I was laughing SO HARD.
Jafar just added “bullshit,” “cocksucker,” and “you’re sitting on the remote” to his twisted repertoire. We have no idea who taught him this, though I suspect it was my grandfather, who seems to enjoy a certain level of chaos at elegant family gatherings.
I replied on my lunch break with a hurried story about a patient I’d had that day who cut off his own pinky toe to prove to his friend we could reattach it. We did, so I guess he was right, but still.
Jacob wrote back by five about a guy who won a bet that he couldn’t eat a whole container of sugar-free gummy bears. He had severe diarrhea. Jacob had to prescribe him Desitin for his diaper rash, and the guy’s friends were cracking up so hard Jacob had to kick them out.
Then our shifts were over. We went home and now both had four days off because Jacob and I had the same schedule: twelve-hour shifts for one week with four days on and three days off. Then the next week it was three days on and four days off.
Four days, no letter. It sucked.
Now I really had nothing to do. I was so bored.
My first day off, the weather was nice so I took Benny out for ice cream, which I hoped would cheer him up, since he hadn’t been able to have any for the last six months. He just poked at it and said it tasted weird. Probably his meds affecting his taste buds. I stopped at a park on the way home and made him walk with me around the lake. He acted like he’d been kidnapped, and he looked miserable the whole time. When we got back, he went straight to his room.
If I didn’t have to be here, I’d probably drive down to see Alexis for the long weekend. I guessed I still could. Do Benny’s dialysis now, get back by tomorrow night in time for it again. But I didn’t really feel good about leaving him alone, even if he didn’t care if I was here. So I just stayed. Doing nothing.
The next day off, I did laundry. I did the dishes. I cleaned the litter box. Then I lay on the sofa and started scrolling through TikTok.
I realized that the only thing that I looked forward to these days were the letters with Jacob. He was so interesting. And fun.
I wondered what he did on his days off. Maybe his letter would be about how he spent the long weekend?
I wondered if he was on TikTok. I typed his name into the search bar, but nothing came up except a slightly viral video with a couple thousand likes on it. Some patient a few months back at Memorial West, recording Jacob from across the ER, talking about how hot her doctor is. I went straight to the comments, and they did not disappoint. I think I laughed for a solid five minutes.
“I know where I’m getting my next Pap smear.”
“This is why your grandmother always told you to wear clean underwear in case you’re in an accident.”
And the top comment said:
“As if Minnesota isn’t wet enough already.”
I died.
I hoped Jacob didn’t know this existed—he would probably be mortified. I hearted the video and the comments.
I continued my quest still smiling and went to Google, but all I got was his bio on the Royaume Northwestern website. No Facebook or Twitter. I went to Instagram. He didn’t come up on a search, but when I combed through Zander’s friends, I found him.
His page was private. I immediately sent him a friend request. A few minutes later he approved it. I sat up with a smile and went right to creeping on his wall.
He only had twenty-three friends, but there were a ton of pictures. I scrolled down and went all the way back to the beginning, about three years.
Most of it looked like family photos. Shots at Christmas, barbeques, lake pictures. Jacob wasn’t in most of them and he didn’t seem to take selfies. Even his profile picture was just a nature shot.
There were lots and lots of Lieutenant Dan. His dog only had three legs.
I burst out laughing the second I saw it. He’d named his dog after the amputee in Forrest Gump. Jacob had never mentioned the missing-leg thing. He was surprisingly funny, in this self-deprecating, understated kind of way.
I think one of the best parts of this new thing with Jacob was drawing him out. I wanted to unravel him, find out more about who he was. I felt like I was peeling his layers back one letter at a time, getting these little glimpses of someone I could tell was highly private and super reserved. I liked people like that. Benny was like that. You had to earn their friendship. They didn’t just fling it all over for anyone who was interested, and when they gave it to you, it meant something.
He seemed to be renovating a small cabin somewhere. He shared a lot of pictures of that.
No ex-girlfriend pics. Maybe he’d deleted them. God knows I’d deleted every picture of Nick after we broke up. It took me like a million years to get rid of them all. Probably would have been easier to delete the whole account and start over, but I refused to delete my non-Nick-related memories on principle.
They should make an app for that. A facial recognition one that could detect and delete photos of your ex. One click and your whole device is wiped clean. And it should delete all their comments too, so you don’t have to see things like “hot mama!” on a picture of you in a bathing suit at your best friend’s house on a day when I now knew for a fact he was at home having sex with Kelly, in our bed.
Nick and his lies tainted everything. Even the memories he wasn’t in.
I shoved the dark cloud down and kept scrolling.
Jacob had a shot of Gooseberry Falls and Split Rock Lighthouse up by Duluth. A hiking trail. About midway through, there was a rare picture of him. He was in a kayak with a blond woman. Maybe that was her? They had on life jackets. I couldn’t really make her out. Another shot of him kneeling with an arm around two little kids on either side of him. A girl and a boy. He was really smiling in this one. It made me smile. He looked so happy. The opposite of how he looked at work, I noted.
Hector mentioned seeing him at the Cockpit. After seeing Jacob’s wall, I was almost certain Hector had been mistaken. None of his pictures were of any places remotely like that, plus I didn’t picture a man with social anxiety being in a rowdy bar getting drinks from a server blowing on a whistle while you took shots.
I scrolled through for a few more minutes. He hadn’t posted anything in the last few days. No clue where he was today or what he was doing. When I got to the last picture, I sighed.
I was beginning to feel like letters were not enough. It was fun, but they couldn’t keep up with the demand. We’d passed four letters back and forth on our last shift alone, and I still felt like I had more to say and so did he.
I wanted to hang out with him. I wondered if he’d be open to that. I’d have to really reiterate that I wasn’t hitting on him, though. Hanging out seemed a little line blurring, especially if it was going to be outside of work and only the two of us. But maybe I could get him to come to Mafi’s the next time everyone else went. That would be okay.
I liked the last picture he posted, a shot of his dog sleeping on a wooden porch, and I posted a little comment. A few minutes later he hearted it.
That was all I’d get of Jacob until work on Monday.
Unless…
Chapter 12
Jacob
It was Saturday, the second of four days off, and I was up at the cabin working on the yard. It was overgrown and I’d spent the day before cutting down a few maples that were blocking the view to the lake. I had my shirt off and Lieutenant Dan was watching me chop one of the trees into firewood from the porch. I was stacking the logs to dry out when the notification pinged on my phone. When I swiped it open, I stared at it for a solid minute, my heart in my throat.