5. Texting + an ‘S’=
No, not textings. Sexting.
Luke
I’m not some long-suffering, levelheaded saint who stays calm under pressure and in the face of danger while my boyfriend freaks out about the sky falling. I freaking wish. I can stay focused and relaxed on the mound even when there’s three balls and no strikes and I can’t let the runner advance. I can stay calm when my older sister replaces all our meat with tofu alternatives or when we run out of coffee and Lydia goes homicidal.
In the grand scheme of things, if something doesn’t really matter, I can stay calm. When it comes to important things, it’s different.
I wanna be all suave, all cool and collected, but mostly I need to be chill for as long as possible. Because the moment I stop, it’s all over. I’ll start questioning everything, nothing will make sense, and I will put my head down and obsess over the problem, so sure I’ve almost cracked it and then I finally look up and see all the chaos that erupted while I was busy getting in my own way.
I didn’t want to worry yet. I made a plan of action. I needed to talk to Zach.
He didn’t want to be talked to, as a general rule, and that was how I ended up in the next town over. Well, city. Fairview. We were at a dumb overpriced clothing store that sold men’s clothing and swimwear while he fussed over different clothes and tried things on. I almost felt like one of those guys who got dragged along shopping by their girlfriends. At least I didn’t have a bunch of bags to carry.
Zach needed swim trunks, even though he already had some. From last summer, but last summer was last season or maybe multiple seasons ago—I had no idea how fashion worked—and no one in our town even cared that much. We weren’t a fashionable or cultural hub or anything but like that mattered to Zach.
He had his own high standards to live up to and he was the one who mattered.
“Are things ever difficult for you?” I asked while he tried on a pair of swim trunks that looked exactly like the last three he tried on. “You know, when hooking up with people,” I rushed through the words quickly in a hushed voice.
“Nope,” he smirked at me in the mirror before his gaze went back to himself.
My best friend Zach Ahmad was kind of a man-whore.
Zach went into the changing room and came out wearing a fourth pair of identical trunks. “Oh, come on,” I groaned, both because this was going to take all freaking day and he said he had no problems when fooling around with people. “Not everything goes perfectly for you. I’ve heard stories.”
“From unreliable sources,” he assured me while checking out his own ass.
“From you directly.” And it wasn’t like I even asked! He just told me.
My buddy was vain and shallow and lots of terrible things, but he was always there when I needed him. Zach had olive skin and sharp cheekbones and haughty, piercing eyes. If there was a contest about who was the best-looking guy on the baseball team, it would be me or Zach. Good thing it wasn’t a competition; he might win.
Zach cleared his throat to get my attention and then held his head high. “I resent the implication that I ever, in the history of the world, had trouble with anything at all, let alone something in my wheelhouse.”
I ignored him being a dramatic bitch because that was pretty normal. Wait. “Where does that expression even come from?” I wondered. Wheelhouse. Like a house where the wheels lived. Why? Who needed that? Someone with a big truck maybe. Or maybe a house made out of wheels? I’m not sure.
“Okay, I would much rather discuss what you wanted to than ponder the origins of wheelhouse with you,” Zach decided.
Maybe a bunch of people pooled their resourced and had a big storage area with wheels so whoever needed one could go get the wheel they needed. How neighborly. Why didn’t we have one of those in Lake Forest? We were neighborly.
I shook my head to clear thoughts of wheelhouses from it. For now. “We’ll table that for later then.”
“Swell.” He made an exaggerated face of realization. “Oh, is that a poor choice of words?”
“No!” I looked around wildly while my face heated up. “I don’t have that kind of problem.” I glared at him while he smirked. “It’s just. Is it supposed to be so awkward? I don’t remember it always being like that.” I certainly didn’t have as much experience as Zach, but I hadn’t had complaints.
Zach shrugged. “It’s new territory.” Then he went to try on a new pair. Were colors out or something? Not outside, but like, fashion out. All his choices so far had been black. Crap, my trunks were navy. That was close enough, right?
No, wait. I had other concerns. I mentally added a conversation about men’s swimwear to the conversations we were tabling, right in front of wheelhouse discussions. Yes, me and Ryan had been exploring new territory. “It’s that way for you when it’s new?” I clarified.
“Not at all,” his voice told me happily from behind the partition.
“Oh, come on,” I groaned.
As confident and worldly as Zach pretended he was, he was still a high schooler like me. He probably didn’t sleep with every attractive person he met. But if they were hot and they thought he was hot… Yeah, I could see him going as far as he could with them.
While the law of averages wasn’t something I totally understood, it still stood to reason, uh scientifically, it followed that... It meant that if Zach fooled around with as many different people as he could as much as possible, it was more likely than not that every experience wasn’t perfect. Everybody had bad days. Was that still the law of averages? Close enough.
