Page 21 of My First Time Fling

And that was just as important. He’d clearly changed his mind about something when he’d pulled away. And he kept saying he was sorry. That wasn’t something you said to someone you wanted to keep making out with, or someone you wanted to date. That was something you said to someone you were trying to let down easy.

I knew it was stupid of me to be so excited about the kiss. And it had been dumb to have a crush on him in the first place, because it just made this situation so much harder. But it had been so tempting, so easy to do, because crushing on Mark had made me feel happy for the first time in a while.

Tanner and I had broken up over two months ago. I was past the worst of it, but it was still hard sometimes. I got these moments where something would make me think of him, and I’d realize, again, that my whole imagined future with him was never going to happen. I knew that he’d cheated on me, I knew I was better off without him, and yet it felt like a punch in the gut to re-realize that he hadn’t cared enough about me to want to be with me.

Tanner had been living in one reality—a reality where he didn’t love me. And I’d been living in one where he did. It sucked to be reminded that his reality had turned out to be right, mine had been wrong, and I had to accept that I was living in his world where we weren’t together, instead of my world where we still would have been.

Not that I even wanted to be with Tanner anymore. I was too mad, too hurt, for that. I guess it was just hard to be single again. To feelrejectedagain. About the only silver lining I’d been able to find was that at least I wasn’t anxious anymore, wondering what Tanner really felt for me. Now I knew for sure.

And then Mark had come along, and he’d somehow become all the silver lining I’d needed. A friend and a crush all wrapped up in one sexy package, and he’d been so nice to me. So cute. So funny. Of course I’d fallen for him. Even though I’d known better.

And now he might be trying to back away from me, regretting kissing me. Afraid I was going to try to jump on him, make him my boyfriend, when the kiss had been a mistake. But I couldn’t stand the thought of Mark distancing himself and fading out of my life. How could I keep that from happening?

I rounded a corner, and there he was, all six foot three of him, bracing against the front gates of Chatham University while he stretched his calf muscles. My stomach dropped, and I had to take a moment to remember how to breathe before walking forward.

Dammit, why did he have to be so hot? Why couldn’t I stop imagining those legs tangled up with mine, his arms wrapped around me?

“Hey!” I called out, as Mark turned and caught a glimpse of me over his shoulder. I started forward, hoping it wasn’t too obvious that I’d been staring. “What’s up?”

Mark smiled, and I felt ten percent better immediately. At least he was smiling. That had to be a good sign, right?

“Hey,” he said. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d flaked on me, and I was going to have to hunt you down.”

“Nah, just stopped at the cafe to catch up with Brooklyn for a minute. He just got back into town last night.”

Another ten percent better. If Mark were trying to distance himself from me, he wouldn’t say something like ‘hunt you down,’ right? At least, I wouldn’t. But who knew how straight guys thought? Or bi guys, I supposed, or whatever Mark was. All I knew was how I would have acted.

“Oh, cool, I didn’t know he was back in town.” Mark had seen Brooklyn a few times over the month when we’d met for our runs, and they’d gotten pretty friendly. “Should we get going?”

I nodded, he started his running watch, and then we were off. We spent the first few minutes talking about the route, deciding how, exactly, we were going to do our ten miles. Then we lapsed into silence.

Comfortable silence on Mark’s part, as far as I could tell. Maybe he was just better at hiding it than I was, though, because I felt like I was about to explode. Every step we took without talking about the kiss wound me up together and tighter. By mile four, I was spinning scenarios in my head where wenevertalked about the kiss, and ended up best friends for life, and when I asked him about it on my deathbed, he wouldn’t even remember it because of dementia or something, and I'd have wasted my whole life wondering what it had meant.

I couldn’t let that happen.

“So can we talk about it?” I asked, surprising myself. I felt like the words had come out of my mouth before I’d actually decided to speak. Mark glanced at me, winced, and looked away.

Well, that wasn’t a good sign. Ten percent worse.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding and frowning. “Sorry. I know I should have said something about it earlier. It just felt awkward.”

One thousand percent worse.

“Right, yeah,” I said, rushing to agree. He really regretted it, didn’t he? He just hadn’t known how to tell me. Fuck. “But it doesn’t have to be awkward. I mean, we can just pretend it never happened.”

Mark looked at me in surprise, his eyes widening for a moment. Was he shocked that I wasn’t trying to put up more of a fight? How desperate did he think I was?

Actually, I didn’t think I wanted the answer to that.

Then he sort of shook his head, and gave me what looked like the world’s saddest smile. A pity smile. Great.

“Okay, yeah.” He turned and looked forward again. “Cool.”

That was it

He wasn’t even going to give me an ‘I’m just not into you that way’ speech? I was just supposed to intuit all of it by myself?

I mean, sure, I could do that. I was very adept at envisioning humiliating scenarios in excruciating detail. But still, he couldn’t even be bothered to give me a proper let-down?

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