But women are always trying to read between the lines.
What could she possibly read into mine?
Or maybe it was too simple… it’s damn hard communicating emotion in a text or e-mail. Even a missing comma can have a huge impact.
“Let’s eat, Grandma” changes a helluva lot without the comma.
Then it’s “Let’s eat Grandma”-who probably won’t willingly come to the table.
He scrolled back in the string of messages and reread what he’d sent, which simply had repeated part of the earlier text: you never answered… why the change of heart?
Maybe that’s it. I’m pushing…
Then suddenly his phone vibrated.
And his heart automatically began beating faster.
When Matt looked at the text message, he was at first shocked at its length.
Jesus! It’s a tome.
What in the world did I trigger?
That’s what took her so long.
It’d take me days to thumb-type one that long on my phone.
Then he remembered seeing her cell phone at Liberties.
It was one of those really new ones, actually more of a small computer that happened also to be a phone. The computer-phone was one and a half times the size of a playing card, and damn near as thin, and if you tapped the icon labeled TEXT, a window with a facsimile of a typewriter keyboard popped up. It was a qwerty one, like a real full-size keyboard only smaller, and allowed for much faster writing than most cell phones.
Phones such as Payne’s.
He read Amanda’s text:
609-555-6221
Hi…
I have to be honest. (If only because without that, why have a relationship?) Didn?t get much sleep last night, what with all this running through my head.
See, I was-maybe still am-afraid of getting close to a cop.
I remember, not exactly happily, all the sacrifices my father made to be a cop. How hard it was on our family, especially my mother, seeing him every day walk out the front door for work and not knowing if that would be the last we?d see him alive.
And then dad got shot.
Matt, I didn?t want that again.
But then I saw what that bastard did at the hospital.
And what you did! Wow! How you were all over that guy without a second thought.
We can?t have people like that loose on the streets.
And to do that, we need people like my dad and you.
And I think I need someone like you… (smile) — A Payne just stared at his phone.