10. Difficult Conversations involving Luke Chambers
Maybe not worse than the father-son chat, but bad in different ways.
Ryan
Anytime Luke and I tried to get closer, in a euphemism way not a distance way, things got weird. It happened a few times, who cares, who’s counting? Besides, it was only one more time than twice.
Twice wasn’t a pattern. One more time than twice wasn’t a pattern either. Not scientifically. There needed to be more certainty, more evidence. Oh god, did I not want there to be more evidence. A life of embarrassing, crazy situations should have prepared me for any kind of uncomfortable scenario. I couldn’t even look my roommate in the eyes.
Luke and I were video chatting tonight. Even though the latest sexual mishap happened a few days ago, we were both acting like it was fresh. I could feel a blush on my face and Luke kept fidgeting, clearing his throat and trying to talk and then stopping and clearing his throat again.
Finally, he shook himself and said, “Okay, here we are again.” His eyes met the camera lens for a moment before deciding that was too much virtual eye contact. He sent me a tight smile. “You ready for this?”
“At least I can look at your abs this time,” I said. That would help. “My roommate and I worked out a system, so I won’t be interrupted.” I didn’t even have to put underwear on the door.
Luke frowned. “What?” He stared at me blankly. It wasn’t a particularly sexy look.
“Phone sex take two,” I told him, duh. He just kept staring at me. “Do you want me to shout action or something?” Hell, maybe we should do that roleplay I thought of earlier.
“I thought we were just going to talk?” he asked more than said and I was busy feeling even more embarrassment—which I hadn’t thought was possible—and couldn’t enjoy his cute, confused face.
“You asked if I was ready for this!” I hissed, because clearly blaming everything on him was the best solution. Even relationship experts like me had bad days.
“So not what I was talking about. I meant are you ready for having another weird conversation?”
“No, but we’re already in one, so around and around we go,” I said, doing that thing where I didn’t know what I was saying but all those sounds I made were technically words, so I counted that as progress.
Thankfully, Luke had been around me enough to know that when I said stuff that didn’t make sense, even I didn’t know what I was talking about and the best thing to do was just move on. “We can do this,” he encouraged.
Actually, yeah. I nodded way more than the situation required at first, but I was almost relieved we were just going to be talking. “Thank god we don’t have to go through that again,” I told him. Wait, I was relieved to not be having sex? My life is so unfair.
I could see his brow furrow on my screen, not as clearly in real life, but enough. “Don’t act like it’s a chore.” Chores weren’t great, but sometimes you got paid to do them. Wait, I don’t want either Luke or me to be prostitutes.
“I’m sorry. I just really wanted this to go better.”
“Really?” Even if his annoyed expression wasn’t perfectly visible, his tone came through just fine. “From my end it’s all great. This is exactly what I wanted.”
I sighed. “And now we’re snapping at each other.”
“What should we do?” His green eyes looked worried. I wanted to touch him, comfort him and it hurt that I couldn’t. “You think we should just ignore it, or pretend everything’s fine?” he asked doubtfully, but also maybe hopefully?
Really wished we could, but the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We’d tried the ‘pretend there’s no problem and there will be no problem’ approach and it never worked out.
“No, we can’t do that,” I said all sensible like. It was really weird. “We already have the distance working against us. It’s just… ugh.”
That felt like a really inadequate way to put it, but Luke nodded immediately. “I agree.”
“Yay,” I said wanly. “Same page.” Then again, it didn’t take a relationship expert (like me) to see there was a problem.
“We’ll figure it out,” he assured me again. He wore a green shirt and it probably hugged his arms nicely, but I couldn’t really see that clearly.
Luke stared at me. I stared back, a little sad, a little longing, both of us wondering or waiting for something, like maybe answers would magically appear. Ugh. If we wanted answers to appear, we had to make them. With our words and whatnot.
Okay, talking. I could do this. I was a professional. This was what I got paid for. Some of those things weren’t true but if I pretended they were hard enough, maybe the world would bend to my reality. It hadn’t yet but that just meant I was due.
I basically only had one relevant thought running through my head, so it was the one I had to voice. “Do you think this means something?” I asked him, referring to the way our, uh, trysts had been going. Reassure me!
“No,” he replied at exactly the right time, not too quick and not too slow. That was encouraging.
