Walter couldn't believe it. His mind raced, calculating the odds. He'd finally been brave enough to listen to Toby and drive over to Paige's, planning on telling her how he felt. He'd been nervous, so nervous his hands were nearly shaking. Now, that feeling was gone. He saw her with Drew, laughing. She was happy.
He felt a cold pit in his stomach, and swallowed, finding it difficult. Surprised at himself, he blinked back a tear. What was happening? Had he really been that emotionally invested? Apparently. He pulled his keys out of his pocket, clutching them harder than necessary, and trudged back to his vehicle.
He drove back to the garage, his mind elsewhere. He walked inside, letting the door shut behind him. Sylvester was digging through the fridge, looking for something to eat. Toby was sitting at his desk, feet propped on the top of an open drawer. Any other time, Walter would have reprimanded him, but now he ignored it.
He set his keys on his desk and removed his coat, folding to precisely and putting it in the top drawer. Anything methodical. Anything that required precision, to keep his mind occupied.
Toby looked up from his book. "Oh, hey Walt. Wait...why are you back already? And you, my friend, do not look good."
Walter told him in a detached tone, "I am perfectly fine, Toby." He headed over to the white board and grabbed a black dry-erase marker. He stood there a moment, considering which mathematical equation would require the most of his attention. After some deliberation, he started to write.
His normally neat handwriting was nearly illegible, the numbers, letters, and signs jumbling together to make a tangled mess. Still, he kept going, filling the board with an equation. Something unchanging. Something where if you added 2 + 2, you'd get four. If you divided 39 by 3, you'd get 13. There was one answer, everything predetermined by logic.
Toby caught on to this immediately. "What got you so worked up? You wouldn't be home already if Paige hadn't accepted it well. You'd probably be going to see Megan and talk about it. Your tense posture and inattention to neatness suggest that you're extremely agitated, yet you didn't even talk to her. Why? Oh. Your hesitation at my statement that you didn't talk to her leads me to conclude that you walked up but saw something that worked you up. Another man? Yes, but not just any man. You have an underlying hostility to you. You two have history. Let me take one, completely accurate guess. Drew?"
Walter tried his best to not lash out at Toby. He capped the marker, set it down in the exact middle of the white board tray, and walked towards the stairs.
Toby smirked slightly, but not triumphantly. For once, he wasn't glad to be right. "Ding ding ding, guess who's a winner," he muttered.
Sylvester, who had been nervously watching the scene unfold, blurted out, "But he isn't coming back for a few days. Right?"
Walter's jaw clenched. "Apparently there was a change of plans," he remarked stiffly before escaping to the solitude of upstairs.
Toby looked a little worried. "Sly, tomorrow you and I are going up there and making sure he didn't self-destruct. But right now, we're leaving." They heard something smash, and Sylvester jumped. Toby muttered, "Yeah, definitely leaving," before making a beeline for the door, Sylvester right on his heels.
Upstairs, Walter was taking out his anger in two of the ways he knew best: smashing things and then putting them back together. He'd shattered his coffee mug (again) before realizing that that had been highly impulsive and illogical. He only had one, which was why he'd repaired it before. He pulled out a few chemicals he kept lying around and worked to make a strong, nontoxic, waterproof adhesive to hold it together. One he'd figured out the formula, he carefully mixed the chemicals and pieced the mug back together, shard by shard.
If he had a higher EQ, he'd realize that this was an ironic event. He was slowly rebuilding something that was broken, but using his mind to distract him from the most logical solution. After seeing Drew at Paige's house, he'd broke down, and was now piecing himself back together in the only way he knew how: by using his mind to distract him. He should have told her sooner.
He should have told her sooner, and now he was paying the price of his hesitance to open up.
He was losing her.