Page 20 of Betting on the Best Friend
“You may be the only person whohasn’tasked me that yet.” She bats away a bit of tree fluff drifting toward her. “People have had alotto say about him. In hindsight, I see he’s bland. But like, in an unobjectionable way? I’m the one who wasted my time, but you’d think it was everyone else who lost five years.”
“They didn’thatehim. They hated him foryou.” Niles wasn’t a “bad” guy. He was just bad for Ruby, always trying to sand her edges. But the things he found abrasive, aren’t. Not for the people who love her. “But something about him worked for you. So what was it?”
She focuses on a bit of thread poking up from the nylon of her chair arm, plucking at it a few times before she answers. “I confused blandness with calm. That’s all I can come up with. You know I love my family, but our house was chaos. Mostly good. Jokes, teasing. But also angsty teenage boys who were loud and bad with boundaries.” She sighs. “If I hadn’t had Ava’s house to escape to, I might still be one frayed nerve, two seconds from snapping.”
“And you picked the opposite with Niles.”
“Yeah. His infrequent family dinners at low-to-moderate volume. His unchaotic accountant brain. His lists.” She gives a small laugh. “I thought I loved his lists. Packing for trips. Shopping for Christmas presents. The grocery store. Weekend entertainment. Easy. Structured.”
I consider this. “I always figured that kind of organization appealed to you. That it’s why you became a librarian. Order and quiet.”
We mull that for a second before we both burst out laughing. Libraries areneverquiet.
“I probably saw him as the eye of the storm after my brothers,” she says. “I liked his steadiness, but really, everyone in my family is steady. They’re just loud steady.”
I give her a searching look. “Seems like Niles was more lack of noise than he was quiet.”
She meets my eyes with a slight smile. “Trust you to know there’s a difference.”
Yeah. Trust me to understand you every which way, Ruby. “I hate that he turned you into a checkbox.”
“What girl doesn’t love getting a proposal because she’s finally met the metrics?”
I pour out some of the Coke she brought me. “Bye, Niles. No one misses you.”
“Truth.”
“What will you look for now?”
“I don’t know.” She falls quiet.
We’ve never been in the habit of filling each other’s silences. To me, that’s another green flag, but I’m pretty sure Ruby takes for granted how easily we do this.
“I don’t have a physical type,” she says after a while. “Maybe I don’t like gym bros? And maybe I have a soft spot for preppy boys? That’s about it.”
Right, so . . . me. But I wait her out, because she’ll think past superficial appearances.
“I want enough in common to have lots of stuff we like to do together. But I also want enough differences that we always have things to talk about. Does that even make sense?” Her forehead wrinkles and she glances at me like she’s trying to see if I’m tracking.
I always do. I always have. “I get it.”
She shifts in the chair, getting even more comfortable. “At my friend’s bridal shower, they asked all the married women to share a piece of advice, and that’s one that stuck with me.Her grandma said to support each other’s separate hobbies and interests, because those things give you stuff to talk about besides the bills or the kids.”
“Makes sense to me.” Especially since Niles’s interests had dominated their relationship. Whenever Ruby had put her foot down to make him do something she wanted to do, on hisbestday he acted like he was indulging her. Usually, he complained. “What else are you looking for?”
She frowns, thinking. “I feel like I’ll know it when I see it, but I can’t put it into words. It’s like when I saw who each of my besties needed. It was obvious. Even if I didn’t know the exact person, I knew the type.”
“Basically, you’re waiting for your superpower to kick in for yourself.”
Ruby points at me like,Yes, that.
It kills me that her superpower isn’t kicking in for her either. I’mright here.
She’ll need the epiphany. Sunlight breaking through a cloud and smacking her right in the face with love for me . . . or something.
That’s what my plan has to be. Creating opportunities for that epiphany to happen. For Ruby to go,Whoa, Charlie, I’ve justrealized I want to make out with you all the time and this chemistry has been there all along.
It’s one of my favorite fantasies because I’m a realist, and there’s no way I’ve imagined the gravity of our orbit around each other. It’ll happen.
