She’s scrolling back, back, back. Her face is what I expect it to be. Horror, disbelief. A little bit of pain. “Mia?—”
Her head snaps up, and I was wrong. There’s actually a fuckton lot of pain in her eyes. She’s shattered. Destroyed.
She blinks, and it’s gone, and then she pastes that fucking smile back on her face, the one I haven’t seen in weeks. Fake and empty. I’m suddenly hit with a feeling of loss.
“If you look at the timestamps of those photos and videos, they’re from before—” I attempt.
“You don’t have to explain,” she says, with that horror movie mannequin smile. “I know what this is, and I know who you are. It’s fine.”
Who I am?“But Mia?—”
“It’s fine, Elias.” She throws my phone on the coffee table as if it’s burned her. “I recognize one of them from the spring. She’s hot. Really hot. Nice boobs. Big. They’re huge. I hope you’re still in touch,” she rambles. “I thought I was… I thought our vid… you know what? Stupid, that’s…” she shakes her head.
I sit next to her on the couch, taking her hands in mine. They’re limp. “Mia, you don’t count—”Nope, that’s not it. I try again. “I swear on my life, I haven’t even talked to anyone else since we started…” I don’t know what to call it yet. That’s what we were supposed to talk about.Fuckingis way too impersonal for the conversation I was about to have.
“Our friends with benefits thing,” she chimes in. “That’s good to know. Especially because we’ve been fucking—” I cringe. “—without a condom. Me neither, by the way.”
“Mia—”
“Will you please stop saying my name like that?” she snaps. She takes a deep breath. “Sorry. Just stop saying my name like I’m… You know what? Forget it. Just… just let me know if you do, you know… start messing around again. I know who you are, like I said. I know you won’t be able to do this for much longer.”
This stings, but I know it’s probably not fair of me to say anything, especially after she’s scrolled through an embarrassing amount of nude photos and videos sent to me from previous hookups that I haven’t gotten around to deleting. But really… Haven’t I proven otherwise yet? “M… That’s… I’m sorry,” I manage lamely.
The smile is back. “I haven’t forgotten what this is, Elias. We’re just lifelong friends with benefits until one of us is done. But please,” she finally squeezes my hands back, the first sign of life in a few minutes, “just let me know if you do, you know. So we can start using protection again. Or let me know if you need to… you know… stop. Just let me know.”
Ouch. “Okay,” I manage, thrown for a loop and not ready to bring anything up right now. This doesn’t seem like the best time to bring up my… bigger feelings towards her. Not after that.
“Great!” she says brightly. She claps her hands together. “I’m never looking through your phone ever again, so if you could find me a photo of your gym and send it to me, that would be great. I’ll just pull up your account on my phone.”
I scrub my face. “I don’t want to… I honestly want to sit down right now and delete every single photo on my phone that’s not a photo of you.”
“Don’t do that,” she says, smiling, strain behind her eyes. She blows out a breath. “Can we just… go for a walk? Let’s go to the park and relax.”
“Okay,” I say lamely.
“I’m ready to move past it,” Mia says to me later, as we lay side by side in her bed, under the covers.
We’ve been in this exact position hundreds of times, her gripping my hand tightly, mashing her face into my shoulder, but something feels different about it right now. “Do you want to talk about it at all?” I try.
She sighs. “I know who you are, Elias—” she says again.
That fucking crawling feeling up my spine comes back. “Why do you keep saying that? Who am I to you, exactly, Mia?” I shoot back, annoyed.
“Don’t pretend like you don’t know?—”
“I want to hear you say it,” I insist.
“You’re fucking gorgeous! Irresistible! You’ve said it yourself,” she says, insistent. “You’ve had a constant, steady parade of women in and out of your bedroom since high school. That’s why we started this whole thing in the first place. You’re a woman-eater. You’re teaching me how to become a man-eater. Hello? The lessons? Don’t you remember? Why we’re doing this in the first place?”
I rub my eyes, the crawling feeling intensifying, inexplicably hurt. I thought I was someone different.It’s not fair to be hurt. You should’ve deleted those photos ages ago, I think. “All I know is that if I knew you were seeing some dude and you told me that you found a bunch of pictures of nude women in his phone, I’d tell you to drop him. I’d go kick his ass myself. An important lesson is having some fucking self-respect?—”
She sits up. “I do have self-respect, asshole. Even if you’re some himbo, I’ve still known you my entire fucking life and you’re one of my best friends in the entire universe and I trust that you’re a good fucking person who would never hurt me.”
I stare at the ceiling.
“Can we just…” she tries again. “Forget it ever happened and never speak of it again and then go back to normal?” She grins down at me, repeating a conversation from weeks ago now. It looks less like fake Mia and more like my Mia.
I’m not in a laughing mood. What is normal, anyway? What are we doing? I blow out a breath. “Fine,” I say.
