Page 69 of Canadian Boyfriend

Mike:It’s the week after next, and I have to stop waffling and make a decision.

Aurora:You don’t want her to?

Mike:I do want her to go—I mean as long as she wants to. Is that terrible?

Aurora:Not terrible. We sometimes need breaks from people, even people we love.

Mike:It’s not that so much as…

The bubble things came and went approximately a million times, and I started to get jumpy. I felt crappy in a way I couldn’t parse after listening to him talk about his trip to the Twin Cities all those years ago. I was irrationally afraid that he was suddenly going to remember me. I stared at the bubbles as if they were the means of my execution.

Mike:If Olivia is gone for a week, maybe we can make out again.

Well. Holy shit with a grand plié. My mouth fell open, but that was the only body part I was capable of moving. I was paralyzed for long enough that he started showering me with a series of backpedaling texts.

Mike:If you want to.

Mike:You probably don’t want to.

Mike:I’m sorry, that was out of line. I’m the one who called a stop to it last time, so why am I talking nonsense now? There are so many reasons this is a bad idea.

I wanted to ask him what those reasons were. He hadn’t really articulated them back in the Tomfoolery parking lot beyond his aversion to “leaks.”

I wanted to ask him what his intentions were, but that sounded kind of medieval.

I reminded myself that I was learning how to do things differently. Looking at my life with the new knowledge and skills I was getting from therapy. I was not the girl who bent herself to please men anymore. I was the girl who listened to her inner voice.

I closed my eyes and asked my inner voice what it wanted. I used Mary-Margaret’s trick, thinking about whatIwanted, what I truly, intrinsically wanted, versus what I felt like Ishouldwant.

The answer was clear: I wanted to resume kissing Mike Martin.

Mike:The biggest of those reasons being that I’m your employer.

I had to get with the program. I shoved back my vague feelings of guilt.

Aurora:No, you’re my friend I kiss sometimes, remember?

There was a long pause, and more bubbles. I held my breath.

Mike:Am I your friend you want to kiss the week after next?

I answered before I could do any more overthinking.

Aurora:Yep.

Mike:With any luck we’ll lose next week and I’ll be able to shave this damn beard.

Aurora:Are you wishing for your team to lose?

Mike:I wouldn’t say that. I’m just saying if we did, there would be a silver lining.

I had thought earlier thattensionwas not quite the right word to describe the vibe between Mike Martin and me. Except now it absolutely was. Pretty much every interaction we had in the week following was tension filled. We were constantly getting in each other’s way or trying to getoutof each other’s way. We were clumsy, as if our reflexes were broken. Olivia was our overseer, stepping unwittingly into the crackling air around us, as if the rules of chaperonage were reversed and we were awkward under the scrutiny of a twelve-year-old.

And oh, the anticipation. If the air crackled around us, the anticipationroaredinside me. I passed the time between the announcement of the kissing to come and the day it would actually commence in a mixture of frustrated lust and jittery unease. I thought Mike Martin must be on edge, too. Gone was his usual breezy façade. When he went to St. Louis for what turned out to be the last game of the season for the Lumberjacks, we didn’t text about anything other than Olivia-related essentials. When he got back, he didn’t wink at me or flash me any ChapStick-tube smiles. He just… got in my way. He was alwaysthere, mumbling apologies when we bumped into each other in the entryway, joining me with a newspaper when I was reading in the living room, sitting too close to me at the kitchen island.

It did occur to me how strange it was that all this emotional drama was being expended on kissing. Just kissing. Like, sure,pretty passionate kissing. “Making out,” we had called it. But that was it. It made me think about all the stuff I had done in the past thatwasn’tjust kissing, and whether I had always wanted to do that stuff. I thought about it so much I made Gretchen come over to talk about it after Mike Martin and Olivia left for Chicago. He was staying the night and would be back the next day. Renata and Stefan had invited him to brunch at their country club, and in the name of trying to get along better, he’d accepted.

“I need some advice,” I said all of five seconds after she’d sat at the kitchen island.

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