Page 17 of Friendshipped
Rob chuckles. “This keeps getting worse.”
“Lexi said she wished she had known I was coming so the three of us could have hung out. I know she was trying to restore our friendship. But the last thing I wanted was to hang out with Lexi and her new boyfriend. We didn’t talk until Christmas break, and even then, it was stilted.
“It took all the way until summer break for us to put that whole fiasco behind us. If I thought the almost-kiss that will never be mentioned was bad, I was so dead wrong. That almost-date gave me the wake-up call of a lifetime. Lexi sees me as a friend. I nearly lost our friendship twice. And now I have her back. I just have to learn how to squash these feelings until they shrivel up and die.”
“Not sure it works that way,” Rob says, always at home with facts, even ones that are impossible to digest.
“Well, I’m hoping it will. I’ve got no other choice.
“Stinks to be you,” Rob says. “Usually relationships like yours with Lexi tip or fizzle before adulthood.”
“Tip or fizzle?” I ask.
“Yeah. You know. Tip toward romance, or fizzle and the two drift apart.”
I hum thoughtfully, my breath coming out with a little more strain after running more than three miles.
Rob looks over sympathetically. He’s been through his own share of heartbreak over the years with Laura.
The barn comes into view and Rob smiles big. “This place is great!” he says, “I had forgotten about it.”
We run past the barn to the old farmhouse, surrounded by trees and grass in need of tending, knee-high and wild, but the building has amazing potential beneath all the unkempt surface.
“I’m not sure you heard what happened when Mr. Finch passed away. It was during our sophomore year in college. They did an estate sale. His two grown children live in Minnesota and Florida now, so it just sits here rotting a bit, but it’s still amazing. They still own it, or one of them does, but it’s basically forgotten and neglected.”
The wraparound porch makes me imagine a life here—with kids running around and a couple sitting in the hot afternoon sipping cold drinks in chairs as the sounds of children and dogs rise up around them. Maybe the kids collect lightning bugs at night and put them in mason jars before the dad says it’s time to head to bed. It’s a good life—the one I always imagine when I stop here.
“This place sure needs some TLC,” Rob says.
“Yeah,” I say. “With the right touch, though.”
“It would be something else,” he says.
I’m glad he sees it. Something about another person seeing the potential inflates my heart with hope. It’s not even my house. These thoughts seem to come out of nowhere whenever I’m here.
We turn back and retrace our route toward home.
“Eventually, Lexi was the one to break things off with Guy and she didn’t really even seem sad after six months of dating him exclusively.”
“I guess he wasn’t theGuyfor her,” Rob jokes.
“Har har,” I say. “During that second semester of our Junior year, I had given my impromptu date proposal a lot of thought. I went out with a few women after Christmas and tried getting serious with one. It wasn’t fair to her. I didn’t want to treat her like a placeholder, so I broke it off.
“All semester I looked forward to summer when I’d be home with Lex, just hoping I hadn’t ruined our friendship. You know, she’s the only woman I’ve ever pictured myself growing old with.”
I look over at Rob. He nods. We turn back onto the main road heading toward my neighborhood.
I’m not about to admit I would still give anything to have the assurance that Lexi and I would be grandparents together someday. That’s the kind of thought I need to take a sledgehammer to.
“What a story!” he says. “I can’t believe you’ve never told me before today.”
“Sorry,” I say. “It’s not that I don’t trust you. You’re the only one who even knows I ever had any feelings beyond friendship for Lexi. Well, outside of Lexi and Guy, I guess. I think I just need to leave it all in the past.”
Like a message in a bottle, I attempt to roll up my feelings for Lexi, stuff that scroll deep into thick glass and cork it. I picture myself heaving the bottle far from shore and letting the waves carry all notions of a future with her off into oblivion.
I’m here. I’m going to make myself focus on what we do have. I’m her friend. Comrade. Confidante. Coworker. Vanilla. Beige. Switzerland. And every other form of neutral known to mankind.
7
