A Year in June: Chapter 16

             The next morning June snoozed her phone twice until she finally woke up at 9:30 a.m. Despite going to bed early, frustrated by the mess she created and the unsettled feeling in her heart, she still woke up at her usual late time. With a small groan she threw off her blanket in an attempt to motivate herself awake. Today, however, waking up did not require the usual amount of effort.

To her left was a sight that startled her awake—a blanketed, breathing mound. This abnormality kicked her half-asleep brain into high gear. What was Mina doing asleep at this hour? Normally her sleeping pills wore off around 7 am and she had to get up and do things to occupy her restless mind. Perhaps her night out with Joseph had been so fulfilling that she did not need the aid of sleeping pills to rest?  Or maybe they had been out late into the night and things progressed until—June shivered despite the relatively warm May morning. Joseph is married, she reminded herself, and Mina is not someone who would insert herself into an equation where she did not belong.

But still, June sat up and stared through the cocoon of blankets surrounding Mina, though all of the exciting days and late nights the two of them had together in the last eleven months not once had Mina failed to wake up at 7 am the next morning. Comparing herself to others was a habit that June couldn’t kick despite knowing all the signs. Surrounded by ‘the best and the brightest’ during college June was often dragged into spurts of self-loathing. But this was different; there was no way she could even begin to compare to Joseph in Mina’s eyes. She looked out through the window at the foot of her bed and watched the giant crows hop around on the telephone wire.