Wouldn’t it just be easier to go through life alone?
So that’s what I had done, for years. I had been alone. I went through high school in a kind of daze. After Cooper graduated and I was on my own, I started getting jumped in the gymnasium, tough boys trying to prove their disdain for violence against women by taking a switchblade to my forearm, carving zigzags in my skin. This is for your father, they’d spit, the irony lost. I remember walking home, the blood dripping from my fingers like melted wax from a candlestick, a little dotted line snaking through town like a treasure map. X marks the spot. I remember telling myself that as long as I got into college, I could get out of Breaux Bridge. I could get away from it all.
And that’s what I did.
I dated boys at LSU, but it was mostly superficial; drunken hookups in the back of a crowded bar, sneaking into a frat house bedroom, leaving the door cracked to make sure I could still hear the muffled noise of the party going on outside. The shitty music vibrating through the walls, the laughter of girls in packs echoing down the hallway, their open-faced palms slapping the door. Their whispers and their glares when we emerged from the bedroom, hair rumpled, zippers down. The slurring words of the boy I had zeroed in on hours earlier, the target of my meticulous checklist that minimized all risk of him getting too attached or killing me in the darkened corners of his bedroom. He was never too tall, never too muscular. If he got on top of me, I could easily push him off. He had friends （I couldn’t risk an angry loner）， but he also wasn’t the life of the party （I couldn’t risk an entitled blowhard, either. A guy who views the body of a female as nothing more than his own plaything）。 He was always just the right amount of drunk—not too drunk to get it up, but just drunk enough to be unsteady on his feet, his eyes glassed over. And I was just the right amount of drunk, too—tingly and confident and numb, my inhibitions lowered just enough to let him kiss my neck without pulling away, but not enough to lose my alertness, my coordination, my sense of danger. Maybe he wouldn’t remember my face in the morning; certainly he wouldn’t remember my name.
And that’s the way I liked it: anonymity, the kind of thing I was never granted in childhood. The luxury of closeness—the beating of another heart against my chest, the trembling of fingers intertwined with mine—without the possibility of getting hurt. My only semi-serious relationship didn’t end well; I wasn’t ready to date. I wasn’t ready to fully trust another person. But again, I did it to feel normal. I did it to drown out the solitude, the physical presence of another body tricking my own into feeling less alone.
Somehow, it did the opposite.
After graduation, the hospital had given me friends, coworkers, a community I could surround myself with during the daytime hours before retreating home at night and settling into my isolated routine. And it had worked, for a while, but ever since I’d launched my own business, I had found myself completely alone. All day and all night. On the day I held Daniel’s card again, I hadn’t spoken to another human being in weeks, outside of the occasional text message from Coop or Shannon or Mom’s place calling to remind me to come visit. I knew that would change once clients started trickling through the doors, but that wasn’t the same. Besides, they were supposed to be talking to me for support, not the other way around.
Daniel’s business card was hot in my hands. I remember walking over to my desk and taking a seat, leaning back in the chair. I picked up my phone and dialed, the ringing on the other end dragging on for so long I almost hung up. Then suddenly, a voice.
“This is Daniel.”
I was quiet on the line, my breath caught in my throat. He waited a few seconds before trying again.
“Hello?”
“Daniel,” I said finally. “This is Chloe Davis.”
The silence on the other end made my stomach lurch.
“We met a few weeks ago,” I reminded him, cringing. “In the hospital.”
“Doctor Chloe Davis,” he responded. I could hear the smile stretching across his lips. “I was starting to think you weren’t going to call.”
“I’ve been unpacking,” I said, my heart rate slowing. “I … lost your card, but I just found it, at the bottom of my last box.”
“So, you’re all moved in?”
“Just about,” I said, looking around the cluttered office.
“Well, that’s cause for celebration. Do you want to grab a drink?”
I had never been one to agree to drinks with a stranger; every real date I had ever been on had been set up by mutual friends, a well-intentioned favor I knew was mostly motivated by the awkwardness that ensued when I was the only one in a group that showed up alone. I hesitated, almost made up an excuse as to why I was busy. But instead, as if my lips were moving in opposition to the brain that controlled them, I heard myself agree. Had I not been so starved for conversation that day, for any kind of human interaction, that phone call probably would have been the end of it.