3
CHLOE
Present Day
Dad
Your mom had a bad flare up this week. We tried to stay on top of everything, but it got away from me. I’m sorry.
Chloe
No worries. I’ll take care of it.
Fucking Mondays,man. I would cry about it, but who had the time for tears.
I stared morosely down at the mess—mymess, because I had held the door for a harried mom juggling a crying toddler and a stroller and she’d thanked me by accidentally clocking my shoulder with her massive diaper bag, sending my avocado toastand iced mocha careening to the sidewalk. Ice cubes and milky chocolate puddled at my feet, the avocado toast face down. Flecks of green and brown splattered my jeans. Half a cherry tomato landed on the toe of my sneaker.
Dammit. I’d had big plans for that iced mocha. I was going to sit my tired ass in that wicker chair, enjoy fifteen minutes of August sunshine, and let the chocolate and caffeine wash away the remnants of this morning’s hangover—courtesy of the Sunday Scaries that had culminated in drinking too much and texting my situationship for one last round oflet’s not ruin this with labelsbefore he left for histotally epic, bromotorcycle ride across Argentina—and the stabbing in my uterus that meant my period was inevitable. My period had always been a sporadic motherfucker, so thank heaven for small mercies or whatever.
I put a reminder in my phone to get an STI check in six months, scooped up the empty plastic cup and dumped it into the trashcan, and dropped into the chair with a pathetic whimper. Money being what it was—never enough—I couldn’t afford to replace my lunch. I had blown the rest of my weekly fun money on last night’s bottle of wine.
Ten minutes. I wasn’t going to cry, but I could give myself ten minutes to sulk so I didn’t drive mad. And then I needed to pull myself together and get to my parents’ house in Evergreen, twenty minutes from Aspen Springs.
From Dad’s texts, I guessed there was a small mountain of laundry waiting for me, along with the typical billing and paperwork Mom handled for Dad’s farrier business when her joints weren’t swollen from lupus. It was how I spent most Mondays after my 6 a.m. to noon shift at Jo’s. I didn’t mind, but I knew today was going to be a long one, and I still had a pile of my own paperwork to do tonight to prepare for the week’s therapy sessions. Two thousand supervised clinical hours down, one thousand to go before I could take the exam and become aLicensed Clinical Social Worker. Just one more year of working two jobs and duct taping my family together in the cracks of my free time. If I could survive it.
Breathe, Chloe, breathe.
I tipped my head back and glared at the world. The Colorado sunshine was annoyingly bright. The morning birdsong was annoyingly loud. The cramps were annoyingly painful. And the cowboy coming my way with a goddamn pig on a leash was annoyingly hot.
I turtled deeper into my gray hoodie with a feeling that the universe was against me. “Get the hell out of here, Steven.”
His dark eyes narrowed at me. “Your shift ended ten minutes ago.”
“Are you stalking me now? I don’t have to be on duty to tell you pigs aren’t allowed.” My gaze dipped to the animal snuffling my sneakers. “And neither are pets.” I leaned my head against the brick wall behind me and closed my eyes with a weary sigh.
“What’s wrong with you?” he demanded.
I cracked one eyelid open, decided it wasn’t worth the effort, and closed it again. “You’re what’s wrong with me,” I said on reflex, but my heart wasn’t in it. Between the pounding in my head and the stabbing in my uterus, I had nothing left for rage, not even for someone as deserving as Steven. Alas.
There was a pause. I knew he hadn’t left because Steve Junior was still snuffling my shoes, but I lacked the energy to do anything about it.
“You look like shit,” he said. “Are you sick or something?”
The concern in his voice sounded genuine. I must have truly looked like I was knocking on death’s door. “I am not sick, Steven. I am hungover. Not only am I hungover, but my uterus has decided that now is the time for a little home renovation and is scraping those walls clean with a rusty knife.”
Steven made a disgusted noise. “Too much information. I don’t need to hear about all that lady shit.”
That was about what I expected from Steven. “Did you know that girls can get their periods as young as nine or ten? If a nine-year-old girl can handle the monthly trauma of bleeding from her vagina for five days straight, then you, a full-grown adult man, can damn well survive hearing about it. Or are you really that fragile?”
There was a beat of silence during which I started to think maybe he had finally walked away, but no such luck. “So, you’re just going to take a nap here?”
“I wasn’t planning on it. I was going to gird my loins with an iced mocha and avocado toast before I go to my parents’ house, but alas.” I indicated the brown sidewalk. “Life had other plans. So now I’m pouting.”
Steven blinked. “It’s Monday,” he said like this had just now dawned on him.
“It really fucking is,” I groused. “But I don’t know what that means to you.”
“Nothing. I just—nothing.”
