CHAPTER TEN
I stood outside the door to my apartment shuffling from foot to foot for almost ten minutes before finally opening the door. The place looked like it had been ravaged by thieves. Oliver’s desk was buried under a cascading mound of crumpled paper balls and loose sheets with great red streaks of marker drawn across line after line of prose.
There were spatters of water leading from the couch—cushions lopsided in a little pile on the floor—to the kitchen, where empty take-out containers had impressively taken over a large part of the counter.
The sound of someone stirring down the hall made me frown, and I kicked off my boots to take hesitant steps forward. Oliver shambled out of his bedroom clutching a pad of paper in one hand and an empty glass in the other. His eyes nearly bugged out of his head when he saw me—he must not have heard me open the door.
He offered a weak smile and brushed past me to put his things down, then pulled me toward the couch, where he replaced the cushions and sank into the soft fabric of it as he lifted his eyes to meet mine.
“Uh, sorry about the mess. I got…I just really needed to eat something and then I thought about making a pillow fort so I took over the living room, and you didn’t come home, so I figured I’d just take my mind off things and focus on writing and—”
“What things?” I interrupted.
The only thing Olly could possibly need to stop thinking so much about was the manuscript he’d been working on for months, but he wouldn’t try to take his mind off it by working on it.
“What?” Oliver replied, almost slurring the single word.
I shifted to face him and leaned forward, my mouth a tight line of concern.
“What things were you trying not to think about, Olly?”
Oliver stood up and threw a chill from his body with a few rough shakes of his arms. He paced in the tight space between the couch and the table, careful not to knock over any of the take-out containers that apparently couldn’t fit on the kitchen counter.
I watched Oliver move like that for a few minutes as his mouth worked silently, trying to find the words he probably still didn’t want to say—classic Oliver. He was great at letting his emotions flare up and terrible at talking through the aftermath.
“Oliver,” I said, reaching a hand up to grab his arm and bring him back to our conversation—if it could be called that. He slithered out of my loose grip, a rare twist of his lips painting itself across his face, and I knit my brow, pouting. “Oliver, sit down. Start from the beginning.”
Huffing, Oliver sat next to me again, his hands balled into tight fists on his trembling knees.
“We’ve been friends for a long time,” he said thoughtfully.
I leaned back into the couch and crossed my arms, turning my head toward him. Oliver was flighty and lost track of time a lot, but I’d never seen him so disheveled. His hair was flat on one side and a dark storm on the other, and his shirt was dotted with the mess of whatever had filled the array of empty take-out containers in our apartment.
“Remember when you moved in?” he continued.
“Yeah,” I said. “You and I had stopped seeing each other, like, a month or two before, and I saw your post about looking for a new roommate on social media,” I finished.
“Right,” he said, his mouth turning up at the corners. “I remember how excited you were to find a place such a short commute to your store with someone you knew.”
“I think those were my exact words,” I said, still looking at Oliver as we spoke. “But, uh, I don’t think this is what I meant when I said you should start from the beginning.” Oliver forced a laugh and shifted to prop his head up with an arm, resting on the couch cushions newly picked up from the floor.
“You’ve gone out with a revolving door of different guys since then. Some of them were all right, some of them were crap, and all of them were boring. Your words, not mine,” he added when I opened my mouth to say something.
I bit my tongue and let him continue.
“It’s been almost three years since then, Aiden. Three years, and now you’re off with some new guy after basically just bombing things with the last one—”
—“That’s not fair,” I said as I shifted to mirror Oliver’s seated position. “Derrek is anything but boring. I might not know everything about him, but you were the one who told me to take the chance on someone out of my comfort zone, right? Maybe I don’t need to know everything about him right now. Maybe it’s enough that we know there’s something electric between us.”
“I…listen, I’m sorry about what I said when I stormed out of here, I really am.”
Oliver shifted again to look away from me, his hands folded in his lap as he stared intently down the hallway.
“There’s a part of me that’s excited you found someone that lights you up inside, even if I am worried you don’t know him really well. I’m allowed to be worried for my friend, right?”
“Of course you are,” I said, offering a soft smile I was sure he could see, because his back slouched as the tension slipped from his body. “But Olly, you kind of got mad that day. I’ve literally never seen you get mad at anything.”
At that, Oliver turned to look at me with wet eyes and a tremble in his lips.
“A bigger part of me thought all your shitty dates would make you realize you’d want to come back.”
I started at him dumbly for a long moment.
“Come back?”
“Yeah,” he said. “To me.”
“To—what?”
I stood up and rounded the couch to stand behind it, Oliver turning to face me. He was nearly in tears, his eyes big and wet and beautiful, and my heart broke for him a little bit.
“Olly…I can’t. We both know that.”
“You don’t know that! You can’t know that. You—you don’t even want to try?” he stuttered, kneeling straight up on the couch.
“But we did try, Oliver,” I said, dropping to the floor and crossing my legs. I leaned forward, crossing one arm over my legs and resting my head in the other. “We tried for months before we settled into a great friendship. Or I thought we had, anyway. You know why we didn’t work.”
