Page 9 of Friendshipped
Does my infatuation stop there?
I wish.
He’s the kind of man who comes over to dance on a chair when one of my friends needs cheering up. And he sat throughLegally Blondeagain with four women in the room even though he’s seen it after every one of my breakups and when Laura and Rob broke up too.
Jayme’s voice snaps me out of my fleeting Trevor indulgence. It’s only the two of us left in my house now.
“You two are like an old married couple,” Jayme says.
She stifles a yawn with the back of her hand.
Flopping down in a chair across from her, I say, “Brother and sister, old married couple, twins from different mothers, you know we’ve heard it all.”
Jayme shakes her head.
She’s sitting sideways curled up in a blanket at the end of my couch with her knees tucked up to her chest. The side of her head rests on the back of the sofa and her back leans against the armrest. She looks drained, but not as defeated as she did at the Dairyland.
I’m sitting in the chair where Trevor did his ridiculous dance to Taylor Swift. Gotta love that man.
“You sure you don’t have any feelings for him at all?” Jayme asks.
Right. About that.
I don’t confess my feelings for Trevor to anyone.
For one thing, I live in Bordeaux where secrets rarely stay between two people. And, for another, I am well aware my feelings are like weeds in an otherwise prize-winning lawn. They tend to take over, and they are an unwanted nuisance. The sooner I eradicate them, the better. I need a good spraying of Weed-B-Gone for my heart.
“I have deep feelings for Trevor,” I tell Jayme, intending to put this whole issue to rest, again. “He’s my best friend in the whole world. We grew up next door to one another, we’ve known each other forever, he’s my ride-or-die.”
Jayme stares at me with an appraising look.
“I guess I find it hard to believe you never had any attraction. I know you’ve told me you don’t over and over, but for some reason, tonight, I thought I saw something whenever you looked at him.”
She really should leave her job at Ox Cart Flower Mart and come to work at the paper with us. She’s got mad investigative skills. And, she saw something in my glances at Trevor? Who else noticed? No one, I hope.
“I know he’s good looking,” I agree. “But, he’s just my friend. I don’t feel sparks or desire.”
Saying something so blatantly untrue feels awful, and also like a bit of a betrayal to the way I really feel. But since I can’t act on my feelings, I have to deny them. If Jayme, Laura or Felicia knew how I really felt, they’d get busy planning all sorts of schemes to force me to tell Trevor.
“So, you two have never even kissed, or almost kissed?” Jayme asks.
She’s obviously undeterred by my insistent denial. I’m not sure if it’s the late hour, or the fact that I’m feeling so much more for him than ever, but I curl my feet up under me so they’re tucked onto the chair, and I prepare myself to tell Jayme the story of our almost-kiss.
“If I tell you this, you can’t say a word to anyone. Not Laura. Not Shannon. Not Rob. Not even anyone who doesn’t know us.”
Jayme nods. “I know how to keep a confidence.”
“I know you do.”
I take a deep breath and look up at the ceiling.
“The summer before our freshman year in high school, a group of us were swimming at Laura’s pool. Meg Abrams had moved into town a few weeks earlier and Laura’s mom decided we ought to include her. We did our best to make her feel welcome. It was such a summer. So much was changing between all of us. Laura started crushing on Rob. We couldn’t decide if Rob felt anything for Laura, and Trevor wasn’t leaking any details to me about where Rob stood no matter how hard I pressed him to let me know.
“That day at Laura’s, we all swam, had dive contests, and played Marco Polo for most of the afternoon. When we had enough of being in the water, the girls all lay towels on a cement area behind the diving board and the guys sat together in another part of the yard where Mr. Lennox had set out a bunch of Adirondack chairs.
You remember how boys and girls regularly divide themselves like oil and water at that age? Anytime we were in a group, that happened, even though we all grew up mingling before then.”
Jayme nods. “It was the same in Columbus too. It’s probably that way everywhere.”
