My eyebrows knit together.
“I’m being serious,” he continues. “I worry about you. I only challenged you to that phone Scrabble game because I know you love beating me in board games, and you haven’t taken a turn in over a month.”
Something stirs inside at the thought of him refreshing the app, waiting for me to put electronic tiles on a board. It’s the nostalgia of it, the childlike sweetness of biking over to your friend’s house and begging them to come out and play.
“You have nothing to worry about. My bed lifestyle is totally under control.”
“Lifestyle?” He grins too wide, and I immediately regret my choice of words when describing what is simply me eating chicken tikka masala with a towel on my lap.
“You cart a bed everywhere you go. You routinely bring women home to your van down by the river like a Chris Farley sketch and beg them to have sex with you.”
He side-eyes me. “First, I play guitar—”
“Hands down, your worst quality.”
“—so I’ve never had to ‘beg for sex,’ as you so eloquently put it, and second, I can do absolutely anything in my van that one of your khaki-clad house-men can do. I have a full bed and can even make breakfast on my hot plate.”
“Wow,” I respond, my voice flat. “You really roll out the red carpet for these women, don’t you?”
“What can I say? I’m a caretaker.”
He gives me that smug hot-guy look that drives me up the wall. Duty-bound to bring him back down to earth, I grab something from the dish next to the martini shaker and chuck it at him. “You are such a douche,” I tell him.
He catches it in his chest like a football. Then he turns the object in his hands and looks up at me. It’s a penis straw.Thepenis straw.
His expression, his voice, they’re both cracking open when he asks, “You kept this?”
Ethan gives me the full force of his attention, which with Ethan is…intense. Absorbing. The birds silence. The world blurs. When Ethan looks at you, hereallylooks at you. It’s a level of eye contact that requires getting used to, and, as it’s been so long since I’ve been confronted by it, I’m more than a little unprepared.
I swallow down whatever’s buzzing in my throat and put on my most casual voice. “Kept what?” The lie turns my stomach, but I don’t want him to think my keeping itmeanssomething. Or that I’m still holding on to the things he said the night of my bachelorette party. Or that I thought that that moment was anything beyond Ethan being Ethan, unfiltered and profoundly unserious.
I can’t read his face, and he doesn’t say more. It’s that secret bit of him I don’t get access to. I hate that bit. But the moment is interrupted by a missed FaceTime call from Laurel that pops up on the bottom corner of my laptop screen.
Our conversation from yesterday bursts into the front of my brain.Did my sister ask? Did Petey accept? Are they already fighting about wedding hashtags and the liability of animal ring bearers?I’m both anxious to know and eager to avoid any acknowledgment that this proposal idea isn’t an elaborate alcohol-induced hallucination.
I sit back down on the bed and type out a quick message.
Charley: sorry. missed your call.
I’m choosing avoidance. Like a coward.
“I didn’t know phallic drinkware was still the bachelorette party favor of choice,” he comments.
“In a campy, ironic sense. The last bachelorette party I went to also had travel-sized hibiscus-lube party favors I have zero use for. If you want to rummage around the bathroom for that, be my guest.”
He shifts in the bed, his eyes brighter, like despite the hiccup between us, he’s mostly back to his normal Ethan-y self. “I’m good. I actually make my own.”
I wriggle on the bed, wincing both at him and at a hangover so bad that even my hair hurts. “Oh god, Powell. Couldneverbe me.”
He grins at the reference to one of our favorite games. In college, whenever I witnessed him wearing five-toe shoes or he caught me setting an egg timer before returning a guy’s text(for very legitimate and scientific reasons), we’d look at each other and say, “Could never be me.” Our gentle reminder to each other that we were both eternally undatable disasters and that you couldn’t pay either of us to trade places with the poor souls forced to date us. It’s funny in that melancholy way depressingly true things are funny.
His lips curl up higher until his smile pinches the corners of his eyes. “Really? Just for that?”
“I’ve said it before for less.” I feel it happen. The nearly undetectable curtain of discomfort lifts, and we’reusagain. We’re Charley and Ethan and it’s just as it’s always been. No more slightly stilted conversation. No more awkwardness. We’re friends.
I think he feels the palpable shift too, because he throws the penis straw back at me and heads into the bathroom again. The tension in my shoulders releases.
“I just have one question.” I hear his voice echoing from inside the linen closet over the sounds of backstock shampoo bottles colliding into each other. “Would you still be my friend if I told you I was Iron Man?” He jumps out of the bathroom in the gold-plated LED light therapy mask I bought during the same retail fugue state when I got the handbag I can’t bring myself to return.
