Too feminine of a project.
Useless when everything’s available to buy with two-day shipping.
“What else do you make?” Aaron asks.
“Mostly gifts for people. Hats and scarves mostly. I make a bunch of little animals and stuff, too.” Those I send off to my various niblings. The younger ones are always thrilled. The older ones pretend they’re too mature for a stuffed dinosaur, but they still end up on the shelves in their bedrooms, so who knows. Honestly, are you ever too old for a dinosaur? Also, it annoys my siblings that I keep sending these various creatures that they have to make room for—a nice bonus.
“That’s so cool. I can’t make anything.”
“You’re an engineer,” I say, scoffing. That can’t possibly be true. If I set out a bunch of stuff, I’m pretty sure he could turn it into some crazy machine in no time.
“Anything creative,” he clarifies. “I’m great at following directions, but that’s not the same thing. Like withLego. I build exactly what’s on the front of the box, nothing more. I know there are hundreds of things I could do with all the sets I own, but I can’t picture it.”
I shrug. “I’m mostly following patterns.” Mostly because I’m terrible at counting stitches, anything where I have to go over five is a recipe for disaster. That means there’s some creative math later to fix whatever mistakes I’ve made.
The scarf I have with me tonight is Exhibit A for that one.
He grins at me. “Yeah, maybe you’ll teach me to make something cool?”
I swallow hard, and a whole swarm of butterflies hits my stomach. That feeling I had at The Flaming Unicorn, the one that made me brave enough to invite him back to my place, returns with a vengeance. “I could teach you.” I’ve already got a picture in my head of me holding onto his hands, helping him get the proper movement. Fuck, it’s going to be hard for me to keep this strictly in the friend-zone, if that’s even where we are. My heart is already running away with the situation, imagining us sitting on the couch each night, watching TV, working on our individual projects. Together.
AARON
I don’t know why I’m here.
That’s not fair. I know exactly why I said yes to Oliver’s text. I thought we could get together and it would break me of these feelings that I misremembered the whole thing. I’d had a few drinks, and there was every chance that the connection I felt between us was nothing more than beer goggles and alcohol induced inhibition.
And horniness. Given my months-long dry spell, it’s to be expected that I’d eventually cave. Although, I didn’t see Oliver coming.
As I sit here tonight with nothing but decaffeinated herbal tea, none of that’s true. I knew it the minute he smiled at me, the flush in his cheeks deepening as he promised to teach me how to crochet.
Why would I even ask that? I’m the opposite of crafty. I’ve never managed anything that doesn’t involve drawing straight lines with a ruler on graph paper. The rest of my engineering friends were always tinkering with things, taking equipment apart, and figuring out new and exciting ways to put them back together.
I preferred to stick to the manuals. I can build anything, as long as it’s the intended use of the pieces.
And now, I’m going to pick up crocheting.
It’s just that when Oliver offered, I couldn’t bring myself to say anything other than yes. If it means seeing him happy, getting to work side-by-side with him, then I’m in.
Which is a big problem I haven’t figured out yet. Even being friends with him will be complicated. More than that is off the table. I’m a terrible boyfriend. Plenty of references can attest to precisely that. It’s what everyone says when we break up. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but especially Oliver. Whatever this attraction between us is, I need to keep a lid on it.
“So you don’t crochet. What do you do with your spare time?”
It actually takes me a whole second to come up with an answer. “I run.” It’s a bit of a sad offering. I know I told him the other night, but that was in the afterglow of our incredible orgasms. Besides, he probably doesn’t realize how much of my time that takes up. Training is basically a part-time job.
“Oh? Like how far?”
I grimace a bit because this discussion is always a little awkward. “I’m training for a marathon right now.”
“A marathon? Like a whole marathon? Aren’t those ridiculously long?”
“Twenty-six point two miles,” I say. I think somewhere around my fifth one, I stopped thinking of them as being ridiculously long. Maybe that’s the issue, but they’ve turnedinto something I consider reasonable. I run one or two a year, typically, so it’s all part of a process. Train, race, recover, repeat.
“I don’t think I’ve ever run further than a mile. And that’s only because they made us in school.” He wrinkles his nose as though he’s remembering the experience. “I’m not sure I would like running. Aren’t you bored listening to your own thoughts?”
“Sometimes, but I can always listen to music or an audiobook.” I tend to like the silence, listening to my feet striking the pavement and my controlled breathing, but some days I need a little more to get me through the monotony. “You could come with me sometime. I’d be fun.”
What the fuck? Barrett is the only person I ever let run with me. That’s mainly because he wore me down, asking over and over again until I was too tired to say no. I certainly didn’t offer.
