Page 47 of Friends Don't Kiss

“Colt?”

“Huh?” Oh, yeah. Valerie. Why the fuck is she talking about my ex? “What?” I snap.

She turns the dial of the radio down, and I feel like taking her hand in mine and keeping it there. Squeezing it to show her how much we all love her.

“Why’d you and Valerie break up?”

I frown. “What’s that gotta do with anything?”

She tucks her left foot under her, so her body is twisted toward me, like when she’s about to start a long conversation. “What happened?”

“Been years, grasshopper. Who cares?”

“Maybe I do.”

I’m not going to ask why. Despite the poor way she’s been treating me, she still has best friend privileges. “It just ran its course.”

“Ha!” she says softly.

I raise an eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

She spreads her hands like I just made her point. “Relationships run their course, and then people are over each other. Friendships don’t.” If there’s anything I know about Kiara, it’s that she likes to examine all aspects of a problem in a scientific way. I can see where her thoughts took her from me refusing toget it over with,back to me asking her to date me. She’s trying to understand my logic.

The thing is, there is no logic.

“We were never friends, Val and I.” If Kiara thinks she can convince me we can be friends with benefits, like she says, she’s got the wrong angle with Valerie. “And she was nothing like you,” I add to drive my point home.

Kiara untucks her foot and looks straight ahead. With a bitterness in her voice that sounds a lot like jealousy, she snaps, “Didn’t she move in with you?”

Yeah, she did. Kiara got that right. It was Valerie’s decision, not mine. But I’m not getting into that with Kiara. Somehow I don’t think bringing my past relationships into the conversation is going to help my case at this juncture. “She moved in, and then she moved out,” I answer Kiara’s question.

“What happened?”

“She didn’t like hanging out with me, I guess. You’d have to ask her.” I don’t share with Kiara the part about Valerie wanting us to move away. It’s irrelevant. Kiara is the one person I’d follow anywhere.

“Didn’t shetellyou?”

There had been some shouting, but honestly, at that point, I was done listening. I’d stopped listening to whatever she said right around the time she decided I spent too much time playing video games and we should take up backgammon, and when I came back from work that day my gaming stuff was stashed in a box next to the trash. It might have been that week that she moved out. “I don’t think we really gelled,” I tell Kiara.

“What about Country Club?”

From a live-in girlfriend to someone I’ve never met, she’s giving me whiplash. “What’s with all the questions?”

“I’m trying to figure out why you won’t… help me out. What’s wrong with me? I’m not asking for anything more than… you know…”

Her hands move around each other in little tumbles. Is this her representation of people sleeping together? Despite me, a smile forms in my belly. I pinch my lips to keep it from spreading to my face. “Thansex?” I ask, letting the word pop out like a mini BB gun.

“Yeah! Sex,” she repeats, drawing out thex. “You have a lot of experience, and you don’t seem to need to looooove the people you sleep with. So…”

“Nope.”

She sighs. “So let me recap. I won’t date you so we don’t ruin our friendship and you won’t… sleep with me… because…?”

Because I already feel more for you than friendship. And when we sleep together—ifwe sleep together—it’s gonna have to mean pretty much the same for both of us.

It’ll mean the beginning of forever. Or at least, an intention toward that.

I make the mistake of glancing at her. Her eyes are watery when she says, “You don’t find me attractive.”

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