages on them on top of the stupid table in front of him. His coffee cup rattles against the table with the force of my hand, and he glances back and forth from the pile of napkins to my face.
"You kept all of my notes?" he asks softly, his eyebrows rising in shock.
Seriously? That's the only thing he has to say?
"Stop leaving me notes. Stop staring at me. And stop smiling," I growl before turning on my heels and walking away.
"Is it okay if I still breathe? What about blink? Is blinking allowed, Bakery Girl?" he calls to my back.
"Stop calling me Bakery Girl. My name is ADDISON!" I shout in irritation over my shoulder as I round the corner of the counter and walk past a smiling Meg resting her elbows on the counter with her chin in her hands. She opens her mouth to speak, and I hold up my hand in front of her face.
"Don't. Not one word," I warn her before I keep going, slamming both of my hands into the swinging door that leads to the back room.
I start dragging mixing bowls and pots and pans down from the cupboards, banging them onto the counter and cursing at myself as I go.
What in the hell possessed me to talk to him? He's going to be like a stray cat that you feel sorry for and feed out on your front porch. I'm never going to be able to get rid of him now.
I grow increasingly angrier at myself when I realize that I'm not exactly sure if I'm happy or pissed that he might keep coming back, and I wonder if Dr. Thompson will be pleased that I showed him who I was AND told him my name. It's probably not exactly what she had in mind when she told me to share part of myself with someone, but I don't really care. Now he knows I'm a bitch, and if he's smart, he'll change his mind and won't want anything more to do with me.
Chapter Four
"When was the last time you did something just for you? Something that made you happy and had nothing to do with anyone else?" Dr. Thompson asks as I curl up in my usual position on her pristine white couch. She stares at me and then twitches her nose like Samantha on the old television show Bewitched. My mother had the same facial tick. We used to joke with her that it wasn't something she did unconsciously, but that she was secretly casting spells on all of us.
Dr. Thompson's question should be an easy question to answer, right? I mean everyone does something for themselves every now and then, whether it's getting a manicure, taking a nap, or sitting outside on a nice day and reading a book. It shouldn't be that hard for me to think of something, ANYTHING, that I've done for myself recently. Unfortunately, I'm coming up blank.
"Addison?"
Dr. Thompson sits with her hands folded in her lap, waiting for me to answer her. But I can't. I don't have an answer. I haven't done anything for myself in longer than I can remember. I run the bakery every day and sure, it pays the bills and keeps a roof over my head, but I do it for my mom, not for me. I do it because it's what she would have wanted. I go to support meetings every week, and supposedly they're to help me, but they aren't really for me. They're for my dad and because of my dad, and it makes HIM happy that I go to these meetings week after week.
