AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Like, in general?” he asked warily. “I’m terrible at social interactions and often prejudge people as having the worst possible intentions, without getting any information first? That’s probably my primary deal.”
“Oh no, that much is clear,” she told him, and then, after a moment’s thought, said, “Have you ever heard of rejection sensitive dysphoria?”
He shook his head.
She shrugged and said, “Huh.”
“What’s my deal that you’re specifically mad about right now?” he prompted her.
“Oh, right, so Hannah said you had some deep talk, secrets were spilled, understandings were reached, and now she ‘really sees your past in a different light,’ which, I gotta tell you, looks an awful lot to me like some gaslight-y rewriting of the past to serve your own ends, and I know you would never try to manipulate my best friend into getting back together, would you?” She stared hard at him.
“She didn’t tell you what we talked about?” he asked, looking back down at the food he was cooking so he wouldn’t have to meet her glare.
“She did not,” Noelle answered, “which also fucking worries me. None of the secrets you two have ever kept together have been healthy.”
He set his spoon down and met Noelle’s eyes. “I didn’t ask her to keep secrets for me, if that’s what you’re asking. She didn’t tell you because she’s not an asshole, and only assholes out people.”
Noelle shook her head like she was trying to process the last thing he’d said, or maybe follow his brain dump. He was used to only speaking to her in as few words as possible, so she didn’t usually get the Full Levi.
“Out you as what?” she asked skeptically.
“Demisexual. Maybe pansexual? It’s up in the air.”
“You like sex,” Noelle told him. “We live in a very old hotel with very thin walls. I have heard you like sex.”
“Not that it’s your business, but I do like sex. With Hannah,” he confirmed. “There are a whole lot of ways to be demisexual. It’s a wide spectrum. Mine is, apparently, sex is great if I’m in love and holds absolutely no interest for me if I’m not.”
She hummed, crossing her arms over her chest. “This annoys me, because I always thought you had a whiny woe-is-me attitude about feeling like an outcast because you were an average straight boy who wanted to think he was the victim of something, but I imagine you actually did grow up with some real angst about why you weren’t like everyone else, and now I have to factor in your lived trauma to your attitude, and I would prefer you remained a cartoon villain.”
“If it helps, I still am a whiny outcast boy with an unearned woe-is-me attitude. I’m just a queer one?” he offered.
“Welcome to the rainbow umbrella, I guess,” Noelle said grudgingly, holding out her hand. He shook it.
“This absolves you of nothing in our past but I’m no longer specifically mad about anything you’ve done this week,” she told him.
“Super fair. Do you want to test this risotto?” He held out a spoon. “I made it without wine so you could eat it.”
“Obviously,” she said, taking the bite.
“You know,” Levi said as she was eating, “I spent a long time casting her as the villain in our breakup. It took me…too long to realize I was being wildly unfair. She couldn’t leave, and I should have seen that. How self-centered do I have to be to know someone all my life, be their oldest friend, and still fundamentally misunderstand who they are when it’s not who I want them to be?”
He’d picked up a bunch of basil as he was talking, rolling into a tube and chiffonading it, the rhythm of his knife matching the rhythm of his words. As if this monologue had played over and over in his head, and he was familiar with its tempo. Which it had, and he was.
“Why are you telling me this?” She looked at him suspiciously.
“I don’t know,” he said, gesturing at her with a handful of basil. “You’re the person who loves her as much as I do? We’re Team Make Hannah Happy, and you suck less at it than I do?”
“Sometimes,” Noelle said, waving her spoon back at him, “and I can’t believe I’m even vaguely taking your side here, we hope so hard for something that we convince ourselves it’s possible. You hoped Hannah would go with you, because you needed to go and you couldn’t imagine your life without her. You constructed a future for the two of you, and some part of you knew that if you ran it by her, she would shoot you down. That wasn’t actually the asshole part. Now, never calling…”
“She told me she never wanted to hear from me again!” he protested, not very convincingly.
She scowled at him. “A convenient excuse.”
“Do you think she can ever forgive me?” he asked, and heard the anxiety in his voice. He hadn’t meant to ask, or even to admit, to Noelle of all people, that he worried over it.
“I think she’s already forgiven you. I don’t think that’s the part of your past that’s standing in your way.” She bopped him with the spoon, and then added, “This needs more acid. The flavors aren’t complex enough yet.”
“Thank you, Gordon Ramsay,” he said grouchily, because she was right.
