Page 10 of French Kiss

Earlier, I thought I’d noticed he might be starting to go grey at his temples, but I hadn’t gotten a decent look. Now I was certain.

I had no idea what the average age for greying was. My hair’s highlights and lowlights from teenage summers at the beach had long since been replaced by the dark brown that took over one winter and stayed through my years haunting libraries and labs. Med school and residency had taken their toll in myriad ways, not the least of which was my boring, long resident hair.

I wondered if Josh felt self-conscious about the grey. Josh had the quiet confidence of guys who were far more attractive, almost like he knew his looks weren’t as important as his other attributes. And it actually hinted at an inner cool.

I could see how gawky guys from high school ended up being the handsomest men in their forties when they started to grey. Suddenly, their long legs gave them stature and their skinny bodies were lean and fit while the former high school jocks developed beer guts and stopped trying.

Josh had an amused grin on his face, and I followed his gaze to where a medium-sized tan dog alternately threw a stuffed animal up in the air and pounced on it over and over again like it was attacking.

“D’you think some small part of the dog believes that stuffed rag is playing the game too?” he asked.

“Eh, maybe. And how lucky to be a dog if he does.”

“Yeah, life is good, though, huh?”

“Life is good.” I stole another look at Josh’s profile, the way his nose stuck out a little like a beak and his cheekbones lifted when he smiled. For the hundredth time, I tried to see him as attractive. We’d been Mom and Dad for so long that I almost never looked at him with anything other than appreciation for the fact that there was zero romantic tension. But every so often, I tried to imagine what the women he dated saw when they looked at him and wanted him to push them up against a wall and rip their panties off with his teeth so they could have blinding, passionate sex.

I assumed he did that, but maybe he just read them passages from biochem textbooks and had boring, mechanical sex. I tried to imagine what it would be like to kiss him, but as usual, my brain pressed pause before actually picturing anything. I didn’t want to. I couldn’t go there.

Heidi considered it a petty felony that we’d never tried dating, because we were so compatible in so many ways.

“Some people are destined to be friends and nothing more,” I told her.

“If that’s what you want to tell yourself…” she said.

“It’s the truth.”

“You sound like you’re in fucking high school.”

Could be worse,I thought. I was valedictorian in high school.

It made life much less complicated to know we would only and ever be friends at the outset and not wonder if some familiar gesture could be interpreted differently. I loved him as a friend, and I was lucky to have him in my corner. End of story.

* * *

Havinga boyfriend for the first half of residency had prevented awkward conversations about dating. Josh’s girlfriend lived in Florida and my boyfriend, Teddy, was out in New York. We’d met at the end of medical school at a birthday paintball outing for a mutual friend in Boston. I’d thought paintball would be a bunch of people in white shirts throwing paint at each other.

“No, I think that’s the kind of thing that happens at fraternities with black lights and lots of alcohol,” Teddy said.

“Kind of sounds fun.”

As it turned out, paintball involved dressing up in army gear and shooting each other with paint pellets with scary-looking rifles. We were supposed to run and dodge and hide behind bales of hay to avoid getting hit. It was not fun.

I took a paint bullet to the safety goggles within the first five minutes and could no longer see, which made avoiding getting fake killed near impossible. Teddy, a self-proclaimed pacifist, refused to shoot his fellow gamers and was gunned down early too. So we sat on the sidelines, eating Doritos, discussing gun control, and agreeing that violent video games would be society's undoing.

We laughed and talked and spent almost every day together for a month, avoiding the topic of our awful timing—I was about to move across the country, and he was starting a new job at an architecture firm in Manhattan. We were determined to beat the long-distance relationship odds, and initially, there was great romance in sexting and stolen weekends together.

Then it started to get annoying to him that I couldn’t even text reliably when I was on call, and I didn’t like that he rarely came to San Francisco.

He claimed that the time difference made it more logical for me to visit him, since I could take a redeye on Friday nights and a late flight home on Sundays. Going the opposite direction put him on the redeye Sunday nights, which ruined him for the following week. We hung on for well over a year, which, to be honest, was about six months too long. I stayed far past the point where there was any love left because breaking up would be fraught with drama, and having a vague connection to Teddy simplified my life in San Francisco—with dating anyone else off the table, I could focus all my energy on medicine.

When we finally broke up, it was because in three months’ time, I’d canceled the four-weekend rendezvous we were supposed to have, and even I couldn’t keep up the pretense that we had a viable relationship.

It turned out that our breakup didn't change my life at all, other than providing a sudden absence of guilt. I never wanted to explain to Teddy that part of the reason I canceled some of our weekend plans was my devotion to our Ultimate Frisbee game. He never would have understood.

Teddy didn’t understand a lot of things about me, like why I chose to walk to the field rather than take public transportation. Josh and I both liked to be outside, and walking four miles through the hilly city never seemed like a waste of time because it allowed us to unwind and talk. Most of our friends gratefully hopped in an Uber or onto a bike or found almost any other way to the park that didn’t require tromping around for an hour, but we liked the chance to catch up without everyone else around. Sometimes it meant we were talking about them—not that we’d ever admit it.

* * *

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