Mike knew Daya's texts by heart, but he re-read them anyway hoping for a hidden message. Belousova kept Daya on her toe picks; Dhawan/Sorokin entered a regional competition in June, some place in Ontario he didn't know; they were to select music and start working on their choreography next week.
None of it included him, except that she had reached out to him. The invisible string between them, thinner than spiderweb silk, tightened, then slacked again. Would a blushing smiley with a trio of ruby hearts have been better? Bad poetry? Should he text back about his thesis? So many questions...
"Michael, I thought you were going to the gym on the break?" Carol phrased it as a question, but her narrowed eyes said, Stop sulking, get off your butt.
"On my way, I was just throwing together a playlist for my run. They keep removing you-tube videos and I hate those snide messages about video being no longer available."
Carol peeked at his screen... and he didn't have the time to do anything about the folders he had dragged up from the obscurity before the app opened up. The list of references, bits and pieces of chapters, the drafts of the thesis proposal... a smile tugged at his boss' lip corner, but out loud she asked, "Taking along your best pal?"
His running list was heavy on the Japanese skating maverick's videos, so he could have been growing attached. "If I have to cultivate an unrealistic body image, I'm going straight for the abstract ideal. It's a compensation for my years of not giving a fig."
Carol shook her head, sending the salt and pepper curls bouncing. "Michael, just go to the gym."
He did. While the greatest-of-all-time flitted around from one corner of the small screen to another, landing back on the ice in an afterthought of each take off, Mike's heavy footfalls shook the treadmill. Must believe this is going somewhere. Oh, please. Going somewhere, on a treadmill? The stupidest thing, this.
And the alternatives were all in the same vein. Swim laps in the pool. Dance on one spot... or skate round and round the ice rink, like Daya must be doing right now in Ontario. His heart gave a painful lurch that had nothing to do with exercise.
This is going somewhere. It had to, to keep all those other people attached to heavy weights and never-ending locomotion.
His thesis could go somewhere too. While sifting through the materials, a busy work at first, it dawned at Mike that he could finish it now. Now that Daya had infected him with ambition, he could do it. Not that Daya would love a Doctor of Philosophy more than a librarian, but he could finish it if he returned to a university.
After 30 minutes of stomping down the treadmill into submission, his face looked so red, it clashed with his hair. He threw cold water onto it, fruitlessly. So, it was with this watermelon-tomato face that he had shown up back at work.
His coworkers still lingered at the lunch nook. He smiled at Alyssa, while edging his way to the fridge, to get his post-workout ambrosia. Low cal, no sugar, 38 grams of protein diluted in something vaguely resembling days old hot chocolate.
"Mike, there're some gluten-free chocolate chip cookies left," Alyssa called brightly, shoving the plate across the table. Some was too imprecise an estimate; he counted eight cookies. The absence of gluten didn't alter the appearance, though perhaps the goodies were paler than their full-bodied wheat equivalent. His first impulse was to stuff one into his mouth and... he swallowed air.
"Thank you, but I'm good." He brandished his sippy cup for the grown-ups playing the dress-up game. Look at me, I'm an athlete! Daya's yoga pants always looked like they belonged on her.
"Just one?" Alyssa tossed her natural curls over her naturally slim torso, clad in natural wool. The knitted outfit was stuck in an awkward place between a sweater dress and a sweater. It stopped mid-thigh of her black-legginged legs, barely letting a plaid skirt peek from underneath.
She tied the sweater up with a hemp belt and loaded her neck with a large buckle made of a dark alloy and amber. The same alloy made little cages for the amber beads in her ears. The overall effect was vaguely Celtic...
The baked offerings were also home-spun. It could have been an oatcake, it could have been an echo of centuries when breaking bread healed all wounds.
Mike licked his lips. Was it that bad to grab one cookie to just fit in, instead of slurping weird things in public? He could just take one bite, throw the rest away discreetly... The inner voice burst out laughing: in for a bite, in for the rest of the plate.
"Alyssa, Michael said no. Let's not mess with his food plan, he's been working hard on it." Carol stood by the doors of their tiny break room, exuding good will.
Alyssa took it for suggestion, rather than command. "Chocolate has endorphins, they can cheer people up. The body, it naturally wants a bit of a reward, to be happy, and not frightened into hoarding the protective layers. Indulgence is what sends the signal that we're not in the middle of a freezing wasteland—"
"After you have a kid or two, come back and tell me all about the freezing wasteland, and how indulgences make us lose weight. Anyhow, I need someone to help with re-stacking." Carol looked straight at him.
"I'm game," Mike volunteered, avoiding eye contact with Alyssa. She was nodding at him during her endorphins speech, as if she had expected him to take her side.
Carol hummed something until they were out of earshot of the lounge. "You could mention your girlfriend to Alyssa, without specifying her current whereabouts, Michael. A drama in the workplace is undesirable."
Mike stared owlishly, his brain trying to make connections between the diet war and his long-distance relationship. The realization finally cleared the congestion: Carol implied that Alyssa had romantic designs on him.
