“And for enders?” Drew asks.
After a hit and a silent dare to be brave, I say, “You.” So I don’t have to see his reaction, I rummage around in the bag until I find one of the photos I took from my bedroom. It was folded in half, almostruined, but it’s one of Drew and me at prom, outside the venue in the Stone Museum gardens in sharp suits, hair tamed, bow ties in different bright colors.
I hand him the crumpled, glossy piece of paper. He clutches it between shaking fingers. “We look so young here.”
“I’mstillyoung, thank you kindly,” I joke to diffuse some of the agonizing tension filling the springtime air alongside clouds of pollen.
He forces out a laugh, and then his mouth snaps back into a straight line. Too serious. “Nolan.” I prepare for the absolute worst. “You have no idea how long I’ve waited to hear you say that you want me.”
An exhale saws out of my lungs. The words make me even braver. “I do.” Hearing it back, I realize how I’m betraying myself. I swore I could rekindle a friendship but not a flame with Drew. Not in this temporary timeline. Yet words pour out of me before I can sop up the spill. “I want to choose you. I’ve wanted to choose you for the longest time, but I promised myself I’d get my shit together before I could be worthy of you. Before I could take the risk of ruining our friendship.”
“Nolan, on what planet would I have ever let romantic feelings ruin our friendship?”
“I don’t know, but I was scared about it,” I admit, shrugging off some of the insecurity like soaked layers after coming in from a torrential storm. “I was scared about everything.” My whole career was rejection after rejection. I couldn’t bear the possibility of that in my personal life from the person who meant the most to me.
Drew grabs my hand suddenly, interlaces his fingers with mine, breaching his own rules about our closeness. “This is going to sound like a line, I’m sure, but there really haven’t been many since us. Sinceyou. I don’t… I don’t experience attraction like most people. Whenwe lived together and went out, I didn’t approach guys or ask them to go on dates because I couldn’t be attracted to them on the spot like that. And the guys I did make exceptions for, the ones willing to take it slow, I never wanted book-level romance with them. I kept it going sometimes because I thought that’s what a single gay man in New York City was supposed to do. But it was always different with you.”
Always different with you.My heart balloons beyond my rib cage. “Wow,” I say, stunned.
“I didn’t completely know until prom,” he clarifies. “I had been talking to Chris Oleander, an artist and the son of one of my mom’s friends, for most of the spring term.”
“I could never forget that,” I butt in, circling back to all the thoughts I had at the Stone Museum today. “You made me proofread every text you sent him for three months straight. Even the spicy ones!”
He lets out an embarrassed laugh. “I was nervous I would say the wrong thing, even if I was basically paraphrasing lines from Tessa Dare books. Anyway, I was scared about meeting him for the first time that summer before college at the beach because I knew he’d want to kiss me and…and then, you offered to kiss me at prom, so I wasn’t putting so much pressure on it.”
It’s clear his memory of that night is as vivid as mine. “You had once told me practice kissing was one of your favorite tropes,” I say. That night, I thought I was doing Drew a favor. Now, I wonder if I was wrong. Maybe that kiss was as much for me as it was for him.
“Not so much anymore,” he says honestly.
“What takes the top spot now?”
He hits the joint before saying dreamily, “Friends-to-lovers.”
My breath catches in my throat. Is it the weed or is it elation causing me to feel floaty? I laugh, because of course we’re bringing this back to romance novel tropes, and, wow, it just occurred to me howmuch I missed the mushy-gushy nerd he was before he hardened into crime-fiction daddy. This Drew, sitting beside me, ismyDrew.
“I like that one too,” I say softly.
Drew’s calming blue eyes meet mine. “You never had to be anything more than what you were to be worthy of me, and I hate that you thought you did.”
The magic spell reminiscing cast over me breaks immediately. “Drew, are you kidding?” I ask, stubbing out the joint and standing. The hand-holding abruptly feels far too intimate for the feelings I’ve been harboring. “I couldn’t keep a pair of socks together, let alone a relationship.”
Drew doesn’t immediately come to comfort me. I appreciate that. He hangs behind, holding space, breathing in loudly. When I’m ready, I turn back, and he says something that makes my heart levitate. “So you couldn’t keep a non-holey pair of socks together, so what? I couldn’t be bothered to put on pants and go out past 10:00 p.m., but you forced me to. You live without a shell. I live inside mine. That’s why we worked as friends.”
“But,” I protest, scared of upending the sweetness, “I ruined it before opposites attract couldbecomefriends-to-lovers.”Or a happily ever after, but I don’t say that part out loud.
Dazed, he steps toward me, narrowly missing the rock collection, and clamps his hands onto the yellow metal bars on either side of me. His body is a barrier to the world. Backed into the corner of this kiddy playset, I’m not twenty-three-years old trapped inside a thirty-year-old’s body and he’s not thirty-year-old Drew either. We’re something outside of that. Suspended in a glittering void for only us.
Timeless.
“What I’m hearing is youdidread all those romance books I shoved at you over the years,” he says, voice light, eyes heavy with desire.
“Some of them,” I say, “yeah.”
He quirks a brow. “Why’d you lie?”
“Because,” I reply, sounding schoolboy snotty to cover up the fact that I read those books to feel close to him. To run my fingers across the sentences that he underlined and loved. “Reading’s for nerds.”
He throws his head back, laughing. “Is kissing also for nerds?” he asks, voice rumbly and intriguing. Maybe it’s the weed. Maybe it’s the enchantment of being back here after all these years and admitting these things we’d never thought we’d admit.
