If I was a little older it wouldn’t have happened the same way. But after twenty years of always being “the friend”, I had learned to doubt that any girl would ever have feelings for me. Which is not to say that girls never liked me, in fact, for the first time in my life more than one girl liked me, but I was slow to notice this. I was too used to these painful one-sided crushes. Also I was dating your best friend.

Oh god, I swear it wasn’t like that at all. I’m not, nor have I ever been, that guy. It’s just that, well, your best friend was crazy. But you knew this. In fact you warned me that it was always going to be a struggle and it would never be like I wanted. Remember the night we met? We were hanging out with you and your boyfriend and she ignored me and talked to him the entire night. I stormed out. I remember when I left you gave me this look of sympathy and then shot daggers at her.

And it wasn’t like I was still dating her. I had ended it upwards of a week prior. And it wasn’t like I didn’t have every right to end it, I mean hell, she was consulting me about what guys she should ask out, while we were on a date! And so what if you and I were hanging out late at night, alone in your room? We were both studying, it was perfectly innocent. I was sitting on your bed and you were laying on your bed. And then all of a sudden you rested your head on my lap. And I started squirming because I didn’t want you to notice that I had just popped a boner. You see, I had developed a little crush on you, but until that moment I didn’t think that you were being anything more
than friendly.

“Hey, remember when you told me that you have a lot of inappropriate crushes?” I asked. “Yeah.” “Was one of them me?” You squealed and hid your face in your pillow. I tried to get you to look at me, but you just squirmed and hid even more. I waiting a minute. “How long?” I asked. “Inappropriately long,” came your muffled reply. Obviously I was shy, or otherwise I would have just made a move on you and not asked you anything in the first place. But instead I had asked. And then I put my arms around you and we just lay there. Oh also I had asked if I could spend the night because it was late and I was pretending that I didn’t know that the bus that picked up down the street ran twenty-four hours. So we got undressed and went to bed and I kissed you and you didn’t so much kiss me back as sort of let me kiss you while having this look of absolute fear on your face. We knew what was going to happen. We knew how she would react.

The next morning we got up and lay around watching TV in each others’ arms. Whenever a roommate would walk in, we would quickly disentangle and swear that nothing was going on and it wasn’t what it looked like. At some point I said I had to go to a potluck I was invited to. “No, you’re not,” you said. So I didn’t. But then I had to go to work. “No, you’re not,” you said. So I didn’t go to work either. We just lay there on her couch cuddling and kissing and trying not to think about how your best friend would react.

We saw each other in secret for a while. Eventually your best friend put two and two together and cursed at me and told me you would just break my heart (never mind that she just broken it herself). You two didn’t speak for a while but that didn’t last long. I felt guilty, but at the same time I was too happy to feel too bad, and I would remind myself how badly she had treated me and then I felt better.

Your best friend was right though. You did kinda sorta break my heart. It turned out you were terrified of commitment, but you sort of strung me along until finally I had to break it off. Looking back, it probably wasn’t a very good match anyway, and I probably mostly liked you because you were stunningly good looking and you did this cutesy shy thing that really got me. But I still have fond memories of us just laying there together, not doing anything, just holding each other. That might have been the happiest and most content I had ever felt.