“You should come round for tea one night,” Dad continued, giving Darcy a warm smile. “Come back with Owen one day next week.”
“Oh, er…” Darcy’s expression was one of poorly disguised panic and I went to step in.
“Dad, Darcy is very busy.”
“Exactly, be nice for him not to have to cook,” Dad said firmly. “Owen doesn’t exactly have many friends with him gallivanting off round the world so often.”
I grimaced, feeling like a child all over again. What was it about parents and their ability to make you feel no more than eight with only one sentence? I was thirty-four, I didn’t need him trying to help me make friends. Or scaring away the ones I had.
“That’d be lovely,” Darcy said. “Maybe next Wednesday? It’s usually one of our quieter days.”
“Lovely, we’ll see you then.” Dad nodded, looking very pleased with the outcome. “Now, we won’t keep you. We’ll getsome ice cream and be out your hair. Nice t’ meet you, Darcy, and I’ll see you later, Owen. Tarra.”
“See you,” I said, smiling weakly as they joined the queue. I wished I’d told Dad to pack it in, or at least asked Matthew to intervene. Although I doubted that would have gone down well since I’d apparently cursed him.
I’d make it up to him at some point by offering to babysit one evening. But first, I had other fuckups to deal with.
“I’m so sorry,” I added as I followed Darcy back to the kitchen, hoping I hadn’t totally fucked things up between us. Getting parents involved usually meant things were serious… but how could things be serious between us when we didn’t even know what this was? All I’d wanted was to make Darcy happy and now it seemed like I was making everything worse. I was getting so in my own head and I didn’t know how to untangle things. “I didn’t know Dad was going to do that.”
“It’s fine,” Darcy said, not looking at me as he walked over to the dishwasher to slide the full tray out and put another one in.
“I can make an excuse for you.”
“It’s fine, honestly.”
“Are you sure? Because it doesn’t sound fine.”
Darcy sighed. “I guess it threw me a bit. But that’s on me. I guess… I don’t know.”
“Tell me, angel. Please.” I closed the gap between us, not touching him but standing close enough I could see all the details of his face.
“It just feels confusing.” He picked up a bowl, turning it around slowly in his hands. “We’re friends and we fuck and we hang out all the time, and I guess… I’m not sure where we stand. But also, I don’t want things to change. I want…” He trailed off and shook his head. “Ignore me, I’m just wittering.”
“Nothing is going to change,” I said. “It’s only dinner.”
I was reassuring myself as much as him, because I didn’t want anything to change. I knew it was going to at some point, and that’d happen sooner than we wanted because the end of summer was coming. But until then, I was going to bury my head in the sand and pretend this bubble was never going to burst.
Because then I didn’t have to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.
And I didn’t have to confront all the pain from my past and my fears for the future.
There was a gnawing feeling in my gut telling me things were different, that I’d changed and so had my dreams, but I didn’t want to listen to it. Not yet. I’d had a plan for my life, and nothing had ever altered it.
But now…
Darcy nodded, a tiny smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. “I know, and I’m sure it’ll be fun. I can’t wait to ask your dad all about you as a kid. Do you think he’ll dig pictures out to show me?”
“He might,” I said. “There’ll probably be at least one of me in a wheelbarrow.”
Darcy laughed softly. “I can’t wait to see that.”
The tension that had been building eased, and I picked up a couple of clean containers and went to put them back on the shelves as I started telling Darcy some random story from my childhood.
Both of us seemed pleased the moment had passed, but as happy as I was to move on and forget about what Darcy had said about where we stood, there was still an uncomfortable feeling in my gut.
Because we could only put that conversation off for so long, and those days were numbered.
At some point, we’d have to talk about how we felt and what we wanted.