He didn't feel like playing coy by insisting that the notion was absurd. It had happened before. Some people had taste bad enough to like him. For all he knew, Alyssa was one of them. "Ah, thank you. I'll mention it."
Carol nodded and left him to the re-stacking.
***
The opportunity to clear the air with Alyssa presented itself at closing hour. He was herding the teens out of the study room to the exit; she stood ready to lock up for the night. The teens dragged their feet, as if the floor was strewn with bubble gum.
"Thanks for offering me the cookies," Mike started, keeping his eyes fixed on a teen magically packing a textbook, a laptop, a drawing pad and possibly a washer-and-dryer unit inside an average-sized backpack. He hoped his unwavering gaze kept the kid moving along, but he was probably just kidding himself. The teen had headphones over his ears, so his conversation with Alyssa was private.
He had an inkling that his smile changed from professional to strained-cheerful, and a little idiotic. Thankfully, this conversation would be over in a minute. "I didn't mean to come across as a party pooper. It's just my diet, you know. My girlfriend wants me to take better care of myself, so I'm trying not to disappoint her." Not the most elegant way to get the point across, but there, it was done.
"Oh." Alyssa tapped her fingers on the glass door. "Oh. I imagine, she's happy with your progress, because you look like you've lost a lot of weight since I've first met you. Your face is thinning out, and everything. You'll need to shop for clothes too, I think. It's getting baggy all over. That's one drawback of losing weight. I remember when my aunt was losing weight she went shopping every month. She enjoyed it a lot. But never threw away any bigger clothes. Just in case. Body wants what body wants."
As always with Alyssa, her thoughts came as a mixed bag, but Mike felt flattered. "Thank you. I didn't realize it was noticeable."
The scale told him he was fifteen pounds lighter, either from the mortification of the flesh or the pining, it was hard to tell which. He hadn't pined in a while, and he didn't remember it robbing him of appetite before. Before, no matter what he felt, food was the welcome relief.
Alyssa laughed, a gurgling sound, before giving him a conspiratorial wink. "Are you fishing for compliments? No way your girlfriend didn't notice!"
"She doesn't know yet, she... well, never mind," Mike replied sheepishly. "Maybe I'll send her a picture— Ah, sorry, I don't need to annoy you with my personal life."
"No worries! I like talking to people, it's the core of my being. I'm curious about people, I always want to know what's up with them. Even with the strangers on the bus, I imagine their stories... like what they need vs what they want." She studied him through narrowed eyes, her fingers still tapping the glass.
The backpacking teens were long gone. They didn't have to stand there, but with her studying him so closely, Mike felt it would be rude to leave. He cleared his throat, but she lifted her free hand in a give me a second here gesture.
Alyssa finished her examination. "I think what you need is a cat."
"A cat," Mike parroted after her. Her leap of logic left him in the dust, a strange feeling. He was used to people staring at him after he had said something weird.
Alyssa's bony shoulders jerked upwards, a gesture she must have perfected over the years of explaining herself. "You always look a little sad. Or at least since I've met you. Not that I think there is a causality—"
"No, no," Mike hurried to assure her, now chaffing to wrap up the conversation. "It is not work-related at all. It's personal."
"I get it. The relationships are hard. So, that's why I was thinking about a cat. I volunteer at the SPCA, and I see the truth of the old poem all the time." She smiled dreamily and slipped into musical French:
"Les amoureux fervents et les savants austères;
Aiment également, dans leur mûre saison,
les chats puissants et doux, orgueil de la maison,
quicomme eux sont frileux et comme eux sédentaires."
"Well, I hope I am not yet in my declining years," Mike joked, translating: "Once their years are on the wane, a fiery lover and an ardent scholar both, oft seek out a mighty, gentle cat as much a fan of warmth and hearth, as they are."
"Close enough." Alyssa smiled, with that special warmth people greet someone they didn't expect to be fluent. In her eyes, he spoke her language in more ways than one, Mike thought with a tinge of guilt. If he wasn't hopelessly glued to Daya, he might have been game... He waved the thought away like smoke.
"It's Baudelaire," Alyssa said, interrupting his inner struggle. "I used to remember a lot more in the Uni, but it's been a while. You know how it is."
He might have been rusty, but not so corroded as to not pick up on her working in a hint of how close they were in age and experience. Smooth, very smooth.
"I thought it might have been Baudelaire," Mike started carefully. This conversation, it was not exactly going the way Carol had hoped, was it? A man loses fifteen pounds, finds French romantics... "Ah, if I want to adopt a pet, I know whom to call."
"Ghost-busters," Alyssa chuckled.
He tried not to, but he could not resist returning a smile, albeit a guilty one. Alyssa was the product of the hallowed halls of liberal arts; he had met her a hundred times before; he had fallen for her in different guises before and she was kind to him.
But damn it, he did not want to bond. The only poetry that interested him was Daya's racing heartbeat.
"Good night, Alyssa." He walked away with the heavy steps of a man who had designed the skyscraper of his own misfortunes and lugged it on his back.