Home and Away Games

The next morning I am refreshed and feeling much zippier. Though I had had a crazy dream about Craig, that at once made me feel confused but happy to have seen him, even though I hadn't.  Dreams are strange that way. Even wide awake you can't always be sure there isn't some grain of truth to them.

I leave early as I have to stop at the store for muffins and flowers and a card for the office. A coworker is leaving and I want to give her a nice send off. Don't ask me where the good will has come from.

I pull into the lot at the store and check my phone as I am unhooking my seatbelt.  Three texts.  Craig, Scott and Mac? 

All Mac. He'd sent them after I'd gone to bed. They were all very nice. 

I text back before I get out of the car. "Sorry to have missed you last night. I was out of gas and went to bed early. Slept well and am back in the game today. Have a great morning!" Send.

I walk the 20 steps into the store and my phone dings. Probably Mac saying good morning back. I look at the phone just to make sure it is not one of the kids saying that they left their project worth half their grade on the back seat of the car.

Craig!  He'd just woken from a dream about me! 

And suddenly I am smiling from ear to ear like a lunatic in the bakery aisle.

I stop by the bagels to reply.  "Did you now?? I had one about you too!"

"Good or bad?" he writes.

"You would not kiss me, so very bad."

And what follows is a dozen or so very cute and flirtatious texts that later I will find myself re-reading over and over.

But the fallout is this: Until, in a later text, Craig and I establish that there is no possible way for us to get together that next weekend, I am plotting what to say to Mac to get out of going anywhere or doing anything with him in favor of any time I can spend with Craig.

Pink eye.

Leprosy.

Death in the family.

Gravely ill family member in another state.

I know where my heart is. And it is not with Mac.