“Nope.”
“And you didn’t get a nap in the woods, either,” she said with real dismay in her tone. Gretchen’s worrying about me was endearing. It had been a long time since anyone besides Auden had done that. Look at me: not only had I apparently made a friend, I’d made a friend who worried about me.
I’d made a friend who worried about me and also gave astonishingly good head.
It was confusing.
“I wrote a song last night.” I didn’t know why I was telling her, except it sort of felt like I was trying to impress her? Which was ridiculous. Was I twelve?
“Good for you. You did it.” She sounded genuinely thrilled.
My inner twelve-year-old preened.
“What’s it called?”
That gave me pause. If anything, I would have expected her to exhort me to play it. People did that. Or ask me what it was about—they did that, too. But no, she only wanted to know the title.
“It’s called…” I hesitated, but I wasn’t sure why. The song had been inspired by my secret nickname for her, but she didn’t know about that. “‘Sweet and Sour.’”
“Like the sauce?” She laughed.
“Yeah, but it’s just a placeholder.” I did that: stuck too-literal titles on songs and later decided to be a little less Captain Obvious and changed them.
Anyway, the song wasn’t about Gretchen, per se. I’d been thinking about “Lemon Tree.” The idea of a lemon flower smelling sweet but the fruit being sour. And about how first impressions are often incorrect. Sure, Gretchen had been the example I’d been thinking about when it came to first impressions, but that just meant she’d been the vehicle for getting my head out of my ass and notes on paper.
Which, come to think of it, sounded an awful lot like saying she was my muse. She’d joked that our sleeping together might turn her into my muse, but apparently I didn’t need to sleep with her for that.
All right, I needed to calm down. Slow my roll. It was one song.
And this was one hurrah. A last one, to use her terminology.
“Hey,” I said by way of changing the subject, “I never asked you, how is Tristan working out?”
“He’s…”
“If he sucks, you can tell me.” I felt bad now, for sticking her with him. I hadn’t been thinking about how he would actually do in the performance she was creating. I’d only been thinking of making him do something he wouldn’t like. Which was actually kind of a dick move. Why had I done that?
It was confusing—why was everything to do with Gretchen so confusing?—and I was so tired. I yawned again.
“I should go,” she said suddenly, and I wanted to know what had happened to lying here for a while. What had happened to cozy? But what could I say? I had signed up for a last hurrah, not a cuddle session.
“I’ll see you tomorrow?” she asked as she shimmied into her yoga pants.
I shamelessly ogled her butt while she did so and felt a pang when it was tucked away under a layer of spandex. “Yeah.”
“Were you serious about going to sunrise circle?”
“Yeah.” I paused. “Pick me up?” Was that too much like a date?
She paused. “Sure.”
“But we’re not going to tell them about the kissing,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I was asking or telling. If I was asking, I wasn’t sure what I wanted the answer to be.
“God, no. Or about…” She waved her hand between us. “The last hurrah.”
“Noted.”
As I drifted off, I experienced a small pang of regret over the fact that we hadn’t kissed—like, on the mouth. Maybe I had erred too much in the direction of “clinical.”
