Chapter Five
Grace
The morning after the Kiss in the Cave – nowthere’sa title for a blog post – I get up before the dormitory-wide alarm jolts me awake.
Rubbing sleep from my eyes, I reach down for my phone and navigate to the horoscope website.
Today is a day where the phrase ‘don’t look a gift horse in the mouth’ couldn’t be more relevant. There are positive changes happening in your life, but this worries you. Well … don’t worry! All will work out in the end. You have the strength.
I smile, moving my thumb across the phone screen, wishing it could be true.
I climb out of bed and pace around the room, switching on the bedside lamp to throw a soft yellow glow across the walls. My body is full of anxious energy, as if all the pent-up yearning from the years since high school is suddenly rippling through me.
After our kiss, Harry found every opportunity for a brief touch in the private dimness of the cave. Our hands brushed more times than I can fricking count, and that just made my head spin all the more.
I move to the small desk and open up my laptop, moving my finger across the track-pad to the link that opens directly onto my blog. I don’t want to go through the browser, because I’m worried I’ll go to Harry’s horoscope and find something that just makes this all the more confusing.
I need to make my first post about the camp, so it’s a lucky break dreams of Harry chased me awake, really.
I go to thenew posttab and click it firmly, feeling a sense of foreboding drape over me like a heavy blanket. My mouth is dry and I haven’t had anything to drink yet, but I feel pinned to the desk, the words brimming unstoppably at the end of my fingertips.
Hey, Grace-fam, I write, which my fans have come to like.
I thought it was a bit cheesy at first, like, what am I, some sort of a cult leader? But it’s all in good fun and, the one time I removed it, there was a minor uproar.
So this fitness camp is a little more complicated than I thought. There’s a man here, one I kind of used to love.
LOL. Kind of? Okay, let’s say I was head over heels in love with him …
My fingers skim over the keyboard like an expert stone skimmer over water, creating patterns that move through my chest and tug on my heart-strings. I mean, I didn’t even believe heart-strings were a thing before, but I do now.
I write out the whole story: about Harry and my romance, about how he left me at the airport to go and be with the girl he got pregnant.
I don’t even know what happened to Gemma. That’s the craziest part. Harry could have a whole family in England and be cheating on his wife by kissing me. So, yeah, this is majorly confusing.
I even write about my plan to get back at him, ignoring the blaring of the dormitory alarm. It’s nowhere near as loud, to me, as the sound of my fingers on the keyboard or the ambiguity baking through my mind.
But then I hover the cursor over thepublishbutton, biting my lip.
Is it really fair to make this information public?
In the end, I go back through the post and shift things around a little.
And by shift things around, I mean I create a whole sneaky narrative, so that I can fulfill my need to take secret jabs at Harry – I’m only human – while also maintaining my professionalism.
Even if my blog is more of a personalized fitness hub, it’s still about fitness primarily, not relationships.
I have to maintain professional integrity.
So I write a new post entitledHarry Hadley and the Ethics of Leadership.
So I suppose I used to be sort of in love with the idea of Harry Hadley as a fitness coach, I write, keeping it oh-so-work-related.
I go on to write about how I used to idealize his fitness methods, watching him in soccer videos online. I talk about his workout ethic and things like that …
Which allmightbe true, not that I’d ever admit that to his face.
In the end, I basically have two versions of the post. The one the public is going to read, which is about Harry Hadley’s ethos as a fitness instructor. And the oneIsee when I read it, reading between the lines.
