Page 11 of Green
And that is why I will never watch that video.
“Alright, alright,” my father grumbled.
“I’m sure he’ll come around eventually. Men are slower to figure these things out than women are. Isn’t that right, Dad?”
“We’re not the brightest creatures when it comes to matters of the heart. But, yes. I’m sure he’ll come around. You’re adorable.”
Great, so it wasthatobvious that Theo was not in love with me? Even to my parents—who are supposed to be delusional about how attractive I am to every single person on the planet?
“Um. I have to go pack. So you guys are okay with the Andrew thing? You’ll talk to Sandy and Gary about it?”
“Of course of course. It would be a nice gesture if you send them an e-mail or something, just so they know there’s no bitterness.”
“Sure. They still don’t know about me and Theo, right? The marriage thing, I mean?”
“No, it seems like Andrew never told them, so we’ve never mentioned it.”
“Okay.”
“Darling,” my Mom practically sang a lullaby. “Hang in there with Theo. He really is perfect for you. He’ll come around eventually.”
I took a deep breath, pushed my chair in under the kitchen table and started to walk out to go pack up what was surely going to be a much lighter suitcase than I came with because I was returning to LA with almost no remaining ego.
“Sure. Thanks.”
Did it bother me that my own parents assumed that I was in unrequited love with my best friend? A little…I just lied. It bothered me a lot. But only when I thought about it. So I was not going to think about it.
Did it bother me that hardly anyone had ever assumed that we were a couple when we were out together in LA? Yes, it did. Our neighbors never questioned our friendly housemate status. When we went out to grab a meal with Chloe and Ethan at Winsome, our place on Sunset, the waitresses did not hesitate to flirt with him when I was sitting next to him. I was not going to think about that either.
I guess it just never really occurred tomethat Theo and I being a real couple was an option. Since other people couldn’t conceive of it, I figured he couldn’t either. Case in point: his nickname for me was Grandma. Betty White would probably have a better chance with him than I would.
Leaving aside the fact that I had a boyfriend when I met him—he had just hooked up with my neighbor. Nikki was a beach volleyball player. She was a tall, athletic, aggressively pretty Nordic goddess. I figured that was his type. I was a petite messy-haired brunette whose main form of exercise consisted of walking around campus and to the store to buy ice cream.
Once I became friends with him, he somehow managed to get me to go for hikes with him around Griffith Park and for the occasional dreadful jog around Elysian Park. He’d always used me to gauge the prototypes of his fitness tech products for “the fitness novice.” I usually just recommended that they should somehow make people feel better about their shape or fitness level no matter what.Yer welcome, world.
But now that I was a single lady in the city that never sags, I supposed I would have to up my game. By that, I meant jogging to and from the store to buy ice cream, and strolling around the house while eating it. I couldn’t believe I was technically single. Or wait—I was technically married, but I was single in practice. Emotionally single. Mentally single. Physically single.
Crap.
It was time to surgically remove that third nipple, so I wouldn’t cling to it as an excuse for never taking my shirt off in front of another man again.
That was why I purchased a journal at the Cleve airport bookstore and I was going to fill it with a list of all the reasons why we should always be Just Friends. Just friends who would be secretly married to each other for one more year, for reasons that had everything to do with friendship and absolutely nothing to do with romantic love or hot sex, or the fact that he had the most beautiful naked body I had ever blurrily-seen in person.
* * *
By the time my plane had landed on the tarmac at the Burbank Airport, I had had two Bloody Marys, filled twenty pages of my new journal with excellent reasons why I should fall out of love with my best friend, and I was feeling pretty darned optimistic about my future. I was particularly excited about my near future. I hadn’t told Theo about Andrew, because he was busy being a workaholic up in the Bay Area all week and I didn’t want to bother him. I would have our floor of the house to myself, so I was going to ask the cab driver to stop off at Ralphs on the way home so I could grab some donuts and maybe a package of sliced cheddar cheese, then I would slip into my jammies and listen to break-up songs while writing in my journal in bed. It was going to be glorious, and Theo wouldn’t be around to tell me that I should be having a raw cacao/fresh mint/avocado/chia seed/almond milk smoothie instead.
As I rolled my carry-on bag towards the little baggage claim/waiting area of Terminal B, I feasted my eyes upon something even more glorious than a box of donuts and cozy pajamas. An A-plus man butt in a nice pair of black jeans. It belonged to a guy who was talking on his cell phone, wearing a black baseball cap, which he had on backwards, and it was making my tummy do somersaults.Goodbye useless third nipple, hello marvelous man butt.
His tight white T-shirt was stretched across his back so that I could see the outline of his deltoid muscles—or were those the lats?—and who cares because oh the beautiful tanned muscular arms and oh the way he was standing was just so…OH. SHIT.
He turned around, spotted me, smirked when he caught me checking him out. He told whoever was on the phone with him that he had to go and hung up immediately, never taking his eyes off of me. He looked happy to see me, and then he remembered that he was here for me because I was supposed to be sad.
I remembered that I was sad about Andrew and I was sad because I needed to distance myself from Theo and I was sad that it was going to be so hard for me to do that when he was so fucking considerate although I was furious that I’d just accidentally eye-fucked him in public and mortified that he totally saw it.
He was supposed to be in Palo Alto, frantically working on a presentation for his key investors. What was he doing at the Burbank airport having a cute butt and seeing me ogle it?! He usually wore an old Toronto Blue Jays baseball cap. I guess I’d never seen those jeans on him before. I suppose that ever since we’d moved in together, I’d been forcing myself to avoid looking in the general direction of his butt when his butt was around. He’d been out of town so much those past few months, I actually didn’t recognize him.
I stopped two feet in front of him, frowning.
