Page 79 of Love, Academically
“Did you tell her you want to take her on a proper, non-fake date?”
“No,” Rhys looked at the bottle in his hands. “I didn’t get the chance.”
“Because?” Dan prompted.
Rhys slammed the bottle on the table.
“I spent the entire night looking at her, touching her. I took her back to hers, we kissed, she undid my trousers and I stopped her.” Rhys’s voice was too loud, and echoed around his sterile grey kitchen. Lila had different coloured glasses and floral tea towels and he had dull white plates and perfunctory cutlery.
“She practically had her hands on your dick and you stopped her?”
Dan’s lips were pressed tightly together, but his eyes sparkled with mirth.
“Dan,” Rhys warned. He did not need to be laughed at right now.
“I’m sorry, man,” Dan said. “And then she kicked you out?”
“Yeah. That’s about it.”
Dan tilted his head. “She was obviously up for it. Why did you stop her?”
It was a question he had asked himself a million times, in a million different ways, since Lila’s door closed in his face.
“Did you not want to? Because that’s all right, man,” Dan said, his eyebrows pulling together in a concerned frown.
Rhys gave him alook.
“All right, just checking! You’ve not had a girl for so long, I thought perhaps—”
“Perhaps what?” Rhys raised an eyebrow at him. Where was he going with this?
“That you were ace or aro or whatever,” Dan said, draining his bottle of beer.
“No,” he said, looking at the table. “I wanted to, Dan. I really fucking wanted to.”
Dan grabbed another beer from the fridge and passed it to Rhys.
“Then why didn’t you?”
“Because I didn’t want her to think it was expected. I didn’t want her to think that the fake date stretched to sex. I didn’t want to take advantage,” he said.
Dan leaned against the kitchen counter and crossed his arms.
“Did you treat it like a real date?”
“Did I hold her hand, put my arm around her, stare at her all fucking night?” Rhys said, voice rising again. “Yeah, I did.”
“Did you tell her that you wanted to go out for real? That you actually liked her?” Dan’s voice was quiet.
“I was going to, but then we were kissing, and…” Rhys glanced out of the window.
“So that’s your next move. You explain,” Dan said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“She probably won’t answer the phone to me.”
Dan assessed him. “Tell me you’ve called her? Texted her?”
Rhys shook his head.