Oliver rested his chin on his arms, crossed over the tops of couch cushions. His back was hunched, and if I looked closely enough, I could see the slight tremble that shook slowly through his body.
“We…we can try again, Aiden, if you—”
“If I what?” I spat before I could stop myself.
“If you want to,” Oliver whispered.
I became aggressively aware of the clock ticking over the front door behind me. I counted five seconds, ten seconds, thirty seconds, and after a full minute I knew my answer would be the same as if Olly had never mentioned anything.
“I don’t,” I said quietly.
Oliver loosed a long, slow breath, his soft sobs drowning out the tick of the clock. I rushed from the floor to circle the couch and sit with him. He fought with me, pulling away to keep his head buried in in his arms. When he finally looked up at me, Oliver’s soft, kind face was streaked with tears. A warm trickle ran down my own cheek as I enveloped Olly in a monstrous hug.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry, Olly. I…I think I’m in love with him. I’m in love with Derrek,” I choked out. A weak fist pummeled my side.
“How can you love someone you don’t even know,” he spat.
I hugged him as tightly as I could, and we rocked back and forth together as he sobbed.
“This is dumb,” he mumbled.
“It’s not dumb,” I said. “I’m proud of you for telling me.”
“What the fuck am I supposed to do with your pride, Aiden?” he hissed.
“Nothing. Anything. It doesn’t matter. Do you feel better now that you’ve said something about it?”
Oliver rose to sit on his own, his lips full and pink and trembling.
“I guess,” he said. “I think I knew, Aiden.”
“Knew what?”
“That you were falling for him. But I had to…I had to try.”
“Forget about that, Olly. Why didn’t you tell me any of this until now? We’ve been roommates for three years, and friends for longer. Have…have you been living with me all this time hoping it would make a difference?”
Oliver clutched at his stomach, crossing his legs on the couch. He did the same thing when the things he wrote made him feel too much at once.
“That’s deranged. Please don’t think that. I wouldn’t do that,” he said, his voice cracking. “I might have offered you first dibs on my extra room because we had just broken up, but I did it because I knew I could just be friends with you. Maybe…maybe it was too soon,” he finished.
“Maybe, but I’m glad you did, Olly. You’re always going to be one of the most important boys in my life. I cared about you when we were together, and I’ve never stopped caring about you. It just isn’t romantic. We fed each other’s shadows. Your words, not mine,” I said when he widened his eyes at me. “Neither of us was in a place for the kind of relationship we wanted, but look at everything that came from us being friends!”
I gestured around us, at all the photos of us together with our other friends over the years, at bookshelves and fridge magnets and memories.
“This wouldn’t be my home without you. I wouldn’t have learned more about myself without you. You’re my best friend. I don’t want to lose my best friend.”
Oliver stood up and walked toward his desk, where he opened his laptop and took a seat.
“I romanticized you, Aiden, and it was dangerous for us both. Every high was beautiful, and that made every low just as dark. I…I thought I needed you for my art,” he said, blushing. I wondered if he had ever said that out loud before.
“And now?” I asked, shifting to lay flat on the couch.
“Now it’s years later and I know ‘pain is art’ is total crap, but that’s not all I had to learn, I guess. I can love you without being in love with you. I get it, but it’s a lot to unlearn and I’m gonna need time.”
He stared thoughtfully at the computer screen in front of him for a few minutes before flipping it down again.
“You should just go to work, I need a shower to clear my head.”
“Olly…” I said weakly, turning my head to see him standing in the hall, arms heavy at his sides, eyes closed. He opened them when the couch rustled beneath me as I sat up, but his outstretched arm stopped me from standing.
“Don’t ‘Olly’ me. Don’t say anything. You love him, but I don’t want to hear about it right now. I can’t. I’m still your best friend, Aiden, but I can’t hear anything about you and Derrek right now. Just promise me you’ll be safe with him. Promise me he’ll love you back. I promise you things between us will go back to normal…eventually.”
My mouth hung open stupidly as made his way to the bathroom, and I didn’t close it until I heard the bathroom door shut and lock behind him.
I shook my head and took a deep breath in, pulling my phone from my pocket to hit Derrek’s number. I heard the sound of a shower and turned to sit on the floor again, leaning against the back of the couch. Derrek picked up after two short rings.
“Miss me already? It’s barely been an hour,” he joked.
“Are you still at home?” I said through a quiet sniffle.
“I’m at a red light on my way to the track to meet my team. What’s wrong?”
I pulled the phone away from my ear, listening to make sure Oliver was still in the shower before I stood up and made a hasty beeline for my bedroom, shutting the door quietly behind me. I had only been away for a night, but my bed already looked foreign.
I didn’t want to sleep in it without Derrek beside me, and I didn’t know if it was my feelings for him or if I just wanted to be near someone warm and comfortable.
“Aiden? Aiden, are you all right? Did something happen? I’m pulling over,” Derrek said.
I was quiet, but he could definitely hear my heavy breaths as I struggled to say the words.
“I think I just lost my best friend.”