Hello Stranger(96)

I was trying so hard to make it make sense. “And you slick your hair back for work, but you don’t bother with it at home?”

“It doesn’t stay neat very long,” Joe said.

I was vacillating between struggle and acceptance. “But aren’t you”—and I felt how goofy the words were, even as I said them—“a freelance snake sitter?”

“You think that I’m a snake sitter, and that’s all I do?”

I tried to picture Joe in a white vet coat. “So you’re a veterinarian who … does snake-sitting as a side hustle and also … rescues homeless bulldogs?”

“Broadly speaking, sure—that works.”

“But you don’t look like a veterinarian.”

“I get that a lot. Hence the lab coat.”

I shook my head, like, What does that mean?

“Most vets just wear scrubs. But when I started, nobody ever thought I was the vet. So I decided to cultivate a more professional look. I committed to the coat. And the contacts. And the hair.”

“You sure did.”

“There’s a psychological component to health care. People need to feel like you’re qualified before they’ll do what you tell them to. People need a lot more bossing around than you’d think.”

“So…” I said. “I only ever saw Dr. Addison in his lab coat, and I only ever saw Joe in his bowling jacket.”

“I wore other jackets sometimes,” Joe said.

But I shook my head. “Almost never. It’s how I recognized you.”

“That’s why you called me Joe?” Joe asked.

“Why else would I call you Joe?”

“I thought you were kidding. I thought you were making fun of the jacket.”

“I was making fun of the jacket. But I also thought you were a guy named Joe. Who really, really liked bowling. Enough to buy a reproduction vintage bowling jacket and have his name embroidered on it.”

“Okay,” Joe said, like now we’d gone too far, “that’s a lot of mental leaps.”

There wasn’t much to say to that.

Joe and I took a minute to stare at each other in disbelief.

How was this happening?

“You never dumped me,” Joe said in amazement as it sank in. Then, correcting: “I mean, you did dump me. But you dumped me … for me.”

“And you never ghosted me. Or—you did, but only after I had broken up with you … without realizing it was you.”

Joe nodded. “It’s like an M.C. Escher drawing.”

I nodded, too. “It’s like a Rubik’s Cube.” Then after a pause, I added, “You must have thought I was nuts to keep calling and texting you like that.”

“I really, really wanted to respond,” Joe said, his voice more tender now. “I had to lock my phone out on the balcony.”

“I guess I should call you Oliver now,” I said, looking up into his face and trying out his name for real.

“I’ll be Joe for you, if you want.”

And then I couldn’t resist. I reached up to touch that face that had caused all this trouble, and my palm cupped his jaw. Then I ran the pads of my fingers up to touch all the pieces of it—cheekbones, nose bridge, brow—so neatly put together now, satisfying like a finished jigsaw puzzle.

He held his breath at the touch.

I could feel his stubble against my palm like sandpaper. I traced down his neck and let my hand rest on his collarbone. “So … I thought you were breaking my heart, but I was also breaking yours.”

He closed the distance between us as he nodded. “And the guy you liked … the one you dumped me for. The one I was so bitterly jealous of that I couldn’t sleep…”

“That was you.”

“That was me.”

“I liked you both a lot,” I said, “if it’s any consolation.”

“It’s all consolation,” he said, his eyes running all over my face like he still couldn’t take everything in.

Then his eyes came back to look into mine—and stayed there. And it didn’t feel uncomfortable to look into them. It felt good. And so we gazed at each other as we waited for it all to make sense.

It was crazy. It was impossible.

And yet here we were. Standing at the rim of this realization like it was the Grand Canyon—astonished and breathless and awestruck. I could see him breathing deep, and then I realized I was, too. We’d had the story all wrong. And it might take some time to put it right.

One thing was clear: He was here right now, and so was I.

And we were both so glad to be wrong.

Was he leaning closer to me or was I leaning closer to him? Somehow our faces were just inches away from each other. My hand slid down to rest against his chest.

“Sadie,” Joe said then, “I noticed you from the start. Since that day I carried all those canvases up to the rooftop for you.”

“Thank you for that, by the way.”

“But it really got real,” Joe went on, his mouth so close to mine it was just a swoon away, “when I saw your Smokey Robinson impression in the grocery store.”

That broke the trance. Hold on. “What?”

Joe nodded.

“That was you? You bought me that cheap wine?”