“Oh, it actually said, ‘Congrats, you’re becoming a real adult’ on it?”
“I kept it simple. It said, ‘Congrats, Dickweed.’”
I laughed. “I like it. Classy, straight to the point. Sure that lady loved writing it.”
“I bet it gave her more excitement than she usually sees on a Sunday in a dimly lit corner bakery area of a sad little grocery store.” Tori stood and grabbed a water bottle out of the duffel bag.
“Surprised you’re not starting with champagne.”
“A girl’s gotta hydrate. Besides, it wouldn’t be fun if both of us were already buzzed when Navy and the other girl arrive.”
“Navy’s sister, Violet.”
“Yeah,” she took a gulp and made a sound like she was filming a commercial for a crisp drink. “Wait, why is Violet coming?”
“She’s living here at the moment. In there.” I gestured toward the back bedroom.
“Then why isn’t she here?”
“Navy brought her up north, to the grocery store out of town. Violet has been kind of cooped up here.” I scratched my beard. “She’s had a rough few weeks, so be nice to her. Okay?”
“Whoa, Keane asking me to be nice. Are we in another dimension?”
I didn’t normally try to police Tori. She was a hurricane and it was usually in your best interest to let her be. But I knew how abrasive she could be, and how some of her comments could come off cold—even though she wasn’t a cold person. “I just want to make sure you’re gentle with her.”
“You know me,” she said between gulps of water. She always drank like she was dying from thirst, “I’m not a gentle kinda person.”
“Trust me,” I said, placing my hand over my heart. “I know.”
“Oh, pish posh.” She flapped a hand at me. “That was a hundred years ago. And you didn’t really like me that way. You liked the idea of me. Everybody likes the idea of me until they get to know me. Take Navy, for example. I mean, she’s not exactly on Team Tori.”
“She doesn’t not like you.”
“That’s a gentle way of saying she doesn’t totally loathe me. I get it. I do.” She shrugged. “I was jealous of her, you know? When she and Hollis got an apartment together. Like, Hollis is my bitch. She’s my girl. And my girl chose Navy.”
“She didn’t choose Navy, come on.”
“My best friend chose someone who was a close friend to live with, instead of me—her bestie. You can’t tell me that’s not a big ouch.”
“You weren’t living in Amber Lake,” I argued, not really sure why I was defending Hollis’s decision. “Hollis wanted to live here, and Navy was searching for a new place. It made sense.”
“I don’t need rational arguments here, Keane. I need you to understand me.” She draped the back of her hand over her forehead, feigning drama. “How would you feel if your best friend moved in with someone you didn’t really get along with?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. But you and Navy don’t not get along.”
“All these double negatives, dude. Okay, fine—we aren’t chummy. How is that?”
“I don’t get why you guys never became friends. You’d think with Hollis and me as your mutual friends, you and Navy would’ve got on like a house on fire.”
“Oh, come on.” Tori flicked a spoonful of cake at me which landed on my nose. “You know why. Don’t be an idiot.”
I flicked some of the cake that had landed on my face back at her and gave her a look that I hoped conveyed confusion. Because I was utterly and completely clueless. Navy had never said a bad thing about Tori, and vice versa. I just chalked it up to how some people just never become close despite often running in the same social circles.
“Oh my god, you really don’t know.” She swallowed the mouthful of cake and then motioned to her cheek with a finger. “Still got some right here. Anyway… ugh,” she made strangled kind of groan in her throat. “I don’t even know if I should say it. It’s not my secret to tell.”
Now my brain swam with possibilities. What secrets did Navy and Tori share that had driven them apart before they could ever truly be friends? “You have to tell me, Tori. Otherwise I’m going to think about it all fucking night.”
“Oh, Jesus, you big baby.” She flicked a little more cake at me, but I caught it in my mouth before it could land on my nose again. “It’s you, you big dummy.”
“What did I do?”
“You liked her when you guys were kids.”
