Dear Heart

7. Wendy. Ollie.

7

Wendy

"I don't see the problem," Simone said the next morning as Wendy slid a plate of pancakes in front of her. "Are those blueberries?"

"Chocolate chips."

"Girl." Simone's eyes bugged with excitement as she reached for the syrup. "Okay. Anyway. The problem?"

Wendy picked up her own plate and plopped down opposite her roommate at their tiny café table. The diffuse Brooklyn sunlight slanted across them, highlighting a stray chip in Wendy's coffee mug; glinting along the bronze trails of syrup Simone drizzled over her pancakes. The familiar, soothing white noise of traffic – car, bike, scooter, and pedestrian – floated up from the street to the cracked living room window; Wendy wondered if that same noise was stirring panic in Ollie right now.

She sighed and played with her fork. She wished now that she'd kept her mouth shut a moment ago, when she'd blushed and admitted "yes" when Simone asked if she liked Ollie in "that way."

"I shouldn't even be thinking like that," she said. "He's been through so much, and – wouldn't that be taking advantage? Like I was, I don't know, preying on him or something."

Simone rolled her eyes and snorted. "Wendy. Seriously. You're not capable of preying on anymore."

"I just wouldn't want him to think..." She bit her lip and stabbed a pattern of dots into the pat of melting butter on top of her pancakes with the fork.

"That you worry way too much?"

"That this was new, me feeling this away about him." Her throat ached and she swallowed, meeting her friend's gaze across the table. "What if he thought this was new? And that I was just attracted to guys with problems or something. That I wanted to fix him. Sex him back to normal. I don't know." She groaned.

Simone's lips quirked like she wanted to grin, but she smoothed her expression, and managed to look serious. "Then you could explain to him that you were totally stupid as a kid, and should have kissed him, and run away from home to be with him, and you guys should already be married and be working baby number four."

"And he'll believe that?"

"If he really is the guy you've been talking about? Then yeah, he will."

~*~

Ollie

He was running on about three hours of sleep. Not unusual. Though this time, it hadn't been heat mirages and the grit of imagined sand between his teeth startling him awake again and again, but the fear that he'd crossed a line with Wendy last night. It frightened him, the way he needed her right now. In a matter of two days, her voice, her face, her smile, the smell of her hair had gone from warm memory touchstones to absolute necessities. He couldn't afford to drive her away, no matter how badly he ached to touch her.

He drank two cups of black coffee, standing up in front of the sink. Tugged his Mets cap on over his unwashed hair, and went to work. He couldn't really complain about the commute, all fifteen steps of it.

He had the Mustang up on the rack, doors open to let in the breeze, and the rattle of traffic, when he heard the clip of shoes approaching.

Footsteps.

He stared at the undercarriage of the car above him. Breathed in. Breathed out. One, two, three...

"Oh shit," Wendy said. "I'm sorry! Footsteps, I forgot. Ollie, it's me."

Something inside him unclenched, some deep-seated knot of constant tension. He exhaled in a rush, blinked the glaze of fear from his eyes, and stepped out from under the Mustang.