The Fiction of Owen Thomas

Shoreline Drive

A Novella

Excerpt D

In the week following Diane’s birthday, Peter found it nearly impossible to stop thinking about Nicollet Flores.  At work, his mind wandered. Patients repeated themselves through awkward, echoing chasms of silence that Peter, after coming to his senses, pretended had played some critical role in the therapeutic process. He kept his door closed between sessions specifically to keep Henry from lumbering in and dumping himself in a chair, propping one of his scuffed Hush Puppies on the edge of the table, and wasting his time with idle conversation. 

And yet, so ensconced, Peter tended to spend that carefully guarded time at his desk with his heels propped up on an open drawer listening to the clock and staring out the window at the cars hissing through the rain and at the people scurrying from awning to awning, leaving The Yeast We Can Do Bakery clutching their protuberant white paper bags and crossing the street in the direction of McClatchy’s Seed Company where they disappeared out of sight beneath corner of his window sill. 

He found himself imagining—idly and without any particular effort to do so—that Nicollet might one day decide she wanted a pie.  Or a scone.  He found himself imagining that he might look down and see her there, exiting the bakery or preparing to cross the street, and that she might look up and find him silently watching her. Looking down at her. She was not the kind to avoid his staring or to care about the rain. She would stop right there in the street and stare back up at him, water running over her face and down her bare brown arms and down her bare brown legs to the tips of the petals of the daisies that adorned her sandals. 

That was how it would happen, he caught himself thinking. He shook his head and forced himself to think about something else.  But it didn’t take and there she was again, looking up at him. As if for help. As if to be pulled up out of a river. And him staring down at her in the river, water raging, rising higher and higher between her legs, as if the simple act of looking at her was extending a branch for her to grab. As if his longing was not the river and she was not the branch. That was how it would start.