Tim stared at his phone trying to craft the perfect text before he jumped up and headed into the kitchen to make a sandwich for dinner, suddenly full of nervous energy. And besides, up until their UC gig, he had considered Lucy one of his closest friends in addition to someone he worked with.
He headed back to the couch, sandwich in hand, and turned on the TV, flipping the channels until he landed on a history channel documentary on tanks that he really had no interest in, but he felt more settled with it on in the background.
Chen, how's it going?
Lucy, I wanted to see how you were liking training.
Was it all really just pretend?
One after another he deleted all his attempts, furious at himself for making this into such a big deal. How was he ever going to work with Lucy again when he couldn't write one sentence that didn't seem too formal or too weird or way too personal?
Hey Lucy – I was thinking about you and wanted to see how UC training was going.
How could a text somehow be both too short and too long? He rewrote is a dozen more times, endlessly changing Lucy to Chen and taking in and adding back the words "I was thinking about you." There was even a period of adding emojis or x's at the end, and that was when he knew he was too far gone.
He went back to the "Hey Lucy" text and was suddenly so sick of doing this and feeling this way. He wasn't someone who usually felt unsure. He had a code he lived by and the years had taught him that if he stuck with that then he wouldn't get hurt or hurt anyone else. Ever since their UC assignment the way he felt about Lucy had made it impossible to hear the little voice that usually told him what the right things to do was. This time he could hear it and it was telling him to put down the phone, go work out, and see Lucy, his platonic work colleague, when she returned.
But there was an even louder voice telling him how much he missed her and that he needed to contact her. And a little friendly text was no big deal.
He listened to the louder voice and pressed send.