Mina: It has nothing to do with you. Sorry, I’ll let them know to leave you alone. Why do you call yourself Tucker?

Tucker: My friends call me that. My grandfather is Samuel. I hate Sam because people always go babyish with it and end up calling me Sammy.

I giggled because I’d definitely called him Sammy-boy in my head more times that I cared to remember.

Mina: Okay.

Tucker: Okay? What does that mean?

Mina: Okay, I won’t call you Sam or Sammy.

Tucker: So, what’s going on with you?

Mina: Nothing.

Tucker: Nothing as a response usually means something.

I didn’t know why I felt compelled to even answer him. Maybe it was because we didn’t really know each other, and it felt safe in a way. I already knew what he thought of me. He had been one of the few people in my life to be honest about it. In truth, that was probably why I decided to go ahead and spill part of my problems at his feet.

Mina: A person I trusted recently proved once again why I hate people.

Tucker: Obviously not me, since you never trusted me.

Mina: I told you it wasn’t about you.

Tucker: So, is now a bad time to ask if you’ve thought things over yet?

Mina: Thought things over?

Tucker: Yeah, about getting married. I promise that I am cleaning up my public act. No more outings and indecent, exposed flings with people. No pictures and I’m having someone clean up what’s already out there.

Mina: You can never truly have people clean up what’s out there. There are already screenshots of everything, as I proved in our meeting.

Tucker: Well, I’m doing my best here.

Mina: Why?

Tucker: Why am I doing my best? Figured it was the only way to get you to agree to this.

Mina: Why me? Why are you agreeable now?

Tucker: I told you already.

Right. He had, but honestly, the majority of the conversation I had with the man was lost to me after what he said about me not being his type and then the Carlos and Charlotte incident. Truthfully, I hadn’t thought about Tucker at all outside of him being one of the reasons my self-worth had taken second position to my all-time low. I didn’t think there was anything that could ever top the first slot in making me feel worthless and ugly. Then again, at least he had been honest about it. He could have lied, fed me false hope the way my father had, and allowed me to enter into a situation where my eyes weren’t as wide open as they needed to be.

I glanced at my laptop, the one where the dark and dirty story I’d been working on had turned into a sad sap, poor me, cry-fest. Then I glanced back toward the phone in my hand. I gulped in a huge lungful of air and blew it out slowly. Was I really considering this, after everything, and knowing how he felt about me? That little voice of doubt inside my head told me it was probably the best I could do. Damn it, I believed the voice. Before I could talk myself out of it, my fingers typed out my answer and hit send.