The Day I Lost My Taste for Love, and for You Chapter 06
It was the third day.
Oliver sat in a conference room at work facing a projection screen dense with figures, and not one of them registered.
His phone lay beside his hand with the screen kept awake.
That familiar profile picture never lit up again.
“Mr. Richardson, is there anything you’d like adjusted in next quarter’s budget?”
The project manager asked it carefully.
Oliver came back to himself with a jolt.
“Ah. Go ahead with it as written. We’re done here.”
He tugged irritably at his tie and walked back to his office.
For three days, he had searched every place he could think of.
My hometown, the coffee shop I used to go to, and even the handful of college classmates I still knew.
There was nothing.
I had evaporated into the air like a drop of water without a sound.
There was a knock.
The office door opened, and Jessica came in on her heels.
She was carrying two coffees.
—
“I knew you wouldn’t have eaten lunch.”
She set the cups on his desk, walked around behind him with practiced ease, and reached out to rub his shoulders.
“Stop looking. She’s hiding from you on purpose so you’ll panic. That playing-hard-to-get routine only works on decent guys like you.”
Oliver’s body stiffened slightly, and he moved out from under her hands without making a point of it.
“Jessica.”
His voice was low and rough with something held down.
“She quit her job.”
Jessica’s hand stopped in midair.
“She quit? That’s impossible.” Her eyes went wide with disbelief. “She spent three years getting that dead-end assistant position made permanent. She’d give that up?”
Oliver did not answer.
He pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk.
A yellowed medical file lay inside it.
He had found it the night before at the very bottom of a storage box while hunting for anything I might have left behind.
“What’s that?”
Jessica leaned in, curious.
—
Oliver flattened his hand over the file and did not let her see the writing on it.
“Nothing.”
On the last page of that file, the head of the neurology department had written out his findings in a clear hand.
[Irreversible damage caused by extreme stimulation. The probability of recovery is very low. Strictly avoid all strongly stimulating foods and odors.]
Oliver closed his eyes, and the last several months played back in his head whether he wanted them to or not.
Wasabi soup that left my face scarlet and my lungs seizing.
The cake with live maggot cheese in it that had me bent over the toilet retching on an empty stomach.
And the glass of warm water was swapped for grain alcohol that made me cough up threads of blood.
And what had he been doing at the time?
He had been laughing.
He had been rubbing my back and telling me gently that Jessica meant well.
“Oliver, what’s wrong with you? You look terrible.”
Jessica’s voice pulled him back.
She did not seem to notice how cold he had gone, and she kept
—
complaining in that entitled tone of hers.
“Honestly, it’s better that Anna left. She’s been walking around like a corpse lately, like the whole world owes her money. Being around her was depressing.”
“Enough.”
Oliver spoke suddenly.
His voice was not loud, but it landed like a hammer and shut Jessica up instantly.
She stared at him blankly.
“What… what did you say?”
Oliver raised his head, and those mild eyes of his were shot through with red.
“I said enough. Stop talking.”
Jessica’s face changed all at once.
“Oliver, are you yelling at me?” She pitched her voice up in disbelief. “Over a woman who took off without so much as a goodbye, you’re yelling at me?”
“She didn’t take off.”
Oliver’s voice shook a little, as though he were forcing himself to confirm something.
“She was just… in too much pain.”
He finally saw the fact he had chosen not to see for so long.
—
Every one of those acts he had wrapped up as a “joke” or “good intentions” had been destroying her body and her dignity with precision.
The panic broke over him completely.
It was an airtight net drawn tight around his throat.
“I have to find her.”
Oliver shot to his feet, grabbed his keys, and headed for the door.
“Oliver! Stop right there!” Jessica stamped her foot behind him, beside herself.
He did not look back.
At that same hour, I was in a small seaside town a hundred and eighty miles away.
I was carrying a bag of fresh vegetables and walking slowly along the flagstone road.
“Annie, off work already?”
The old woman who sold seafood next door greeted me with a squint of a smile.
“Yes, ma’am. The shrimp look good today.”
I stopped and smiled back.
The clerical job I had found was easy, and the town moved at a slow pace.
I still could not taste the sweetness of seafood or smell the salt in the
—
wind.
But my stomach no longer cramped, and my sleep was no longer broken by a shrill phone ringing.
I looked out at the coastline in the distance.
A life like that struck me as a good one.