One Kiss: An Office Romance

With a knot in my stomach, I resolve to fix this. I can get it sorted. I twist the handle to open the door and it gives with just a little bit of resistance. As I pull it open, Clarissa is standing there, her eyes wide with surprise.

“Clarissa? I was just about to… Are you all right?”

She shakes her head tightly. “No? We have to… It’s my sister.”

She brushes a strand of hair behind her ear, her lips pressed tightly together. I see her chin quiver with emotion as she holds herself together.

“Hey, it’s all right. It’s okay,” I reassure her automatically. “Would you like to go?”

She nods, stiff with barely-restrained tears. “She’s in the hospital,” she explains in a hoarse whisper.

Suddenly nothing else matters. I know what we need to do. It only takes a moment for me to pack my things and we are back in the Mustang, headed back toward Chicago.

During the trip, Clarissa is silent. She stays in the passenger seat with her knees drawn up slightly, her hands knotted together in her lap. I can feel her turbulent thoughts, and it kills me that I can’t do anything to help. All I can do is drive and get her there as fast as possible.

When we reach the hospital,

Clarissa rushes to the front desk to inquire. I don’t know what else to do so I follow her, and no one tells me not to. When they take her back behind the swinging doors, I follow the blue arrow on the floor to a small, strangely formal waiting room.

The TV in the corner offers recorded information about diabetes in English, then in Spanish. It repeats every few minutes. The watercolor painting on the wall is stripes of tulips in bloom, all different colors.

I feel like I’m in a sort of intermission. I can’t leave. I can’t advance.

After a while my phone buzzes and I swipe the face to see a text message from Sunny asking if everything is all right. After a few minutes, I finally compose a response:

I’m not sure. I’ll let you know as soon as possible.

Chapter 10

Clarissa

I’m relieved to see that Landry is sitting up in bed when the nurse escorts me to the room. I rush through the door, stopping up short when I see her face. Landry takes a timid bite of Jell-O and keeps her eyes down.

“Okay, you have to tell me what happened,” I say quickly through clenched teeth.

“I don’t know…” She shrugs. “I’m sure it looks worse than it is.”

In the back of my mind, there’s a small voice that tells me I can’t push her. Landry cannot be pushed to talk when she doesn’t want to talk. That’s not how she is.

But this time, I don’t feel like I can wait.

I sit on the edge of the bed, checking her over. She lets me look her up and down, though I am sure she is recoiling at the invasion of her space. A piece of white cotton gauze is taped over one eyebrow, and I can see the purple of the bruise seeping down below. Her left eye is swollen completely shut, and her upper lip is lopsided and raw on one side.

“Don’t tell me that you fell,” I begin. “Tell me the truth.”

She takes another bite of the Jell-O, wincing as her cracked lip tries to curl over the plastic spoon. It takes every bit of patience that I have to wait for her to start speaking again.

“What is his name?” I finally ask when I can’t wait anymore.

“Ronnie,” she answers softly.

Slowly, the story begins to come out. They’ve been living together. He’s overbearing. He’s rude. It seems that she’s been reaching out to me like a life raft, trying to find a way out. She wanted a way to leave without having to ask me.

Somehow he convinced her to let him come to my house this weekend while I was gone. He started a fight. It spilled onto the front steps. He had her, out there, in public while the joggers ran past. Nobody did anything.

A single tear wriggles through a meandering path down one cheek as she talks. Just one.

A million things swirl through my head. I want to ask her how this happened. After everything we have been through. After the way our father treated our mother, how could she let a man like that into her life? But I can’t blame her. It’s not her fault, and asking her to explain the inexplicable is just callous. I can’t do that to her.