From Clingy to Independent- He Thought I Needed Him Until He Realized I Didn’t Chapter 12
I went back to Stanton the very next day.
After the wedding, Cameron and I gradually
became more familiar with each other.
To my surprise, I discovered that not only was he
down–to–earth, he was also kind of a chatterbox.
At lunch, he would casually snap photos of the
clouds outside the office windows and send them
to me.
He turned photos of his cat into a barrage of
crying cat memes and spammed my phone with
them.
Even when he was working late into the night, het
still remembered to send a complaint like, “The
hot case at the convenience store only had
braised radish left. One star.”
Before I knew it, I had started sharing the little fragments of my own life with him too.
And every single time, he replied instantly.
Whenever I finished working and saw my phone
full of messages from him, it gave me a strange feeling, like someone had been quietly thinking about me the whole time.
Then one day, for once, Cameron didn’t reply
within five minutes.
I checked my phone again and again, but the
screen stayed perfectly still.
All at once, a sharp sense of disappointment rose
up in me.
Without thinking, I typed, “Why aren’t you
answering?”
Right before I hit send, I suddenly came to my
senses.
What was I doing?
Since when was I making demands about how
fast my boss should reply?
I hurriedly deleted the words.
Then a voice message popped up.
There was a lot of background noise, chairs
scraping and people moving around.
“I got dragged into a meeting at the last minute. It
just ended.”
Holding my phone, I suddenly thought of
something small from when Adrian and I had first
started dating.
We had been texting, and then out of nowhere he
said he was going to eat, and after that he never
sent another message.
I waited for more than an hour before finally
asking, “Finished eating?”
He replied, “Yeah.”
It was such a tiny thing, but it had left me
strangely disappointed.
After he finished eating, it had never even occurred
to him to tell me, or ask what I was doing.
At the time, I hadn’t thought much of it and had
just kept talking to him.
Later, Adrian slowly stopped replying to my messages altogether.
When I asked why, he would just say coldly, “Don’t
you have your own life to focus on?”
I was long past the age where I should still care
about something as trivial as whether someone
replied instantly.
And yet when I heard Cameron explain himself, I
still felt a secret flicker of happiness.
Even so, I replied politely.
Jenna: [It’s okay. You should focus on what you’re
doing. You don’t need to reply to me.]
At the top of the chat window, the words changed
immediately to [typing…]
A long time passed.
Then a huge block of text suddenly came through.
Cameron: [Even soldiers in World War II found time.
to write love letters to their sweethearts. Olympic commentators still call their girlfriends during breaks in the broadcast. Guys in bands stop in the middle of a set to reply to their girlfriends on
WhatsApp.]
Cameron: [Compared to that, I’m just an ordinary
person. No matter how busy I get, I can still make time to reply to a message.]
Cameron: [So would you let me be your
boyfriend?]