Time (Laws of Physics #3)(4)

Fact three: I wanted to talk to Abram, more than anything, but he’d been the one who left this time. He was the one who’d insisted it wasn’t goodbye. I had to be patient. I had to be practical. I would give him space. I would wait. But I promised myself, if a month or two passed and he still didn’t reach out, then . . .

Then you will still want to see him.

GAH!

Was Lisa right? Was I becoming someone else? Someone pathetic? Over a guy? But Abram wasn’t “a guy.”

But is he “the one?”

I hated the term, the one. However, here I was, using it, because I needed to call him something relative to my feelings for him. And yet, he couldn’t be “the one.” He didn’t meet the minimum requirements.

By his own admission, Abram had never thought of getting married. I wanted kids, a house, a picket fence, normalcy, consistency. My feelings for Abram hadn’t made those dreams go away, they’d just shifted, settled around him. He’d now become part of that picture.

But what if he didn’t want to be part of that picture? What if he didn’t want any of those things? What if his picture was completely different than mine? What then?

I rubbed my chest with stiff fingers, massaging my hurting heart through my ribs, telling myself that it wasn’t Abram who’d made me weepy, he wasn’t the cause for my constant catastrophic crying. It was me.

I was the problem. Me and my quest for stability while falling in love with a musician.

“Yeah, come over and help me talk some sense into her.” Lisa raised her voice, obviously wanting me to hear her phone conversation, and I glanced up. She was sending me a stony look, her eyes slightly narrowed.

I glanced at the phone in her hand. “Who is that?”

“It’s Gabby. She’s on her way, bringing over ice cream and wine, but also offered male strippers.”

Ah, Gabby.

I reached for my tea. “No. No, thank you. I don’t need the wine or the ice cream either.”

We’d gone out with Gabby during my first two days in Chicago. She was an excellent distraction. Or rather, her constant gabbing, zaniness, and wacky stories were. I was glad she was coming over just for the distraction factor.

“Well, you’re getting wine and ice cream because she already bought them,” Lisa said to me as she meandered closer, and then to Gabby, “Tell Duke to stay on standby. Okay, see you in a little bit. Bye.” My sister returned to her spot on the couch, leaving her phone on the coffee table.

Taking as deep of a breath as I possibly could, I decided it was time to explain the entire situation to my sister. The inability to speak without becoming a blubbering mess had been a major limiting factor. I would just have to get over it. I would accept the tears, rather than fight them, and I would tell her the whole story.

“I’ll tell you everything that happened,” I rushed to say before she could launch into another rant. “Truly, Lisa. Abram is not like that, he’s not like Tyler. He’s not like Mom and Dad either.”

She gritted her teeth and released a humorless laugh, shaking her head. “He is exactly like Tyler—and Mom, and Dad—musicians and artists are all the same, Mo, especially the brilliant ones. They’re flighty, selfish, and vain. They might be brilliant, but they only care about themselves, their ego, and their music. They will suck the soul right out of anyone who loves them, and they use it to feed their own brilliance until your light is extinguished, until you’re left broken. And then they move on.”

“Let me just tell you what happened, okay?”

“Fine, but if he doesn’t call you soon, groveling, and begging for forgiveness for not making contact in six days, then I will junk punch him with my new taekwondo moves, and then break his femurs.”

For the record, I didn’t want Lisa to junk punch Abram, but for some reason her overprotectiveness warmed my heart and, you guessed it, made me want to cry. I blinked against the new onslaught, lifting my eyes to the ceiling.

“Okay, first, let me explain something.” I cleared my throat and endeavored to recenter my thoughts. “You first have to understand, time doesn’t exist. As such, I can’t be angry at Abram for not calling me.”

One of Lisa’s eyebrows lifted, her gaze became a glare. “Riiiiiiight.”

“No, hear me out. We talk about people being deep, we talk about feelings being heavy. I’ve been thinking about this for the past week and it made me wonder: Do heavy feelings have more mass? Do they have their own gravity? Fields we cannot detect with any scientific instrument because they’re calibrated for the physical world?”

“Mona—”

“Just listen. If time is the result of gravity shaping or warping reality—which it is, which is why clocks tick faster on a mountain than at sea level—then what impact do heavy, weighty feelings have on time? I hypothesize that sadness slows time, and happiness does the opposite. Make sense?”

She rolled her eyes. “Only you would overcomplicate something so simple. Forget about the rules of physics—”

“Laws of physics.”

“Whatever! The rules of life, of society and engagement say that—if Abram was serious about you, if you were important to him—he would have called you the very next day. You can’t tell me the weight of your feelings is at all responsible for the force of the mass of the gravity of fucking, selfish, shitty boys being shitty to you, blah blah blah.” She waved her hands through the air, working herself into a frenzy. “He hasn’t called you in six days. I don’t care about gravity and feelings. In every universe, six days is a ridiculous amount of time.”