Page 16 of A Totally Platonic Thing
I’d thought Chris and I were close. Well, obviously we were more than close enough, by most people’s standards, so strike that, but…I’d thought we knew each other, trusted each other, more than anyone else in the world. And he’d seriously believed I’d be angry with him, or dislike him for it, when he acted like himself? His own sweet, affectionate, friendly self, dropping in to make my day a little better—which he always did, simply by being there?
Did he think I didn’t actually like him that much, for precisely who he was? He couldn’t trust me that much if he thought that.
And that seriously, seriously hurt like hell.
“No courage required. You should come visit me every day,” I said after a second, biting back any words that might have given away how incredibly whiny I sounded in my own head. “Give me a goodbye kiss when you leave. If everyone thinks we’re dating anyway, let’s give ’em a show, right?”
I could picture that, actually. Chris handing me my coffee, telling me he had to run, and then tipping his head up for a kiss. Not a crazy passionate kiss, like with people who were all in love, but a friendly kiss.
Chris went totally still for a second, and then he flashed me a wide, bright smile. “Why not? Okay, that’d be funny.” Funny? My gut squirmed. Chris went on before I could say anything, thankfully. “But, like, you’re really sure you’re not saying that to make me feel better? I can be a lot. I don’t want you to feel like you have to…I don’t know. Put up with it all the time. If it makes things weird for you.”
“You’re weird. So am I. Of course things are weird. Weirdo.” I stuck my tongue out at him, and that got me a little chuckle like I’d hoped. He needed to lighten up. Jesus, he needed torelax, and being another source of stress for him, as it was starting to look like I was, made me so fucking unhappy with life. I had to fix it. “You’re amazing, Chris. I can’t believe you got me a sandwich. I thought I was going to be stuck with crackers and string cheese tonight because I was too tired to stop on the way home.”
Chris laughed and made a silly little face at me, the one that made his lips all pouty. “You’re so lucky I did get you a sandwich, because I ate all the crackers. And the string cheese.” He shoved at my chest, levering himself up and off of me and scrambling off the bed. My lap felt too light and empty. Christ, maybe I was touch-starved too. That might explain a lot about my mood lately. And my thoughts about friendly kisses. “I’ll put it on a plate for you.”
“Oooh, fancy,” I drawled, and forced myself to stand up instead of collapsing into his bed again and not moving for a week. Thank God it was the weekend. I might still go to the lab, but not as early and not as much. “What’s next? Eating at a table or something?”
Chris snorted, such an inelegant sound for such a pretty person that it cracked me up, like it always did. He opened the fridge and shot over his shoulder, “The table goes on your bed, Lucas. There’s nowhere else to put it.”
Which was why we didn’t have a table in the first place, and this was not the first time we’d had the same conversation. It soothed me, in the way only a well-worn series of kind of dull and dumb inside jokes with someone you cared about could do sometimes. The tension that’d been clutching at me since the night before finally,finallyeased.
I headed for the bathroom. Piss, wash up, then sandwich. Fuck yes.
“Let’s move to my bed,” I called back at him. “You pick the movie. Doesn’t matter what. I’m going to fall asleep halfway through anyway.”
“I’ll get it set up,” Chris said, and I shut the bathroom door, smiling to myself. It was Friday night, and Chris hadn’t gone out. Instead, he’d chosen to stay home with me and not drink. Maybe he’d catch up on his work this weekend.
Normality. Home. Chris. Sandwich.
If every night was that simple and perfect, I’d be a happy man.
Chapter Four
Chris
Watching a movie with Lucas was probably the most relaxing part of my life…and maybe that explained why I’d been so on edge recently, when we’d been spending less time together. Or had we been spending less time together because I’d been on edge and going out to try to forget about feeling like an unlovable, homewrecking disaster of a human being? Or because Lucas had tried a couple of times to talk to me about how my cycle of going out, being hungover and missing classes, and then freaking out about missing classes and going out to deal with the stress was going to fuck up my life big-time, and I couldn’t deal with talking about it yet again?
Like, did I think if I ignored Lucas’s concerns for long enough, I’d suddenly find the perfect guy and fall madly in love on one of those nights spent partying, and it’d erase all my past sex-life disasters and make my spotty class attendance okay?
Ugh, I couldn’t even think about it without starting to spiral.
But either way, now we’d had that conversation. I’d confessed my sins. Lucas had given me the support I should’ve known he’d offer without question, and the warmth of that lingered in my chest. The worst was over, hopefully. And I’d missed quiet nights in watching a movie with him more than I’d realized now that I was about to have one. Lucas worked so much and relaxed so little that I especially loved carving out that time for him where he could simply be himself, chill out a bit. Where we could be ourselves together, without any of the pressures of the outside world.
But even though we both enjoyed the mellowness of it…well, there was always a little undercurrent of something else, at least for me. Probably not for him. Lucas was one of the most straightforwardly unflappable people I’d ever met.
Also, one of the straightest.
But anyway.
It was the porn thing.
The porn thing always lurked at the back of my mind when we settled into Lucas’s larger bed to watch a movie, or very rarely into my narrow one, if his had a heap of our clean laundry on it.
The porn thing started a few months after we moved in together. I’d always watched mine muted, because whatever noises they made never lived up to the soundtrack I could create in my own head. And the dirty talk. I had an imagination, and a vocabulary, that outstripped any talkative top I’d ever found on the internet.
But Lucas used headphones, and he didn’t in general when he was watching not-porn, because the quiet background noise of whatever movie or silly video he had on didn’t bother me at all. I kind of liked it, actually, since it was like we were hanging out together even when we were doing something totally separate.
So when he put on his headphones late at night, once we’d turned off the overhead light and both settled in to veg out before we went to sleep, I knew what he was doing.
