Page 58 of Hard to Forgive

According to Jonas, there was only one final step before he could feel like we were reallyreal.

I had to meet his friends.

He spent the better part of the week making sure I understood how important Thursdays were to him and his friends. He told me the whole origin story, and he told me that while he wanted to spend a lot of time with me, there would be weeks where he would want to do this without me. He seemed so nervous about it that I had to assure him that I wouldn’t be offended if he wentout with his friends without me. I was a big boy. I had friends of my own. A very limited number of people that I’d actually consider friends, but they did exist.

I was fairly certain I could get Mariah or Isabel to hang out with me if I grew desperately lonely while Jonas was out with his friends.

I had kind of hoped we’d be together a few more weeks before I had to jump that particular hurdle, but Jonas didn’t want to wait. He wanted the most important people in his life to know who I was. I guessed it made sense. After all, I’d already met both of his parents, and he’d met my uncle. (I hadn’t brought him around to my parents’ house yet, but he didn’t seemed to mind that.) He made the plans for me to join them on Thursday, and then, when I started freaking out, he came over and managed to talk me off the edge.

He also helped plan my outfit: jeans and a black tee. Apparently, I was overthinking it. I wanted to make a good impression, though. What if they didn’t like me? What if they couldn’t forgive me for everything that had happened in high school?

“I promise you they’ve forgiven you,” Jonas assured me when I voiced my worries to him. “The only one of them that ever holds a grudge is Eli, but he’s always been of the opinion that if he’s holding a grudge for someone else and they’ve moved on, he’ll move on. So the second I told him that we’d talked about it and I’d been able to put it behind me, he put it behind us.”

I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe him sobadly, but he’d told me stories about how close he was with the guys I was meeting that night. He squeezed my shoulder in an attempt to reassure me, and I sighed. “Are you sure we can’t go to Goliath? I think I’d feel more comfortable there.”

“No, because I want them to get to know you,” he repeated for what had to be the tenth time since we’d gotten back to my place after work. “You can’t hear anything in Goliath.”

“That’s the point,” I muttered. I regretted it the moment he gave me a hurt look. I could see the wheels turning in his head. I could almost hear his next question.If you don’t want to do this—“That’s not me saying I don’t want to meet your friends.” I cut him off before he had a chance to second guess any of this. More importantly, I cut him off before he had the chance to work himself up over my worries. I drew in a deep breath. He’d been pretty honest with me about his concerns and worries. I owed the same to him, especially if we wanted to make this work. I exhaled slowly before confessing. “I’m just nervous.”

“I thought I was supposed to be the anxious one,” he teased. “Now c’mon. If we get there after Matthew, I willneverlive it down.”

“He’s the one that’s late to everything, right?” I confirmed, trying to remember everything he’d told me about his friends.

“Yup,” he confirmed before he grabbed my hand and practically dragged me out of the bedroom.

Rushing turned out to be a waste.

When we got to The Rusty Nail, only one of his friends was there. Jonas’s entire demeanor changed the moment he saw the man sitting at a table, holding a bottle of beer and playing on his phone. I’d seen him happy, especially these past few weeks, but this was something different. All of the tension drained from his body and smile lit up his face. He grabbed my hand, leading meover to the table. He slid into the booth next to the man there and patted the seat beside him.

It felt weird with all three of us sitting on the same side of the booth, but I guessed we were leaving the other side for everyone else.

“Silas, this is Seb,” he introduced.

The man, Seb, put his phone face down on the sticky table before extending a hand out to me. “We’ve met, actually,” Seb said casually. “But it’s been years.” I racked my brain, trying to think if I’d ever met this man. I assumed he was talking about high school. I hadn’t spent a lot of time with Jonas’s friends back then, even when we’d talked. His friends were shadows in my memory. I hoped they weren’t all going to say the same thing. Seb seemed to notice my discomfort and shrugged. “No worries if you don’t remember. You didn’t exactly hang out with us back then.”

That did not make me any less tense.

“Seb,” Jonas said with a slight shake of his head. “Be nice.”

“I am being nice!” Seb countered with a wide eyed innocence that I wanted to believe, even if it didn’t feel completely genuine. That must be some kind of magical power.

“It’s nice to meet you, man,” I finally said. I could play calm, cool, and collected. It didn’t matter that my sweaty palms probably gave me away when I shook his hand. “Jonas’s told me a lot about you.”

“All lies, I swear.”

And just like that, the tension melted away. Maybe I’d just been reading too much into it. “Well, that’s good. Some of the stuff he said was kind of scary.”

“Oh yeah? What kind of stuff was he saying?”

“That you have a clown fetish.”

The words had an immediate affect on Jonas. His eyes went wide, and he looked at me with an expression that might havemade weaker men die. Luckily, I thought his glares were kind of adorable. If they were going to scare me off, then we’d have never gotten to this point.

And I wouldn’t know about his immense fear of clowns.

“That one’s true, actually,” another voice chimed in.

Two men slid into the empty bench seat across from us. The one that had spoken had curly dark blonde hair and a playful smirk that made me want to smile. The other man had darker hair that fell into his eyes and eyes that glittered with amusement. They sat closer to one another than anyone on my side of the table did, and I wondered if they were together. Jonas hadn’t mentioned any of his friends dating, but maybe it had just slipped his mind or something.

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