Page 88 of Just Friends

“He’s allergic to red dye number seven.” Her lips twitch, holding back a smile, and some of the tension leaves me again.

“Oh, good. I’ll Amazon Prime him some Kool-Aid pouches.”

She shakes her head. “Wouldn’t work. He doesn’t consume processed products.”

“I’m going to have to google how to poison someone with red dye,” I say. “I won’t be able to let this go.”

“I’ll write down that quote for your memoir,” she vows, and my lips crack into a smile. Snuggling farther into her pillow, she says, “What if we watched the same movie at the same time for Movie Monday?”

I reach for the remote, flipping the TV back on. The blue glow casts shadows across my face once more, and when I look back at my phone, Hazel is watching me, her bottom lip trapped between her teeth. Her eyes are heavy-lidded and warm, like sugar being heated into simple syrup on the stove.

It sends a jolt of desire straight down my spine.

When I clear my throat, she blinks. “What movie?” I ask. My voice sounds like the scratch of a match on sandpaper.

“What If.”

“I’mlosingsteam,”Imumble into the phone hours later. We switched from FaceTime to a phone call over an hour ago, when she needed her phone flashlight to walk down the hall to the bathroom. Since then, we’ve made it halfway through our third movie, and even though I’m going to be an actual zombie at work tomorrow, I haven’t been able to hang up.

“Me too,” Hazel says. Her voice is quiet and hazy, drugged with sleep. I want to hear it like this every single day for the rest of my life. Late nights wrapped in sheets together, skin to skin. Early mornings when neither of us can manage to get out of bed.

Groaning, I force my mind to change course. “Let’s go to bed.”

“I’m already in bed,” Hazel grunts, and if I weren’t so tired, I’d laugh.

“I’m on the couch,” I moan, barely able to lift my head. I peel my eyes open, staring down the ever-elongating hallway to my bedroom. “My bed is too far.”

“Sleep on your couch,” she murmurs. “It’s comfier than my bed at home.”

“I love your bed.”

Hazel must have loosened her grip on the phone because when she speaks again, she sounds farther away, her voice faint and tinged with sleep. “You’ve never slept in my bed.”

“Yes, I have. That night you were sick,” I say, nuzzling farther into my sofa, the cushions molding to my body, cocooning me.

“You were on my couch when I woke up,” she mumbles, her words running together, like she’s too tired to open her mouth all the way.

“I left in the middle of the night.”

“How come?”

I’m in that sleep-drenched fog, where you’re not sure if you’re awake or asleep, when your guard is down and your words come without thoughts. If I were fully awake, I wouldn’t say it, because although I told Hazel I love her two weeks ago, we haven’t mentioned it since. I’m giving her the time she asked for, and that doesn’t include foisting my love on her like a last-minute dinner invitation.

But I’m not thinking clearly, and my guard is more than down; it’s obliterated. So I say, “Because I woke up and I never wanted to leave.”

She’s quiet for so long that my words start to break through the sleepy haze around my brain, waking me up, even if just slightly. Panic creeps in like an unwanted houseguest, unpacking its bags in my chest.

“You should have stayed,” she says finally, and my heartbeat settles, the breath heaving from my lungs in a rush. Her words, the tone of her voice, feel like waking up in that sofa bed at the lake house to find her wrapped around me. Like waking up from a dream to find out reality is better.

“Why?” I breathe, unable to keep from asking the question. Maybe it’s wrong for me to ask when we’re like this, half-asleep and not thinking through the answers, but that’s what makes me do it. I know she’s scared, that she’s weighing every possibility between us all the time, but Ihaveto know what she’s feeling when she’s not thinking, when sleep is blurring the edges, and dreams and reality are mixing together.

“Because I like sleeping next to you,” she says, and then her breath evens out, and I know she’s asleep.

It takes me much longer, her words echoing through my head, but eventually I drift off too, wrapped in a butterfly throw blanket Hazel left at my house months ago.

Idon’tknowwhattime it is when I wake up, whether it’s real or a dream, but I hear her voice, whisper soft and sweet as ice cream on a hot summer day. “I love you too, Alex.”

Wren’ssunshine-yellowfrontdooris unlocked, and I let myself into her little cottage. The scent of her jasmine trellis hangs heavy in the air, like expensive perfume. Medieval tavern music is playing on the speakers, and when I round the corner into her tiny kitchen, she’s got a floral-printed apron tied over her denim shorts overalls.

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