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He really surprised me at the dinner party. I was expecting he and Kristen to be the same. They weren’t. Of course they weren’t. They were adults now and they both seemed to have matured.
Kristen had basically the same personality but seemed a bit more guarded than she had been before. I had no idea what was going on with Logan. He had still walked in like the cocky jerk I had known him to be in high school— the one I both loved and hated him for being.
But his easy banter and borderline self-depreciation throughout some of the rest of the night, and during our text conversation, were not at all what I remembered. Maybe the money his family had started accumulating in high school thanks to his grandfather’s business success had gone to his head and he was finally coming back down to reality with the rest of us.
I had often wished I had stayed in touch with Kristen. There was really no question when it came to her. Our drifting apart had really been down to me and I could only imagine how much it had hurt her.
It was a bit surprising, seeing all those friends of hers at the dinner party. She had always had a few friends, but I was always the popular one as we were growing up. At first, I thought she only wanted to hang out with me to be seen as cool. Like some of my popularity might rub off on her.
Once I got to know her though, I realized that this really wasn’t a problem. She was plenty cool in her own right, but she just chose carefully the friendships she wanted to make. One of them just happened to be with me. And it had turned out to be the best one, lasting the longest, through the years until we went our separate ways. Still, I couldn’t really expect her to just stay still and never make friends again after that happened.
I had tried to make other friends after Kristen, but it never really seemed to work out. There was always some issue that would come up, sometimes pretty quickly, that would make it clear that the friendship was doomed.
They would become a vegan intent on making me become one, too, or they were in a touring band and would be gone for months at a time or her boyfriend would decide, out of the clear blue sky, that he didn’t like the time she was spending with me and wanted more of her attention to be on him.
Then there were the real outsiders. The blood collectors. The neo-Pagans. The closet lesbians trying really, really hard to be “just friends” with a girl that they really, really wanted to fuck. Like a lot.
I didn’t say anything, not wanting to poison the well, or put us on bad terms again, but a lot of the women at the dinner party seemed pretty weird too. Not in an obvious way, like talking about their pet crows, or having clown faces tattooed on the back of their head – that took a lot of explaining when a girl like that had tried to be my friend! – but there was a sense of oddness I couldn’t put my finger on or quite shake.
Still, it all ended up for the best though. The night had gone fine and it really seemed, against all odds, that Kristen and I might actually be friends again.
The only question was what to do about Logan. He may have tried to be casual and funny but his hard-on spoke volumes. And that was before he had sent me those texts.
I had just taken down my skirt, a short, pleated, black number the salesgirl had said made my ass look awesome, when the phone rang. I had to fumble a bit with my jacket to find the phone, it being one of those new, super-thin stealth models you could hide in a manila envelope. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
“Hi,” Logan said, sounding almost meek.
“Hi?” I said, it coming out as a question.
Or more like a single word representing all the many questions that had started raging in my head.
“You home?” he asked.
“Yeah. You aren’t going to ask what I am wearing, are you?”
“No, I mean, I wasn’t planning to.”
“Why not?” I asked, feigning insult.
“Oh, um, sorry, what are you wearing?”
“A pair of black silk panties, thank you for asking.”
“That’s all?” he asked.
“That’s all,” I whispered huskily.
“Oh,” he said softly, clearly picturing it in his head.
“How about you?” I asked.
“A once dapper but now disheveled Ralph Lauren suit,” he said.
“There’s something to be said for honesty,” I offered, this not being the answer I expected.
“A lot, I would say,” he said.
“Are you dunk?” I asked.
“Not nearly enough.”
