The Day I Lost My Taste for Love, and for You Chapter 07
Two months went by.
Winter in the town was far damper and colder than I had expected.
Bundled in a heavy down coat, I came out of the town’s only package pickup point carrying a cardboard box.
Inside it was a space heater I had ordered online.
“Annie, what did you buy this time?”
The woman who ran the pickup counter cracked sunflower seeds and struck up a conversation warmly.
“A heater. The temperature dropped hard these last couple of days.” I smiled and hitched the box higher.
“Goodness, you’re such a thin little thing. Come by my place sometime and I’ll cook you a pot roast and put some meat on you.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
There was no way to tell her that pot roast would register as nothing at all, so I answered with a grateful smile.
I had barely walked past the counter when my phone rang.
It was an unknown number.
“Hello?”
“Anna.”
The voice on the other end was hoarse and dry, with a careful tremor
—
running under it.
My feet stopped where they were.
Cold winter wind funneled down the narrow lane and cut across my face like a blade.
It was Oliver.
I said nothing and held the phone.
“I saw the charge on your insurance card.”
His breathing was heavy, as though he were holding something down with effort.
“You’re in Fairmont. Aren’t you?”
So that was how he had found me.
A few days earlier, I had gone to the town clinic for antibiotics because of a cold.
It was the first time since leaving that I had used the insurance credentials tied to my old records.
“Did you need something?” My voice came out remarkably calm.
“Anna… I…”
He had not finished when I heard a car engine somewhere close by.
A black SUV spattered with mud pulled up at the mouth of the lane.
The door flew open.
—
Oliver half fell out of the car and stumbled toward me.
He had lost a great deal of weight.
His hair, which he had always kept immaculate, was a mess, blue stubble covered his jaw, and the expensive coat hung off him in creases as though he had not changed clothes in days.
He ran up to me and stopped short.
He stood less than six feet away and stared at me, and his eyes went red on the spot.
“I finally found you.”
He was gasping for air, and his voice was thick.
I looked at him and felt as though I were looking at a stranger I had known a long time ago.
Nothing stirred in me.
Even that thin thread of hatred had been diluted out of existence by two quiet months.
“What do you want with me?” I asked flatly.
Oliver took a step forward as though to reach for my hand, then saw the guard in my eyes and made himself stop.
“Anna, I’m sorry.”
His throat worked, and his voice broke.
“I saw your medical file. I had no idea the damage to your taste nerves was that bad. I thought… I thought those home remedies might
—
actually help you.”
“You thought?”
I laughed under my breath.
“You wouldn’t take the doctor’s word for it, and you took Jessica’s remedies instead. And you call that helping me?”
Oliver shut his eyes in pain, and tears ran down his face.
“I’m a bastard. At the time I just… I just didn’t want a scene. I didn’t want to leave Jessica standing there with nowhere to go.”
He opened his eyes again, and his look was pleading.
“Anna, come home with me. Please. I’ll take you to the best hospitals, we’ll go abroad for treatment. Jessica will never come within a mile of you again, I swear it.”
Right then, the passenger door of the SUV swung open.
Jessica came picking her way toward us in a fur coat and heels, stumbling on the uneven ground.
She looked down at the dirt road with open disgust.
“Anna, what are you doing hiding out in this dump? They don’t even have real roads.”
She reached Oliver’s side and moved to take his arm out of habit.
Oliver threw her off as though she had shocked him.
“Don’t touch me!” he roared.
—
Jessica froze, startled.
Then her eyes reddened fast, and the tears came down like beads off a snapped string.
“Anna, everything is my fault, all of it!”
She swung toward me, and her voice turned shrill, like an actress in a melodrama.
“I was thoughtless, I take jokes too far! Hit me, scream at me, I don’t care, just stop torturing Oliver!”
She pointed at him.
“He’s spent two months looking for you. He’s let the company fall apart, he’s been out of his mind every single day. Can you stand to see him like this?”
I watched her perform.
I watched the few neighbors craning their heads out to see.
Guilt as a weapon, and it was the same old recipe.
“Torturing him?”
I set the box with the heater in it down on the ground and brushed the dust off my hands.
“Jessica, I think you’ve got something confused.”
I raised my eyes and swept a cold look over the pair of them.
“I haven’t tortured anyone. I threw out an old coat covered in garbage. That’s all I did.”