I nodded. I remembered. She’d been the first girl I’d had a crush on, but I’d been so young. I hadn’t really cared that she didn’t like me back that way.
“And she had a crush on you in high school. Come on, don’t pretend like you didn’t know.”
I didn’t want to confirm it for her. The way she was talking about Navy, like this was some secret we were all in on about her, made me uncomfortable. “I don’t think it was that serious.”
Tori shrugged and licked her spoon clean. “I don’t know how serious it was for her. But you could see it on her face. To be honest, she’s half the reason I played so hard to get back then when you were chasing me.”
“I didn’t chase you.” Why did everyone say I chased girls? “I was interested in you, but I didn’t follow you around like a lovesick fool. And besides, maybe Navy had a crush on me, but I don’t believe it’s what’s caused this unspoken rift between you. That was years ago.”
“Then maybe she still likes you, bozo.” She took my spoon from me and set them both in the sink before loading the cake in the fridge. “She was never mean or anything, but anytime I came around you she looked at me like someone—a.k.a. this bitch—had just kicked her puppy.”
“Hey, that’s enough.” I adjusted the collar of my t-shirt. “She’s not here to defend herself, and she’s my friend. Don’t talk about her like that.”
“Whoa, look at you. Being a man about this.” She turned around, bracing herself against the counter as she considered. “Okay, you’re right.”
“And like I said, this was years ago. She doesn’t like me like that anymore.” Flashes of her skin, her eyes half-closed and her lips panting quick breaths flashed through my head. My brain was a traitor.
“If you say so.” She crossed her legs at her ankles and her arms across her chest. “But she’s still not friendly with me.”
“Tonight will change that. I’m sure of it. Navy is a good person.”
“So I hear,” Tori said, like I was a parent giving her a lecture she’d heard a billion times.
“No. When I say she’s a good person, I mean good person. The kind that’ll drop everything for you, will give you her last dollar, will open her arms and her home to you if you need it.” She was the best person I knew. “She’s not selfish, and she’s not petty, and she’s not heartless, okay?”
“What’s with the third degree, Keane?”
Tori had cat-like instincts in the sense that once she saw a flicker of information she wasn’t meant to see, she pounced on it. She was clever and cunning and too damn intuitive for her own good. Which is why I wasn’t surprised when she followed it up with, “What’s going on between you and Navy?”
And since my reply: “Nothing,” was quick and short, she knew I was absolutely bullshitting her.
“Mmhmm. Okay. Something is going on between you. I can’t figure out if you’re fighting or if it’s something else…” She stared at me, even as I turned away from her to mess with the thermostat that didn’t need me to mess with it. “Or maybe I’m going at this from the wrong angle. Did you kiss her? Did you do more than kissing? Do you have feelings for her?” I rolled my eyes at her and she pounced toward me, practically caging me in as her eyes lit up in delight. “Oh, shit, all of the above?” Her voice was screeching now.
“We aren’t going to talk about this,” I said. But I did want to talk about this, with someone. Adam was on the road and Asa would only forget and ask me about Megan again. Until Tori had pushed me on the issue, I hadn�
��t realized just how much I’d missed having someone to talk my baggage with.
“But you want to, at least a little bit.” Her eyes narrowed as she read me like a fucking book. “Come on, Keane. Tell me your woes. I can help. I’m pretty smart.”
“Yeah. Too fucking smart.” I moved around her so I could sit on the couch. Unsurprisingly, she joined me seconds later. “I really can’t talk about this with you.” Don’t get me wrong, Tori was a friend now. But still, it didn’t feel natural talking with her about my love troubles because of our own shared romantic history.
“That’s just dumb. You can tell me. So, you kissed. And did more. Let’s talk about the more.” Shit, she looked like I was about to offer her a fucking cookie.
I groaned, dropping my head to the back of the sofa. “Isn’t this a little weird for you?”
“Why would it be weird?”
“Because you and I have…” I gestured a hand between us that was supposed to illustrate that we’d had sex more than a handful of times, but she just blinked at me. “Because we’ve been together. This is weird.”
