Page 27 of Friends with Benefits

“We’re getting married so I can quit my full-time job for a minimum-wage fellowship.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s kind of a monumental change.”

“It is.” Theo nods. “I meant with us. Nothing will change. I promise.”

Evelyn rolls her eyes, then takes a step out of the embrace. “That I’m not worried about, Theodore.”

It’s not until the headlights of her car turn on and he watches Evelyn pull out of the parking lot that Theo dares to acknowledge—then promptly swallow—the truth that his insistence, no,promise, that nothing will change was possibly more for himself than it was for her.

AFTERS AFTER, JUNIOR YEAR

Theo

Everything changes his junior year, and it is so incredibly inconvenient, being in love with his best friend. He first felt it, the flutter of a crush, their first day back in the studio after summer break. Evelyn had just returned from a summer-long dance intensive with blue hair cut short, a tattoo on her rib cage, and a girlfriend. Talia. When she peeled off her tank top during the break, exposing a cluster of music notes just below her sports bra, Theo short-circuited.

Hot.

Evelyn is hot.

“Tattoo?”

She pushed her bangs—also new—out of her face with a headband. “It’s the opening notes of ‘Vienna.’”

Billy Joel.

Her favorite song.

Also—or, perhaps, even because—his mom’s favorite song.

“How?”

Evelyn showed Theo another new acquisition from her summer without him, a piece of plastic with her face on it and a false identity next to it. “Talia knows someone.”

“Oh.”

Tattoo? Oh?Had a summer apart fucked with his brain chemistry, rendered him no longer capable of speaking to his best friend in more than one-word sentences?Pull it together.Did he miss her? Yes. Did he love her? Of course.But not like that.In the bathroom, he splashed water on his face until his heart calmed down. Then Evelyn took his hands in hers, guided them to her hips and talked him through new choreography that wasn’t theirs yet but would’ve been, could’ve been, had he not been distracted by how little she was wearing, by blue hair skimming her collarbone, bythat fucking tattooto learn any of it.

Such a cliché Theo Cohen had become.

Six months later, Evelyn is blue hair no more, her relationship with Talia is no more, but that flutter is ever present. It’s a soft whisper in his ear when he watches her dance, a quiet yelp when her freezing feet press against his warm skin during a movie night at the bungalow, a punch in the stomach when she stops by his house after school with a lavender latte, Lori’s favorite, just because. Currently, it’s the laugh that accompanies listening to Evelyn butcher the lyrics of “Ribs” as she drives them from the dance studio to Afters. She finds street parking and doesn’t cut the engine of Pep’s 2008 Honda Accord until the song reaches its climax and fades to a soft conclusion.

“I’ll order for us,” Evelyn says, walking ahead to the window.

Theo claims a picnic table and sets upSurvivoron his phone and wonders, as he so often does, would it really be so terrible to acknowledge this all-consuming flutter? To ask if she feels it too? What if she says no?

What if she saysyes?

He isn’t sure if he’s ready for either answer, so he doesn’t ask.

Theo never asks.

Instead, he leans into his attraction to anyone,everyoneelse. Always, it is physical. Casual. A summer fling with Nicolette Moore, a rising senior who wrangled elementary school kiddos alongside Theo, both student teachers at SHDA’s dance camp. Late nights kissing Yaz Gonzales, his AP Bio lab partner, in the back of her orange Nissan Murano until their lips were swollen. Maya Jones, a sophomore in jazz company with him, asked him to homecoming. Violet Parker, the junior class president, invited him to the winter formal. Girls,plural, liked him, and he isn’t sure when it happened, when being a male dancer becamecool—but who is he to question this rebrand?

Evelyn slides into the bench across from him, and when he looks up from his phone, he doesn’t find his usual—two scoops of ube brownie in a cup with a cone on top. In front of him is an aluminum tray with maybe the equivalent of those two scoops in compostable sample cups arranged to spell a one-word question:

PROM?

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