I close my eyes.
“It seems like something you should tell your Womb Friend,” Emmanuel snorts.
“I’d be pissed.” Georgia tells Emmanuel.
“Gagged,” Emmanuel replies.
I think about it. I’m fucking pissed. This is definitely something you would tell your Womb Friend, lifelong-sex-friends or not.
It’s time for a reckoning. It’s time to pull up your Hot Girl Pants for real, Mia. Make him see you.
I sit on the couch that evening, waiting for him to come home.
He doesn’t get back until late, almost ten o’clock. Past our bedtime.
He walks in the door, glances at me on the couch, throws his stuff on the ground, and keeps walking towards the kitchen.
“Elias.”
He stops.
“Come sit here,” I say, patting the couch.
“I gotta?—”
“Sit. Here.”
He walks over and plops down with a good few inches between us.
“Why didn’t you tell me that you were leaving?” I demand to know.
He shrugs.
“Regardless of what this is, Elias, I’m still one of your closest friends. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What is this, exactly?” he asks me for the second time this week, and it almost sounds like a dare. This time, I’m ready for it.
“It’s something at the very least where you would tell your second oldest friend some pretty huge fucking news about yourself.”
He shrugs again. “It’s not like it’s a real job.”
I freeze.
He doesn’t notice, because he’s not looking at me. He’s looking at the wall, almost… bored. “Let’s go back, though, Mia. What is this between us?”
I glare at him, adrenaline slowly building, stacking like blocks in my spine. The lessons, the confidence. Chin up. Tits out.See me. “This isn’t lifelong friends with benefits anymore, Elias.”
He glances at me with green eyes and crow’s feet. His summer freckles are long gone.
“I can’t do that anymore. I can’t be just friends with benefits anymore,” I tell him. “This has become way more than that to me over the last few weeks. It started off the way it did, and I was okay with that for a while. Friends with benefits, just sex and lessons and all that.” I take a deep breath, wishing he would look me in the eye. He’s fidgeting with a thread on his jeans. “And you were really clear. But I think somewhere in the middle, it became bigger than that. And I think it became bigger for you, too.”
He keeps silent.
“I’m sorry that you heard that conversation with Andrea. But you know, Elias, that I trust you, and I respect the hell out of you. You’re annoyingly competent at everything you do, remember? I’ve always been on your side. I’ve always taken you seriously. I’m upset that you didn’t tell me, but that doesn’t take away how proud I am of you. But I always knew you could do it.”
The thread he’s pulling out of his jeans gets longer and longer.
I put my hand over his fidgeting fingers. “Will you please look at me?”
