Page 3 of Green
“Hmmm…” Still staring.
I slowly turned around to face her, wondering if her eyesight really was messed-up.
“Do you do squats?”
“Nope.”
“Do you work out a lot?”
“I run. I’m a runner.”
“I bet you look good in pants.” She wasn’t being flirtatious in the least. She said it as though she were saying something very profound.
“I’d love to show you how good I look in pants. Soon.”
After three seconds, she burst into a fit of laughter again, and eventually I was wearing pants, but she had completely forgotten to check out how my butt looked in them because she was too busy eating potato chips and talking about ordering pizza.
I completely forgot about going home to study.
She completely forgot to order pizza.
I had no idea where the girl across the hall had disappeared to and somehow didn’t care that my phone and keys and wallet were locked in her apartment.
The boyfriend’s clothes did fit me. She said his name was Andrew, that he lived “back home” in Cleveland, that they’d known each other their whole lives, their parents were all friends, their dads worked together, and they’d been seeing each other “every couple of months” since she came out to L.A. She said it was perfect. I didn’t ask why, I was just glad that he’d left his pants here and that he wasn’t around.
I stayed with her until morning, helped her out when she got nauseous, talked her down when her mild pot-brownie-induced freakout hit, watched about eight episodes ofBob’s Burgerswith her and woke up on the sofa with her asleep on top of me, her head on my chest. She was thoroughly unconscious.
I lay awake, perfectly still, for maybe fifteen minutes. Her arms were wrapped around me, her body pressed against mine. Her hair smelled like fresh citrus fruits and pretty flowers and sexy musk and I wanted so badly to run my fingers through it. I wanted to touch her and kiss her and take off her clothes and taste her and make her feel things that her absent boyfriend had surely never made her feel. But I didn’t. I kept my hands clasped behind my head.
I don’t know what it was, exactly, that made her trust me enough to let me into her apartment late at night—besides the fact that she was stoned, I was clearly not hiding any weapons on my person and we both knew Nikki. I don’t know what made me want to be her friend. I’d never really had a female friend before, not since I was a little kid. I also don’t know what it was that caused her to wriggle around slowly, and moan softly in her sleep—if she was dreaming or if she thought she was with her boyfriend. But I closed my eyes and clenched my fists and recited mathematical formulas in my head.
That did the trick.
When she awoke, she bolted up and declared that she just remembered that she had a spare key for the apartment across the hall because she watered Nikki’s plants when she was out of town. She didn’t seem to realize that she had been lying on top of me. She didn’t seem to remember it, either.
Ever.
I tried to forget about it every single day for about a month.
I still thought about it from time to time for months after that.
For years, neither Gemma nor I had seen each other naked since the night we met.
Unless you count the times my stupid brain imagined what she looked like completely naked, without my permission. If you count those times, we’re talking, conservatively…at least once every single day. In my defense—my twenty year-old brain imagined every attractive woman naked, usually without my permission, and some of the not-so-attractive women too.
But that was never going to stop me from being the best friend she’d ever had.
* * *
A week after meeting, Gemma and I had seen each other every day after classes, I’d nicknamed her Grandma Kelly, she’d repeatedly told me that the only reason she was hanging out with a guy who’s prettier than she is was that I’m also a bigger dork than her (neither of which is true), and I asked her if she wanted to move in with me.
When I’d first moved to LA from Toronto, I used a chunk of my trust fund money for the down payment on a three-bedroom house in Echo Park. It was an investment. Risky, I suppose, but it had worked out very well. Property in the hipster neighborhood continued to climb in value, my renters covered my mortgage payments and then some, and I got a line of credit to finance development of my app. I also put money into a financial portfolio, which I tweaked now and then, and not to brag or anything—but I’m kind of awesome at making money.
The house is close to USC, but not in a sketchy neighborhood, and Gemma was tired of living with three other students in a two-bedroom apartment in Koreatown. I didn’t want to keep running into Nikki who lived across the hall from her. Also, I just wanted Gemma around all the time. Even though I was charging her half of what she had been paying at the apartment, she said she would only move in because I already had two other tenants.
Chloe and Ethan were married USC grad students. Chloe was getting her Masters in Product Development Engineering, then began working for an industrial design firm in Santa Monica. Ethan was getting his Masters in Sustainable Design at the School of Architecture, then got a job at a firm in Pasadena. They were my dream tenants. I’d started renting out the downstairs unit of the duplex to them a week after I’d moved in, but barely spoke to them aside from polite chit-chat. Once Gem moved in, we all started having dinner together out back almost every night. We’d been a happy family ever since.
I can’t say for sure why Andrew had no complaints when, after knowing me for two years, Gemma told him that she was going to marry me so that I could get a green card and she could live rent-free for three years. I suppose I’d been more focused on getting my startup funded to wonder if he just didn’t think of me as a threat to their relationship, or if he didn’t care enough about what Gemma was up to when she wasn’t with him. I asked her if I should have a talk with him, but she said it wouldn’t be necessary. I tried to stay out of her relationship with him as much as possible. The less I knew about it the better. Maybe that was how Andrew felt about her friendship with me.
