Page 29 of Hard to Pretend

I actually hated to call it a day. I hated to leave and go back to my place, but I had plans with Jonas. I wasn’t going to be one of those guys who blew off his best friend, because he was hanging out with a hot guy. It didn’t make leaving him any easier. Especially when I got back upstairs and saw Chris’s shirt still balled up on my bed. I picked it up to fold it. That was all I planned on doing with it, but somehow, I ended up holding the fabric to my nose and taking a deep whiff, inhaling the smell of his sweat, deodorant,and whatever else it was that made Chris smell the tempting way he did.

I took a few deep whiffs and forced myself to fold it and place it on top of my dresser.

My eyes kept traveling to it. Before I could stop myself, I snapped a picture of the shirt and sent it to Chris.

Seb

it’s my hostage until you return mine

Chris

guess that means we need to hang out again, huh?

Seb

guess it does

once i know what this week looks like, i’ll send you a text

Chris responded with the thumbs up emoji, and I pocketed my phone. I needed to straighten up my place before Jonas got there. I knew that he wouldn’t judge the mess, but I would. It was bad enough that Chris had seen my place looking like a disaster. If Jonas showed up with my place looking the way it did, he’d have questions. Like what I was doing all day thatkept me from cleaning up. Because Jonas knew me. He knew how I was raised. He knew that I’d been raised to always clean up before company, even if that company was someone who had known me since I had Spiderman bed sheets.

I did a quick clean up. I put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher and turned it on. I folded up the lemon blanket and put it neatly on the back of the sofa. I picked up the clothes from my bedroom floor and put them in my hamper where they belonged. It took less than twenty minutes, and my apartment was back to looking the way it should. Maybe not as nice as it did the first time Chris came over, but at least I wouldn’t want to put a blindfold on Jonas so he couldn’t see the wreck.

I was still straightening the yellow throw pillows when I heard my door open.

“Seriously man, how many times do I have to tell you that you don’t have to make the pillows perfect for little old me?”

I turned around and saw the teasing look on Jonas’s face. I stuck my tongue out at him, but I did stop messing with the pillows.

Not that it mattered, because Jonas flopped down on the couch and immediately grabbed one of the perfectly positioned pillows and put it on his lap. I sat down beside him, and the other pillow sunk down a little. There went all of my hard work.

“What did you get up to last night?” Jonas asked after he finished updating me on the latest theories about his haunted apartment. “Tried calling you, but no answer.”

“I was on a date.”

“A real date or another fake date with your fake boyfriend?”

I rolled my eyes at him. “A real date,” I answered, the small grin on my face growing larger as I thought about my date. My perfect date. “It was with the fake boyfriend, though.”

“Really?” Jonas rotated around almost comically to look at me, his eyes wide. It reminded me of him at twelve, the two of us sitting on my twin size bed, as I admitted to him that I had my first real crush. Just like then, he was looking at me with such an intensity that it made me want to spill all the beans. He was obviously waiting on me to do just that. When it took too long, he started gesturing wildly with his hand, urging me to speak. “Tell me everything.”

“We went out to eat at that seafood place over by the beach,” I started. I told him about the walk on the beach and about running into his friends at Dana’s that morning. I told him about antiquing and all the time I spent with him that day. The entire time, he sat and listened with a sparkle in his eyes. He looked almost as excited as I felt. The only things I didn’t tell him was the sex stuff. We had a tendency to oversharein my friend group, but I wanted to keep parts of Chris to myself.

It felt private in a way that sex never had before.

A few beats of silence passed between us when I finished, ending my story with the kiss in Chris’s car when he dropped me off. (Okay, I left out the part where I also smelled his shirt, but who wouldn’t leave that part out of the romantic retelling of their amazing date?)

“You like him,” Jonas noted after he was sure I was done.

“Yeah,” I confessed. “I mean, maybe. I think I do.”

I knew I did, but it made me feel vulnerable. Liking someone meant lowering my guard, letting someone in. It meant risking rejection. What if Chris didn’t like me back the way I liked him? It would suck.

“You’re overthinking it, aren’t you?” Jonas asked with a knowing look in his eyes. Out of all of my friends, he’d be the one that would understand that. Jonas overthought everything. “What’s holding you back?”

I shrugged. That answer wasn’t good enough for Jonas. I wondered if there was a part of him that was taking pleasure in this, because I never let him off with just a shrug when something was threatening to eat him alive. It was different, though. When it was Jonas, he was typically hiding something that was threatening to send him into a panic attack. Itusually lead him down the path of self-destructive thought—or even just self-destruction in general.

I was just being insecure.

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