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“Ow!”
I draw my legs back up to the bed. “Peter?”
He’s sleeping on the floor next to my bed, a blanket tossed haphazardly over him.
“Hey,” I whisper, trying to soothe my heartbeat, which starts racing when I notice the stubble on Peter’s jaw, his wrinkled shirt, his feet sticking out of the blanket. Morning Peter is too much for me to handle, especially after last night. I resist the urge to touch my lips. “Sorry for kicking you.”
He pushes himself to a sitting position, rubs the sleep out of his eyes. “What time is it? I didn’t mean to fall asleep here.”
More of the night comes back to me. We got home around two a.m. He helped me inside because he wanted to make sure I was okay, I remember him saying. He must have been too tired to walk across the street.
“It is . . . almost eleven.”
“Guhhhh . . .” He reaches for his phone, scrolls through his messages. “At least I was lucid enough to tell my parents I might crash here.” He stands up, stretches. His shirt lifts up, revealing a slice of his stomach.
“About last night,” I start, feeling my face flame.
“Right . . .”
“I wasn’t . . . fully myself.”
He cracks a small smile. “That’s a good euphemism.”
In that moment, it strikes me how easy it would be to brush this all away, forget it ever happened. But I want more from this friendship, and I’ve never been this close to it.
Maybe I was more myself last night than I thought—a version of myself who was unafraid to reach for what she wanted.
“I don’t want it to be something that happened that we never talk about again.” I force myself to make eye contact with him, needing to know that he knows exactly what I mean. His middle school declaration of love. Our virginity pact. Those mismatched feelings that I thought, last night, were finally happening at the right time. The way he kissed me, I was convinced he felt the same way. “What if . . . ? What if we tried this for real? You and me, I mean.”
Peter leans against my dresser, pulling his lower lip between his teeth. I wish he didn’t look so perfect in my room, all morning-rumpled, his hair wild. He waits a few moments before responding
. Each moment feels like a sudden stop in a song—when your breath hitches and you’re waiting for the music to kick back in.
“I . . . I think I need some time to think about it,” he says finally.
It’s not the worst response.
But it’s not the one I wanted.
“I know people say that dating can ruin friendships, and I’m sure it does sometimes, but definitely not all the time, right?” I’m desperate to fill the silence between us, to persuade him. Tip him over the edge so he can fall with me. “And—what if it made our friendship better?”
“How?” He asks it softly, earnestly. It’s not a combative question, but one that comes from a place of real curiosity. “What would be different?” His eyes are on his bracelet, his thumb tracing the engraving there. “Aside from, I guess, kissing . . . and . . . other things.”
Those would be the main differences.
There’s a limit to how much you can love someone as a friend, and Peter and I have hit that limit. The only way I can love him more is by actually making love. That has to be the reason it’s called that.
I try to imagine Peter with someone else, a girl with the patience to grow her hair long, one who has no freckles and no scars. They’re in college in a tiny dorm room bed, and he’s on top of her, and he’s whispering to her things he should have whispered to me. Even in my imagination, it’s brutal.
“Have you thought about it?” I ask, pulling the sheets around my bare legs. “About . . . us?”
“If I’m being completely honest, yeah, I have.” He fiddles with the knobs on my dresser drawers, pushing one of them out and then back in. His mouth curves in a sheepish smile. He’s blushing, and it gives me a buzz of satisfaction that this conversation is as intense for him as it is for me.
I wonder what we look like in his imagination, if we look any of the ways we do in mine. If we’re laughing or if we’re serious.
Why he stopped imagining us.
“I mean . . . we made that pact,” he continues.
