Page 71 of A Totally Platonic Thing
By the Thursday of the last week of classes, I’d started to lose my mind a little. Graduation felt so fucking meaningless without Chris. Everything felt meaningless without Chris. Getting up in the morning: pointless. Eating: who cared? My senior project: meh. Sure, I went through the motions. I nodded and smiled and talked to people, putting up a good façade and probably fooling everyone but Amanda and Aidan. But it felt like being a robot.
I put down my soldering iron, stretched my back, and glanced at my phone. A little after three. Chris would be getting out of class soon. I could picture it, him walking out of the building where most of the English classes were held. His last class for his senior seminar. Would he be feeling proud? Relieved? Kind of melancholy and stunned, the way I had when I’d attended my very last class of my undergraduate career that morning?
One thing he wouldn’t be feeling was defeated, because I knew from bugging Aidan that Chris had gone to every single class, read every single word assigned, and written papers like a fiend since he’d moved in with them. He’d been going to therapy, too, although obviously Aidan hadn’t given me any details about that even if he knew any.
In short, Chris had gotten his shit together and succeeded the way I knew he could. And Aidan had also told me, casually, as if he was too good to gossip and dared me to call him on it, that Chris hadn’t been out at all, either. Not to Aeon, and not anywhere else, since he’d been spending every evening studying with Sebastian with the kitchen table split between them.
I’d been about thirty seconds from cracking and begging him to tell me something, anything, about Chris anyway. I felt like a junkie missing a fix. At least, what I imagined that might feel like, since I’d never been there. My skin itched in a way that wasn’t physical, and my brain felt like it might burst out of my skull, all ill-fitting and wrong.
I needed Chris. I fuckingneededhim, and every night alone in the apartment, alone in my bed, made me ache. I’d had to stop myself from getting up and driving over to Sebastian’s a thousand times.
Pounding on the door until Chris appeared, all flushed and rumpled and gorgeous. Grabbing him and throwing him over my shoulder and bringing him home where he belonged, so I could strip him and kiss every inch of him, make him beg and moan and tell me he’d always be mine.
I’d left him alone, afraid he’d be too angry and hurt to talk to me and also hoping he’d get it together.
And now he had gotten it together…and I wasn’t even sure it mattered anymore. What the hell had I been thinking, walking out on him instead of trying to solve the problem together, like we always did? I could’ve helped. I could’ve been more understanding. I knew Chris had major issues with people walking away and leaving him behind, letting him down, putting him in second place. I’d been an asshole.
Chris was only a few hundred yards away. Out the door, down the walkway, around the side of the building, and then a quick walk down the campus’s central avenue.
I put my phone in my pocket and turned off the soldering iron, abandoning my work in situ. Fuck it.
Abruptly, right that very fucking second, I couldn’t take it anymore. The soldering, the loneliness, the waiting, the worry about Chris. Any of it.
I needed to see him. And if he was still too hurt to talk to me, I’d kiss him instead, kiss him until he stopped arguing and then kiss him again and again until he couldn’t talk at all.
Chris hadn’t contacted me. I’d asked Aidan, like a pathetic idiot, if Chris ever talked about me. He’d shrugged, raised his eyebrows, and said, “What the fuck do you think, dude? Seriously?”
Which had given me a flare of almost unbearable hope for a second.
But then it hit me that Aidan hadn’t specified what Chris had been saying about me. And that he might have been sparing my feelings by being so vague.
Maybe Chris had moved on. Started dating other people. Maybe he’d decided he was better off without me. Maybe he’d been ranting about what a dick I’d been.
But I couldn’t let him go that easily.
As I headed for the door, Amanda called out, “Taking a break?”
“Going to find Chris,” I shot back over my shoulder.
“About time!” She grinned and waved, and I strode out the door, heart pounding and palms a little clammy.
It took me less than five minutes to get to the big L-shaped open space in front of the library. The entrance to Chris’s building sat right at the short end of the L.
And there was the pretzel cart in its usual spot in the middle of the long side, with the actual owner manning it instead of his awful nephew, thank God.
I could see the building’s exit from the pretzel cart if I went over there.
I went. One girl already stood there ordering her food, and I waited with badly hidden impatience for her to figure out what she wanted already. I mean, it was a freaking pretzel cart. Do you not want a pretzel? Then go somewhere else, for fuck’s sake.
By the time she figured out that she did indeed want a pretzel, students had started coming out of the building across the way in little groups, some all animated with excitement over the end of the quarter and others walking slowly, probably exhausted or worried about finals.
I couldn’t empathize with either. My heart beat so fast I could feel the vibrations in my fingertips. Who gave a shit about their classes or finals, anyway, when Chris might be walking out that door any second?
Keeping an eye on the building, and probably looking like a crazy person, all shifty and weird, I ordered two pretzels, paid, and stood to the side to wait for him to get them ready for me.
The stream of students slowed, the door shut behind them, and—nothing.
I froze, horrified. Had Chris gone out another door? He always came this way. And I knew, logically, that I could track him down easily enough by calling him or texting him or going to Sebastian’s. But some irrational part of me felt like if I didn’t catch him now, when I’d worked up the courage to do it, I might lose the opportunity forever. He’d vanish, and then the next time I saw him it’d be at Aidan and Sebastian’s wedding with Chris introducing me to his tall, handsome date.
