Page 24 of A Play For The Heart
“Nope. I’m going to my room. No more questions.”
“Friends share things with each other.” Maren whines.
“You know more than enough.”
Maren groans as I walk away, leaving her in the living room to watch her action movie. She can ask Gerard as many questions as she would like.
I emerge from my lair after hours of scrolling on TikTok, my stomach rumbling with hunger. I quickly make a cup of tea to warm up since Maren keeps the apartment at an arctic temperature and my poor circulation can't keep up.
Maren’s on the couch, reading, when I flop down onto the other side of it with a loud sigh, grateful for the fact that my roommate is mostly normal and harbors no weird, secret hobbies. The snacks from earlier are still spread out on the table and I pick at what’s left. I don’t have the energy to make a real meal, so it's more snacks.
Maren sets her book down on the coffee table with a thud, entirely unaware of my presence. She must have been very enthralled in the book to not have noticed my grand—albeit dramatic—entrance into the living room. I glance at the cover to see if it’s something I’ve read but don’t recognize anything other than a half-naked man posing on the front. A romance then. She looks almost angry at whatever she read in the book, which doesn’t shock me if it was the part where they get all gushy about their feelings. She describes those scenes back to me so angrily, but she continues to read them. It makes me think she secretly loves them and hates that she loves them simultaneously.
I’ve learned a few things, outside of the love-hate for romance novels, about my roommate since I moved in about a month ago.
One, Maren Rivers is as loyal as they come. Once you’re a part of her inner circle, she will take a bullet for you. No questions asked.
Two, she doesn't like to talk about her feelings. At all. I think she would rather have her teeth pulled one by one without laughing gas than talk about her own emotions. I know she has them, because I have witnessed the annoyed emotion every time she encounters a slow walker or someone who chews with their mouth open, and I had a front-row seat for the flabbergasted emotion earlier when I told her I was a virgin. They exist.
Third, you do not want to get on Maren Rivers' bad side. It’s hard to get there, but once you’re there it’s nearly impossible to leave. She refuses to deal with people who lack attributes that she deems as common sense, like being courteous to others or minding your own damn business (her words). The last one is ironic considering how much she likes to know my business.
Finally, Maren will tell you how it is. Not in a mean way, but she’s honest, which I appreciate in a friendship more than she will ever know.
I’ve personally learned just how honest Maren can be, like how she straight-up told me to break up with Declan. Even though I’ve experienced her honesty firsthand, I’m still astonished to hear the words that come out of her mouth from the other side of the couch.
“Henry has a crush on you.”
I nearly choke on my chamomile tea and spill it all over myself.Where the hell had that come from?I’m trying to enjoy my tea in peace and tranquility, and Maren decides this is the moment to take my Zen and throw it right out the window.
“He what?” I sputter out, placing my tea on the coffee table to avoid any third-degree burns.
“He has feelings for you,” she says simply as if it’s the most nonchalant, normal statement in the world and not causing my brain to cease to function. This must be her way of getting back at me for my information bomb earlier. She was shocked so now it's her turn to shock me.
“How do you know this? Did he tell you?”
First of all, there is no way that Henry has feelings for me. Even if he did, which is a ridiculous thought to even consider, he definitely wouldn’t tell Maren. He met her once and they didn’t even have a conversation without me present. It took me months in undergrad to get him to open up. The man is a geode: damn near impossible to crack, but what's on the inside is worth the effort. It was a year into our friendship before I knew his favorite pizza topping. It's olives. He’s a monster.
“No, he didn’t. But I have a radar for these things. I just know.”
“You just know…?” I ask, skeptically.
She looks over from where she’s sitting. Apparently, she’s finally noticed the shock and disbelief in my voice because she faces me, looks me straight in the eyes, and repeats herself.
“Yes, I sensed it. Henry has romantic feelings for you.” There isn't a hint of humor on her face. Just seriousness and confidence.
“Maren, I don’t want to discredit your so-called radar on these types of things,” I say gently, even though internally I am discrediting her entirely because she’s insane, “but I really don’t think Henry feels that way about me. We're best friends, that’s it.”
There. That should settle that conversation. She understands that as Henry's best friend, I would be able to recognize if he was into me. Which he is not. There are no romantic feelings coming from Henry Parker aimed in my direction. Zero. Zilch. Nada. He has not shown any of the classic symptoms of having a crush. According to science, you need data to back up a hypothesis, and she doesn’t have any. Take that, Maren. Let me see you try to argue against science as a scientist. Checkmate.
“I saw the way he looked at you when you weren’t looking at the bar. And it wasn’t in the way someone simply looks at their best friend. He gazed at you as if you were the sun, the moon, and the stars and someone had just handed him a telescope. We’ve recently established that I’m never wrong. Keep that in mind.”
With that, she gets off the couch and nearly skips toward her bedroom, leaving me sitting in the living room, dazed and confused. I feel like she just checkmated me right back.
I stare up at the ceiling above my bed.The sun, the moon, and the stars?Maren has been reading too much poetry or something because that may be the cheesiest thing that has ever come out of her mouth.
No matter how hard I try to fall asleep, my mind keeps wandering back to what she said. I’ve known Henry for three years and not once has he made a move or even hinted he wanted to make a move. There were no lingering touches or heated looks. Three years is ample time to tell me that he has feelings if he has feelings. It’s not like I was dating left and right or was in a relationship. By that logic, it would only be right to assume that he has no feelings and Maren took an edible or something that was making her speak like a lunatic. But the more I stew in the whole thing, the more muddled everything becomes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Henry speak to the opposite sex in anything more than a casual ‘hey we’re friends or acquaintances' kind of way and he surely hasn’t spoken to me about anyone. No late-night chats about which girl he is crushing on or any stories about his romps around town. I’ve never heard of him asking anyone out on a date, even though I know any woman within a ten-mile radius would say yes. It was just never a topic we discussed, and then once I started dating Declan it really became a taboo topic. But now, as my eyes begin to go heavy and I drift off to sleep, I can’t help but wonder if it just truly never came up, or if he avoided it.
Henry cages me in between his arms, backing me into the counter. My hands grip the cool countertop for stability. As his bicep grazes my bare skin, the sensation strikes through me like a lightning bolt. I sharply inhale a gasp at the featherlight touch, and my heart starts to race, nearly beating out of my chest. I attempt to lean away from him, but he has me trapped between him and the kitchen island.
