“This is so crazy.”
“What?” Brock said, his voice edging me on.
“You know what.”
He shrugged, as if too naïve to guess the answer.
“No, tell me.”
He’s going to drag it out of me, isn’t he? He’s going to play this game and string me along?
He’s good.
“It’s a little weird being out for drinks with you alone,” I said. “I’m happy to be here, but it’s strange!”
Brock took a long gulp of his can, set it down on the table, and looked at me before shrugging again.
“I don’t see how this is any different than when we would hang out at two a.m. on Steele’s back porch.”
I smiled at that. The contexts were wildly different, but he had a great point. This wasn’t like I was going for someone that I barely knew. This was being with someone that arguably knew me better than Steele ever did.
“You wanna know something?”
“Sure,” Brock said. “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?”
It wasn’t the best habit. But I was always loathed to tell people what they should or should not do.
“Just not in my face.”
“Of course. What were you gonna say?”
“I…with Steele, when we had those back-porch conversations, it killed me because you listened so much more than he did.”
Brock continued to smoke, but even though he glanced down at the cigarette as he lit it, I knew his ears were attuned to me.
“He thought he knew me, but if you asked him something like where I’d gone to college or when my birthday was, he wouldn’t know. I suspect that if Elizabeth was younger or was still at Cornell while we dated, he wouldn’t have known her name. It embarrassed me that a guy I was dating for as long as I was didn’t know these basic things. And so I lied to Elizabeth and my friends.”
“How so?”
I laughed, but mostly at myself for being so immature with it all.
“I told them Steele treated me badly, and that I had to get away. But Steele never treated me poorly. He… he didn’t know how to be a boyfriend.”
“I can see it,” Brock said. “Steele is a live-by-the-moment type of guy. Guided by his emotions. Things have to be a certain way, his way. Great friend, and I love him to death, but he’s not someone I would seek guidance from.”
“Right, you get it.”
“So why did you two date?”
A question that I’ve asked myself more than I have ever hoped to.
“It was a right-place, right-time deal from his perspective,” I said. “I was feeling a little suffocated. I’d just graduated from Rice and come home, and it was like there was no time to decompress. My dad immediately put me at NME Services, and I just wanted to relax a little, you know? Enjoy having finished school. And so when I met him, he was emblematic of that rebellious spirit. If I’d met him now instead of at twenty-two, I doubt that we’d be together.”
Brock nodded and finished his cigarette. The silence that followed unnerved me a bit; had I slandered his best friend too much? Had I said so much that Brock would tell me to leave? Sure, it was cliché to say that guys, when they liked a girl, didn’t think straight, but Brock wasn’t like most guys. He could rise above a situation as quickly as he could dive deeply into it.
“And do you regret it?”
Now that’s a question I haven’t asked myself much.
