Page 13 of A Totally Platonic Thing
That said something I really, really didn’t like.
My phone dinged again.He’s not here. Is he ok? What’s wrong? Should I try to call him?
I winced and grimaced down at my phone. Giving Sebastian a panic attack because my hungover roommate wasn’t answering my calls would be the shitty cap to a shitty day. I sent back a reassuring few words about how it was no big deal, and got in the car, now in kind of a hurry to get home.
Logically, I knew Chris had to be fine. He’d be watching something with his headphones on, or taking one of the endless, reservoir-depleting showers he used to recover from his hangovers. Or he’d gone out to dinner and didn’t feel like dealing with me.
I could picture a lot of less-mundane scenarios too, though, and I stepped on the gas a little bit, the fifteen-minute drive home feeling like it took for-fucking-ever.
When I jogged up the steps and opened the apartment door, it took me a second to adjust to the near-total darkness.
And then I saw the faint glow of Chris’s laptop, which he’d pulled half under the covers of his bed with him.
I flicked the switch by the door to turn on the ceiling light.
The lump of blankets thrashed, and a second later Chris’s wildly rumpled hair appeared, followed by wide, blinking green eyes.
Jesus, he was cute. Even now I’d known him for more than two years and had some time to get used to him, he still looked like a fucking Disney forest creature. No wonder he got away with murder—or with dragging me out of bed in the middle of the night to pick him up at the bar.
Or with hanging around Aeon getting wasted and putting the burden of looking after him on Aidan, who had a job to do beyond being Chris’s babysitter.
It had crossed my mind once or twice that getting Aidan’s attention might be a feature of his getting wasted at Aeon, not a bug, but I squashed that thought as often as it came up. It left a nasty, sour taste in my mouth. Of course it would, right? I didn’t even want to speculate on the possibility of Chris trying to go behind his best friend’s back. Chris wasn’t like that. Even before his ex screwed him over, he’d always despised cheaters.
But Aidan was exactly his type, as far as I could tell. Maybe he wouldn’t touch, but he liked to look, and that bothered me almost as much. Ever since that first day we’d met and I’d thought Chris might have been flirting with me, I’d never caught him looking at me like that again: like an attractive man he appreciated.
And I shouldn’t have wanted him to. Although it did bother me that I didn’t rate casual ogling. I’d never wanted to have sex with a guy, but occasionally I’d notice a hot one. Some people were so hot everyone noticed them, gay, straight, or other.
Like Chris, for example.
I dropped my backpack at my feet and toed off my shoes, biting my tongue so I didn’t start in on him right away. Okay, so I was mostly over being pissed off…but worrying about him on the way home, on top of the incredibly long day, on top of a sleepless night, had me ready to start lecturing him.
Because it wasn’t about the inconvenience to me. And it wasn’t about the annoyance to Aidan, or the worry he gave Sebastian.
It was about Chris not taking care of himself. He was missing classes—I’d have bet my entire bank account balance he hadn’t gone to his afternoon section—and he was spending too much time and money he didn’t have going out, leaving him a hungover mess two or three times a week. Me having to go out and pick him up when I had stuff to do in the morning, or him not bothering to check his phone, weren’t really the issues. They were just symptoms of a larger problem.
And I had no idea how to fix it, or even if me trying to fix it would help. People had to run their own lives and make their own decisions, right? Even if it frustrated me to no end knowing that if I told him what to do, and he did it, he’d be healthier and happier.
Okay, so I was an arrogant asshole, but at least I cared.
“Hi,” Chris said into the stretching silence, his voice a little high and breathy.
And his cheeks were flushed.
Yeah, he’d been watching porn without the sound on, the way he always did. I’d noticed this little quirk of his a couple of months into us living together. And that was a story all its own. I shied away from thinking about it too much. Okay, so it was weird. We were weird. It worked for us.
“Hi,” I said, and gave in to temptation despite my lingering grouchiness, going over to his bed instead of mine and faceplanting on top of him, sprawled across his legs, my head just missing his pile of pillows. He let out a startled littleEeep!and wriggled around underneath me, trying to get his legs free.
He failed, and after a second he stopped moving.
I let my eyes close. Oh, Jesus, that felt good. Cool sheets under my cheek. Being horizontal. Not moving.
Chris’s hand in my hair, his nails scratching gently at the base of my skull. His hands always knew exactly how to touch me when I needed it.
Fucking heaven.
“I tried to text and call you,” I mumbled. Fucking hell, why did his bed smell so much better than mine? We used the same laundry detergent. Did I need to wash everything more often? “Your phone dead?”
“Probably,” Chris said softly, still running his fingers through my hair and massaging the nape of my neck. If I’d been a cat, I’d have been purring. “I mean, yeah. I didn’t plug it in last night or today.”
