Hooked 3 (Hooked #3)(19)

Back at my apartment I made coffee and read for a bit, scratching at Boomer’s neck and trying not to think about Drew. I wondered what he was doing, what he was thinking. I wondered if he missed me. I wondered if I would have the strength to avoid his text messages and calls in the coming days if, in fact, he decided not to avoid me. Would I have the strength to avoid such supreme sexuality, such grand times? For what, anyway? What was I living for?

Sometime at around one or two in the afternoon, after I had run my thoughts into the ground too many times, forcing myself into a sort of frenzy, my phone began to ring. My eyes widened. I reached for it, realizing in that moment that I truly didn’t have the strength to avoid him; that if it was him calling, I would answer and give my entire life to him.

But it wasn’t him. It was the bank. About the loan.

“Hello, Molly? Molly Atwood?”

“Yes. That’s me.”

“Right. Well. We wanted to call and thank you for already paying back that loan. What a marvelous turn around. This is really going to benefit your credit.”

I raised my eyebrows, turning my head out to the balcony toward the sun. What? “I’m sorry? Paid back the loan?”

I had received the loan and it sat in my bank account, waiting for me to do something with it—to create with it. However, I had to create with the loan before I would be able to make any money to pay it back. That would be—oh—five years from now. Maybe a little more.

“The loan has been paid back to us. Thank you.”

And the bank manager, a bit confused by my words, hung up the phone. I stood, perturbed. What the hell? Had there been some sort of mistake? I was continually stressing about paying that loan back; I was putting serious pressure on myself. Here I was, struggling with the fact that I had an extra 10,000 dollars in my account—something that I would ultimately have to pay back with interest.

But now I didn’t have to.

I walked out to the balcony and gazed out at the city before me. I sat on the ground, watching the cars shuffle past. Boomer sauntered behind me and started crying at my back. “I know,” I murmured to him as I scratched his ears and head. “I know.”

I remembered those days, just a few weeks before, when someone—someone who had ultimately been Drew—had stood on his balcony, talking about me with Marty. “That girl he had slept with.” I wondered if Drew was talking about me in that manner, now. “That girl he had taken to Iowa. For a scandalous vacation and a Jacuzzi f*ck.”

I knew it was unhealthy to think this way; I knew it wasn’t appropriate. But this time, as I sat out on the balcony, I was completely alone. I heard no voices; I heard nothing that took me away from my loneliness. I remembered that feeling of waking up beside him, of waking up in someone’s arms, and I longed for that once more.

I didn’t need money. I didn’t need sex. I simply needed someone I could call my own—someone who called me his. Because of my situation, because of my lack of money, because of my lack of—everything, really—I couldn’t comprehend a time when I would be ripe and ready to be somebody’s somebody.

My head in my hands, I felt the city collapse around me in a sea of darkness and little twitters of stars. Tomorrow, I continued to tell myself—because I was the only voice in my head, the only voice in my world—was another day.