“Just because I’ve seen your penis doesn’t mean you can’t talk to me about what’s going on in your other head.”
“Jesus, Tori.” I rubbed a hand over my face. “I can’t talk to you about this shit, you’re too cynical and practical.” On second thought, what the hell. Tori wasn’t going to go blabbing to anyone else, what was the harm in telling her? “Okay, fine. Jesus, you’re like a dog with a bone.”
“I love dogs.” She folded her legs under her, getting comfortable. “So, tell me. What happened?”
I cringed. Should I tell her the whole thing? It felt like I was keeping a secret from Navy by telling Tori—especially when Navy still couldn’t talk about it with me. But maybe Tori would give me some insight. What were the guidelines of discussing sex with a best friend to another friend? “We had some drinks—too many drinks. Woke up naked next to each other and things have been kind of weird since. Weird for us,” I clarified. “We normally talk all the time. Spend most of our days together, even doing the dumb stuff like grocery shopping or paying bills or whatever errands.”
“Wow, so it’s like you guys are married. Except you still like each other.”
“See—you’re cynical.”
“And Navy isn’t. Yes, we’ve established this. She is a perfect celestial being and I’m a greasy troll.” I knew she wasn’t fishing for compliments, just being sarcastic. “So? What’s the problem? You wrapped up that bad boy, right?” She pointed between my legs.
My lips made a flat line. “Yes. That’s not the problem. The problem is that we sort of agreed not to make it weird except that’s all it is. It’s fucking weird.”
“Like… the sex was weird? What’d she do, ask you to milk her like she was a cow?”
I face palmed myself. This was a mistake. Holy shit.
“Did you eat hot wings before you went down on her? Because that shit stings and you deserve her acting weird if you lit her vagina on fire.”
“Christ, Tori. No. The sex wasn’t weird. It was… good. Natural. We laughed.” I smiled to myself, thinking of it. But feeling her eyes on me, I remembered where I was. And who I was talking to. “I don’t know. I’m not going to talk about the sex with you. The sex wasn’t the problem.” At all. Which was the problem, really. The sex was great. My memories were still sort of fuzzy, but what I remembered felt easy, like we’d fallen together that way so many times. “When she woke up in my bed, she went weird and nonchalant, like it was totally a normal thing to wake up naked in my bed.”
“Like, ‘Whoops, Keane, you accidentally cleaned up my cobwebs with your womb broom, LOL, our bad’?”
“The shit that comes out of your mouth sometimes, Tori. I swear.” I shook my head. “But yeah, basically. Not the cobwebs part.”
“So, did you follow her lead and act like it was just an accident?”
“Sort of?” I scratched my head. It was hard to remember how I’d acted. She’d been in such a rush to get the hell out of my room; I hadn’t had time to really analyze what had gone on.
“Have you kissed her or done anything else since it happened?”
“No. She hasn’t really seemed open to it anyway.”
“Well, maybe she’s thinking she’s following your lead by acting like it was no big deal. I mean, you kind of have a reputation.” She held up her hands in an apology shrug.
“But she’s Navy. I wouldn’t treat her like that. To me, it was a big deal. You know I don’t have sex with my friends.”
“Except me.”
“You’re different. What we did was fun. I didn’t love you when we first hooked up, I wasn’t in love with you.”
You could have heard a pin drop in the silence that followed that comment.
“Well.” Tori rubbed her lips together, her eyebrows raised meaningfully.
“You know what I mean.”
She cocked her head to the side. “Uh… not sure I do, bud. I mean, I know you were never in love with me. You might’ve been in lust—we both probably were. But we didn’t have that kind of connection.” She rubbed her fist over her heart. “This kind. The stuff that hurts.”
“It hurt when you rejected me,” I protested.
