1
I’dalwaysfeltlikeI stuck out a little, no matter where I was or who I was with. I never fully felt like I belonged, like completely and 100% belonged. The closest I ever came was on Thursday nights with my best friends, but even then, I always felt like I was somewhat on the outside. After all, when I joined the group in high school, the bonds between the other four boys had been long established. Jonas and Seb were best friends. Hunter and Eli were best friends. They were each other’s number ones, and it had taken me a while to feel like I wasn’t just an extra appendage, unnecessary and expendable, sticking out to anyone who looked at us.
Over the years, the feeling had faded into a low background hum, something that kept me awake on lonely nights or crowded my thoughts in the shower. It was a feeling reserved for the darkest nights, when my small one-bedroom apartment somehow felt both too big and too small for me and my thoughts. It was the kind of thing I didn’t share with anyone, outside of my extensive collection of rubber ducks, and even then, it was only when my head was too full of insecurities overmy place in the group to function. I knew my friends would be upset if they knew I felt that way, and I didn’t want to do that to them.
But tonight? God, that feeling was back in full force, and I knew the exact reason.
Everyone sitting around the table had someone. Jonas had brought his boyfriend, Silas, to the bar with him. Seb’s new boyfriend, Chris, had joined us for the night. Holden and Eli were being Holden and Eli, which meant that anyone who wasn’t intimately familiar with our group dynamics probably thought they were a couple. Both Chris and Silas had thought it when they’d met everyone.
And then there was me.
Sitting slightly apart, clearly not a part of any of the couplings surrounding the table. I was smiling and laughing at all the right moments, but I felt it. I felt it like a dark cloud hanging over me, the way you could feel rain before it started. It was heavy in the air, and I hated it. I’d never felt fully comfortable in my own skin. I tried to compensate for it, tried to make myself invaluable to my friends in ways that were uniquely me. Anything I could do to keep that feeling at bay, as hard as it could be.
That night, the feeling refused to budge. The only thing that kept me from excusing myself early, which would set my friends on high alert, was the constant hum of my phone, buzzing with new text messages every few minutes. At first, I didn’t think my friends even noticed. Okay, maybe Eli noticed. I’d caught the way his amber eyes darted to the phone in my hand more times than I could count. He wasn’t exactly furtive about it.
“And who keeps texting you?” he finally asked after what was probably the hundredth text message. That might have been a slight exaggeration, but I couldn’t be entirely sure. We’d been texting off-and-on all day, and the frequency of texts had only increased as the night went on.
I felt my cheeks heat, and I tucked my phone under the sticky table, out of sight of Eli’s probing eyes. Of course, not answering right away drew everyone else’s attention. I felt six pairs of eyes on me and shifted under the weight of their gaze.
“Out with it,” Seb piped up. “Otherwise, we’re all going to assume that you’re messaging someone on Swyper for a very uncharacteristic one-night stand.”
I almost wished that it was. My friends would tease me less if it were. I sighed. “Noah.”
“As in your ex, Noah?” Eli questioned incredulously.
I didn’t know why he was surprised. We’d gone to Noah’s play two weeks before. They knew that I was talking to him again, ever since he moved back to King’s Bay to take a curator position at the art museum. I wasn’t hiding our rekindled friendship from them. He’d even come to the bar with us after we watched his play, at Eli’s suggestion mind you, but I was still blushing and flinching under my friends’ gazes. I shifted in my seat again. “Yes, that Noah.”
It wasn’t like I wasn’t friends with all of my exes. I still talked to my most recent ex-boyfriend, Lucas, checking in on how he was doing in Texas. I’d kept in contact with Noah, even after we had broken up. I stayed friends with the people I loved, even when the love changed forms. My friends didn’t understand it, and I’d never been able to find the words to explain it to them properly.
I noticed the glances Seb and Jonas exchanged, passed over their respective boyfriends and then shot my way. Questioning. Maybe they were questioning my sanity, or maybe they were just wondering if they should say something.
Eli, on the other hand, had no such qualms. “Is that going to become a thing again?” he asked with his signature bluntness.
“We’re friends,” I told him with a shrug. It was neither a denial nor an admittance, because I didn’t have psychic powers. I hadno way of knowing what would happen in the future, and I never turned down the chance for love. I didn’t believe in closing that door, no matter what the circumstances. It had led to me being hurt on more than one occasion, even by the man in question back in high school, but it didn’t matter.
In my experience, love was always worth it. No matter what form love took.
“Okay, but is it going to become a thing again?” Eli repeated.
“Drop it,” Holden muttered, lifting his head from Eli’s shoulder. Because of course his head was on Eli’s shoulder. The two were always touching in some way. It was no small wonder that people thought that there was something more going on between them, something beyond the friendship they’d maintained for longer than I’d known them.
“Yes, Eli, drop it,” Seb repeated. Except he said it in a way that made me nervous. There was a twinkle in his eyes that I didn’t quite trust. “He doesn’t have psychic powers, so you’re asking the wrong question.”
Yeah, I was right not to trust the glimmer in Seb’s eyes. Then, I noticed the matching glimmer in Jonas’s eyes. He leaned across Silas, resting an elbow on the bar table and wincing a little as he realized just how sticky it was. I never understood what it was about the Rusty Nail and how their tables were always so damn sticky. I wanted to focus on that, but Jonas’s next words prevented me from doing so. “Then what would be the right question, Sebastian?”
“The right question would be does hewantit to become a thing again,” Seb said with a knowing nod.
“You’re right, Jonas, that is the right question,” Eli agreed. Seb nodded in agreement, and Holden looked like he was about to start laughing. I wanted the ground to open up beneath me and swallow me whole. Especially when Eli turned the full force of his amber eyes back on me. I suddenly felttooincluded in thegroup. I longed for thelonely in a crowd of people that loved mefeeling I had just minutes before. “Do youwantit to become a thing again?”
“We’refriends,” I repeated, emphasizing the word. Because I hadn’t given it any thought. Lucas and I had been broken up for about six months, and the nights at the apartment we once shared did get lonely without him. And there had always been a pull between me and Noah. He had always been one of the most handsome men I’d ever seen, and time had only made him more attractive. But what we’d had ended in high school. We’d tiptoed around memories of our past for as long as we’d managed our tentative friendship. Which had been since our breakup the summer after senior year.
Did I want it to become a thing again?
I didn’t know, because I’d never entertained the possibility.
“That’s not an answer,” Eli prodded.
“It is,” I countered. It was the only answer I could give.
