Page 84 of Betting on the Best Friend
She doesn’t even get the last sentence out before I’m heading for the door after a quick goodbye to Charlie. I offer smiles but avoid eye contact with a few male voices calling my name.
The noise level rises as soon as the moderator declares it open mingle time, and I’m glad, because I don’t want to hear women saying Charlie’s name. I don’t want to stand there beside him watching one pretty woman after another come up to introduce themselves.
I don’t want to see or hear any of it, and as I scurry out of the pub, I know I’m running from that. From the idea that Charlie will make a connection in there.
Even more so, I’m trying to run from why I’m running.
The answer is stalking me, and the fear in my gut tries to push me to safety.
A deeper fear, one inside the molecules that hold my world together, tells me I may be all out of safe spaces.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Charlie
I had to pitchRuby to other people as a date. I survived.
Ruby had to pitch me to other people to date. She thrived.
The whole time I listened to her last-minute brilliance, to her easy banter, I wanted to say, “But if you see all that about me, why isn’t it enough?”
Ruby pitched me so effectively that I’ve already had seven different women reach out via my DMs since last night, three of whom I should be falling all over myself to ask out and thank them for their charity. They are gorgeous and funny, and I’d been impressed with all three of them when their friends pitched them.
I reply to each of them with the same message.Sorry, probably shouldn’t have agreed to be pitched. Not trying to date right now. It’s me, not you, but thank you for making me smile by connecting.
I got one thumbs-up emoji and one responded by liking my message. But the third woman responded with a single-word question.
Ruby?
I had only a single word reply.Unfortunately.
But we’d survived it. I’d shown up for Ruby as a friend after spending a few weeks trying to figure out how I would do that without eroding my own well-being. I did it by reminding myself that being there last night was about supporting Ruby. I hung onto that notion like a Texas running back with the ball and the SEC championship depending on my touchdown.
I’m surviving this morning by reminding myself that anything that happens as a result of last night is none of my business. If my imagination tries to conjure an image of any of the dudes last night contacting Ruby, I shove it right back out with the Heisman maneuver.
Begone, intrusive thought, before you flatten me like the civilian normie that I am.
I can’t be a fake friend to Ruby. I can’t act like her dates are interesting and I want to hear all about them. Not that she’s asking me to. But I’ve tried in the past, and now I’m dumping “support Ruby’s love life” off my plate. Now that I can be honest that I don’t want to know anything about her dating life, her girls can be her friends for that.
I can be a friend for the rest of it. Be there to cheer for her, help her, remind her she’s incredible if she forgets. I’ve been really good at it for three years.
Maybe it should have been obvious that the best way forward was just to be us, but maybe we needed weeks of not being us for us to see it. Or formeto see it. But I do now.
So that’s it. There’s the new plan. Be us.
Time to inform the other half of the plan.
In the spirit of honest conversation . . .
Okay . . .
Let’s be friends but
I pause, considering how I want to frame this.
BUT WHAT YOU BUTT
But I need to pay monthly dues now???