“Your pride.” She leaned forward, running a hand down the side of my face. “Not in here,” she said, laying her palm flat on my chest. “What you and Navy have is good stuff. I don’t have any guy friends like that—not even you.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Don’t act offended. I’m not a Navy for you either, idiot.”
She was right. The part about her not being another Navy. And the part about me being an idiot. “I know we need to talk it out, but she doesn’t like confrontation.”
“It doesn’t have to be one.”
“To her, it is. And I get it, because I can be the same way.” With my mom, with my brother. With Navy. “So I’m kind of stuck. She doesn’t want to talk about it, but I do.”
“But you definitely have feelings for her that are not strictly friend feelings.”
I nodded. I did. I kept making excuses to see her when two weeks ago, it’d been natural to see her all the time. I never needed an excuse to see her, to text her. So, yes, part of me missed the friendship we’d had before everything got messy. But it was more than that. Deeper. And the mess we’d made didn’t put me off like it would have if she’d been just anyone. Navy and I had a history, we had more. What that more was, I wasn’t certain.
“Probably an obvious question, but have you launched the meat missile ever since?”
“With her? No.”
“With anyone else? Maybe you just need to hook up with someone else and you’ll get it out of your system.”
“Not with anyone else.” I couldn’t even think about anyone else. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on. For the first time since I met her, I feel strangely empty when I’m around her. Not that she makes me empty. There’s just this hole inside of me that I can’t explain. Like, I’m full because she’s near me. But I’m empty because it’s not enough.”
“You love her.”
“I’ve always loved her.”
“Don’t be dense. You love her. Not strictly as a friend.”
That was where the waters got murky for me. What I felt for Navy was complicated and different than anything I’d ever had with anyone else. Who was I kidding, how could I talk to her about it when I didn’t even understand it myself? “I don’t think I want to talk about this anymore.”
“Oh, no. You look like that time I made you ride that rollercoaster in Salt Lake five times in a row. You gonna puke? Where are your buckets?”
“I’m not going to puke.” But I did feel sick. Sick of all these feelings that I couldn’t figure out.
“This is the shit you miss when you check out of those relationships early, Keane. That’s why it feels so weird, why you don’t like it.”
“This is different than those r
elationships,” I insisted.
“Well, duh. Because you never really liked those girls that much. You’ve been playing it safe, choosing girls you knew wouldn’t be able to get too close. And now that someone has—someone who was supposed to be a friend and only a friend—you’re vulnerable. Sucks, right? And you wonder why I’m so cynical about love. It’s because the greatest emotion known to man can make you feel like someone just ripped a chunk of your heart out of your chest and nothing else you try to replace it with fits in that empty space. Everybody talks about what love can give you, but they forget to mention what it can take from you, too.”
“You’re getting a little too deep for me, Tori. Appreciate the pep talk, but all of this is hypothetical.”
Tori groaned and flopped back to her side of the couch. “You’re really dense, Keane. Good thing we’re going to spend the next several hours in the same house with Navy.”
“Don’t talk to her about this,” I said, an edge sharpening my voice. “I want to tell her I talked to you before you do. It wouldn’t be fair for her to be ambushed by you before I’ve had a chance to say anything.”
“Okay, be my guest. But that gives me an open invitation to mediate.”
“We don’t need a mediator.”
“What’s that sound?” Tori rose and went to the window. “Oh, looks like your paramour has arrived.”
Suddenly and not surprisingly, I was regretting inviting Tori along.
20
NAVY
I could see Tori in the window, peering out at us. This was a bad, bad idea. It had been a while since I’d seen Tori and until this moment, I’d nearly forgotten how it made me feel to be around her: like I was somehow, someway, deficient.
It isn’t her fault that you feel that way about yourself. I couldn’t blame her for my feelings. But Tori represented that deep-seated belief I held onto since before her, about not being enough. Not being enough for my parents to give up their ways and be the mother and father we needed. Not being enough for my sisters, to keep them out of trouble and safe. Not being enough for Keane, to love me back.
One Big Mistake: a friends to lovers rom-com Page 21
