Page 3 of A Totally Platonic Thing
Chris stared at me for a long moment, his lips parted. “Oh,” he breathed out. “You’re sure you’re not a psycho serial killer or anything?”
My own lips twitched. “Last I checked.”
He cocked his head at me, his smile growing. “I don’t know whether to be flattered or offended that you didn’t ask me the same question. I mean, like, it’s nice that you don’t think I seem like a creep. Not that I think you seem like a creep!” he added, looking so horrified that I burst out laughing. “Oh, shut up. I didn’t mean it that way. But I guess I don’t seem like I’m scary at all. I always kind of wanted to be scary.”
I was still laughing as I said, “Maybe you’re a late bloomer. You know, there could still be hope.”
He cracked up, his laugh ringing through the quiet courtyard, his eyes dancing, little sparks of gold in the green like sunlight on tree leaves. And who the fuck even was I, having thoughts like that? I couldn’t even write a goddamn sociology paper. Poetic bullshit didn’t come naturally to me.
“Maybe you’ll be my first victim,” he said, leaning in a little, his voice hushed like he was telling me a juicy secret. “But maybe I’ll be the most awesome roommate ever. I can’t believe you want me to move in with you. I promise I’ll be great. I’m quiet, and I’m, like, a really good cook.”
I leaned in a little too, drawn in by his air of mystery. “Then I guess when you murder me, I’ll die happy, right?”
Chris let out another of those infectious, musical laughs, and we started gathering up his sweater and our pretzel trash and books.
“You know, I dumped all my problems on you, Lucas. But you don’t look super happy with life either, like, what’s going on with you? If I’m going to be your new roomie the bitching has to go both ways, right?”
I hesitated. Not because it was some deep dark secret I couldn’t trust him with, but because it was so damn embarrassing.
“I have papers due,” I said after a second, while Chris stood there patiently, simply looking at me. Like he had all day for me to figure it out. “I know that sounds stupid. We all have papers to write. But I’m an engineering major, I’m not a very good writer, and I have no fucking clue what I’m doing. If I fail these general ed requirement classes I can’t get fully accepted to the College of Engineering. I’m basically kind of screwed.”
To my surprise, Chris’s face lit up with a blinding grin. “You, sir, are in luck!” he crowed. “Christian Esposito, English major extraordinaire, totally at your service! When are these papers due?”
Seriously? He had no idea what he was in for. “There’s two of them. One’s due tomorrow. And the other’s due the day after. And I have one paragraph of each.”
Chris nodded, the grin not fading at all. “I can work with that. You want to go to your place? Ditch class for the rest of the day? I can see the apartment, and then like, who am I kidding, I amsogoing to move in so we might as well go get some of my stuff, and then we can spend the night writing papers. I have one to work on too, but I can do that at the same time.”
The heavy, stifling weight that’d been sitting in a lump in my chest started to dissolve a little. I had trouble making friends, honestly, because I didn’t know how to start conversations with potential buddies any more than I did with girls. I’d had an apartment I couldn’t pay the rent on, and two classes to maybe fail, and almost no one to hang out with.
And now, miraculously—due to a burned pretzel and an impulse—I might be on my way to having passing grades, an apartment I could settle into without freaking out, and…a friend.
We headed off to the parking lot together, Chris chatting at me a mile a minute the whole way, and he followed me back to my place, parking on the left of the driveway and proclaiming that would be his spot from now on.
Chris somehow produced amazingly delicious homemade chicken soup from the stuff in my fridge and cabinets while I wrote the first paper.
And then he ripped that paper to shreds while I did the dishes, sitting me down to explain all the ways I needed to fix it over some kind of cardboardy cookies that I regretted buying, but that he ate without complaint.
By three in the morning, we’d repeated half of that process with paper number two.
By six in the morning, Chris had passed out across the foot of my bed while I worked on editing based on his comments and corrections, his mouth hanging open as he snored quietly in a way I tried to find annoying, knowing that was the kind of thing that might bother me as his roommate, but mostly just thought was pretty funny.
At seven, I passed out at the head of the bed, and at noon we crawled off the bed, made coffee, and finished our work.
We picked up his stuff that afternoon, and that was that.
Chapter One
Chris
Bass thumped through my limbs and rattled my vertebrae, lights flashed, and I knocked back the last few drops of my third cocktail. Or maybe my fourth? Did it count when someone else bought it? Maybe that made it nonalcoholic, sort of like calories didn’t count when you ate free samples at Costco. I couldn’t remember, anyway, so it didn’t matter.
At least it was Thursday night at ten, which made it a totally acceptable time to be drinking heavily, because it was almost Friday.
It wasn’t always a totally acceptable time, but I had my reasons. I spent a lot of nights at Aeon Lounge. My best friend’s fiancé worked there, and of course someone needed to keep an eye on him. Not that he was going to cheat, or anything. I’d never seen a guy more nauseatingly devoted than Aidan was.
Like, gross. So. Gross.
But he was also hot like burning, and everyone hit on him whether he noticed or not. So someone had to be there to protect his six-feet-something of ripped muscles and virtue, since Sebastian, my bestie and Aidan’s reason for living, was a total homebody nerd. That was why I had to be in the club not only on Sundays, their weekly gay night, but also on Saturdays (half-price cocktails until nine!) and the occasional weekday, like tonight.
