“Don’t try to be funny, you’re not all that good at it.”
“Okay.”
She kept her thumb and finger under my chin, making small, maddening circles against my skin with the tips of each. “Do you love me?”
I blanked out for a second-what was happening here?-then shook myself back to the Right-Now and said, “Yes, of course I do. We’ve known each other for-what is it now?- eight years?”
“Almost nine now.”
I reached up and held her wrist. “You are the best friend I have ever had, Beth. Hell-you’re the only real friend I’ve ever had.”
She cupped my face in both her hands and kissed me again. “And you’re my best friend. You’ve never judged me, or lied to me, you’ve never been cruel or thoughtless to me, you’ve appreciated everything I’ve ever done for you and you’ve done so many sweet things for me, even when I was acting like a real bitch on wheels-”
“Your words, not mine. Go on, I’ll speak up when I disagree.”
She smiled, moving closer to me. “You know that in high school I was kind of… oh, what’s the word I’m looking for?”
“Popular?”
She laughed and shook her head. “Well, I suppose that’s one word for it.”
“Friendly?”
She bit her lower lip and shook her head.
“Available? ‘Open twenty-four Hours’?” I began to laugh. “ ‘One Mattress, No Waiting’?”
“You’re dangerously close to losing one of your nuts.”
“I know, I’m sorry.”
“You do know what I’m trying to tell you, right?”
“That you were kind of easy in high school?”
“Don’t sugar-coat it, kiddo-Oh, shit! I didn’t mean-”
“Too late.” I held out my hand. “You owe me a buck.”
“But we were having a moment-”
“-that will continue once you pony up the dough.” Ever since the day she’d taken me home from the hospital, Beth and I’d had an agreement: any time she slipped up and called me “kid” or “kiddo” or any other variation thereof, it would cost her a dollar. She had promised never to call me anything like that again, and my charging her for her digressions seemed a solid way to remind her of the importance of keeping her word.
She dug into her pocket and produced a crumpled dollar bill, which she slapped into my hand with a lot more force than was called for, in my opinion.
Shoving the buck into my pocket so the lint would have some company, I smiled at her and said: “You were telling me something about your being easy in high school?”
“Easy? I was a slut. If I’d stayed in college, I’d probably be a real piece-”
“-like you already weren’t?”
“- of work, smartass. I’d be a real piece of work. I spent way too much time in way too many beds trying to convince myself I was worth something. If a guy even hinted that he liked me, I’d pretty much let him do whatever he wanted.”
“I kind of suspected that after you banged the orderly that time in the hospital so he’d take us to the animal lab. Well, that, and when I saw you with that bozo at the gas station the first time you took me home for dinner.”
“I’m not like that anymore. Since the abortion last year, I’ve been very careful about who I… you know… I mean, I haven’t been with a guy in that way since…”
She wasn’t on the verge of tears-Beth almost never cried-but there was a thinness to her voice, a vulnerability that both surprised and scared me.
I touched her face. “You don’t have to explain any of this to me. I understand how things were. It never mattered to me. It still doesn’t.”
She turned her face into my hand, kissing the palm. “That’s just so goddamn typical of you.”
“What? Did I do something untoward? Did I say the wrong thing? Did I let fly with a whopper of a fart and just not notice-what?”
“You accept me for who and what I am. You always have. Whenever one of those dick-for-brains boyfriends of mine would treat me like shit, or embarrass me, or stand me up for a date, you always said or did the right thing to make it better. I could never really hurt when I was with you. Sometimes, just knowing that all I’d have to do-it didn’t matter who I was with or where we were or whatever kind of trouble I getting into-all I had to do was pick up the phone and call you and you’d make everything better.”
“Okay. And…? ”
She stared at me for a moment, then slightly shook her head. “And you have no idea how great a thing that is, do you? You have no idea how wonderful you really are. All you can see are your weaknesses and failures. You don’t see how strong you are already, how strong you’ve always been. Christ, when I first met you in the hospital I thought you were, like, my age. Sure, you were built about the size of a nine-year-old, but when you looked at a person-when you looked at me -you were so much older than you should have been. Even now, looking into your eyes, you seem so much older than I am. Haven’t you ever noticed how people can’t keep eye contact with you during a conversation?”
“Always figured it was because I had something stuck in my teeth-”
“ Shut. Up. You listen now. People can’t keep eye contact with you because you see through all the scrims and bullshit. Whether you mean to or not, you just don’t look at a person, you look right into the middle of who they really are and people can’t handle that.”
“That explains my jam-packed social calendar.”
“See? Just then, that remark-‘My jam-packed social calendar.’ How many seventeen-year-old guys do you know who say things like that? And wasn’t there an ‘untoward’ in there earlier? Don’t answer, it wasn’t really a question.”
“What’s going on here, Beth? I’m confused.”
“No, you’re not. You’re one of the most un- confused people I’ve ever known. I think everything is very clear to you.”
I held up the birthday card. “This isn’t.”
“Yes, it is. You just don’t want to admit it.”
“Admit what?”
“That you love me.”
I sighed in exasperation. “ I already said I did! That’s what started this… this…this goddamn dialogue exchange from a Harold Pinter play. You’re my best friend and I love you.”
“But you don’t only love me as a friend, do you?”
(Mayday, Mayday, sonar has malfunctioned, there’s an unexpected obstacle outside the cabin window and-)
– and there it was.
She’d blindsided me and she knew it. Had it been that obvious all these years and I was just too stupid to know I’d been wearing all my feelings on my sleeve?
Staring into her soft-brown, gold-flecked eyes I was as utterly and deliciously helpless as any teenager in love has ever been. “You’re twenty-four, Beth.”
“You make it sound ancient.”
“How would it look to your friends? Christ, I’m just a baby as far as they’re concerned.”
“Leave them out of it for now, okay? Fuck ’em. Right now, right here, I want to know your feelings for me.”
What surprised me the most was how quickly I answered, and the ease with which the words came out of my mouth: “I’ve been in love with you since that day you brought two of your friends into my room at the hospital and kissed me in front of them. I was in love with you long before you held my hand for the first time, or told me a secret, or took me to your house, or slipped your arm through mine while we wandered around King’s Island. The first time I saw you in your hip-huggers and a halter-top I thought I’d implode from how beautiful you were. Do you
