Ten Trends to Seduce Your Bestfriend
: Chapter 9

“You—what?”

“I like you,” I said, surrendering the truth, uncovering it for her to see. My heart thundered, the organ supplying an unwelcomed, frenzied percussion over which my thoughts skipped and raced. I hadn’t expected that. Nor had I expected the rope-like heat cinching my throat.

But if I was going to do this, I was just going to fucking do it. “I have a . . . thing for you,” I explained with outward calm, no reason to be otherwise. “If you want to call it that.”

Winnie’s brown eyes, so much the color of cinnamon, bounced between mine. She looked horrified. I managed a swallow as the rope cinched tighter. I hadn’t anticipated that she might be horrified.

Surprised? Yes. Flattered? Maybe. Amused? Perhaps.

Horrified? No.

“You can’t, there’s no way,” the words pure air, a wheeze squeezed out of her. “Are you having a stroke? Do I need to call an ambulance?”

Wrestling a grimace, I tried not to swallow my tongue. Well. This sucks. “Fred.”

“I’m sorry, that wasn’t—I—I. . .” She lifted a hand as though to ward me off. “Are you joking?”

“No.”

“You—”

“Yes. I like you. I have a crush on you. I have a thing for you.” The statements followed no map. I had no plan.

Correction: I did have a plan. The plan had been to never tell her. Why the hell would I ever tell her? Spontaneously communicating my irrelevant feelings hadn’t worked well for me in the past. This—the inadvisable habit of volunteering information to insouciant parties—was a lesson I obviously hadn’t quite learned.

Work on that, Byron. Fix that about yourself. Edit it out of your repertoire and then move on.

Breathing in through my nose, I held the air in my lungs for the count of three, liberating it carefully. The seizing tightness lessened.

“But—but when? And how?” She stumbled a step forward, her mouth opening and closing, her bright brown stare beneath thick, inky lashes scanning my face. This might’ve been the longest she’d ever held my eyes. “And . . . why?”

It occurred to me that Winnie, being Winnie, might be overreacting. She felt deeply, took people and their tragedies inside her heart when it would be better to filter out the noise, learn from the precautionary tales of other peoples’ lives, and move on. Mucking about with a helper complex was her way, infuriating as it was to watch.

I sought to calm her. “It’s not a big deal.”

She flinched, blinking once. “Oh?”

“No.” My feelings, as inconvenient as they were for me, had nothing to do with her. She’d done nothing to encourage them, nothing purposeful to inspire them. I expected nothing. I wanted nothing—except to help her, as we’d previously agreed and as she’d promised.

“Ah. Okay.” Relief permeated her words. “So you a little bit like me.”

“No.” Never one to accept inaccuracy, though the tips of my ears burned, I corrected, “I a lot like you. But it’s not a big deal.”

“Not a big deal?” she croaked.

“No.”

“Because . . .?” Winnie shook her head, her long hair sliding over her shoulders, once again making no attempt to conceal her horror.

And this—her lovely, lively, expressive face contorting with dismay at the mere suggestion of my hidden affection, as though I was a burdensome, geriatric dog who worshipped her, and now she found herself in the unenviable position of being beholden to me—almost made me laugh.

I should have found another way.

“It isn’t a big deal.” I was not one of her charity cases. My like for her—my admiration—was as irrelevant as her feelings of dislike toward me. “And now that you know, we can move on from it.”

“What does that mean?”

“We can do the challenges, and they won’t be disingenuous.”

Her coloring had gone pale, greenish. “Because you like me. A lot.”

“Correct.” A laugh did escape me now. She was panicking. What did Winnie think? That I would trouble her with my inconvenient attraction? “You don’t need to worry, Fred. My feelings aren’t your problem.”

She looked no less dismayed. “Seriously, are you joking?”

I glared at her. “No.”

“Am I . . .”

“What?”

She shifted her weight back and forth between her feet, her voice pitching higher. “Am I allowed to ask questions about this?”

I stiffened. Questions? No. No follow-up questions. What could she possibly want to—

“Winnie? Are you still up here?”

We both looked in the direction of Amelia’s voice a moment before she emerged from the main stairs.

“Yes. I’m here.” Winnie cleared her throat, darting a frantic glance at me, like I was a bomb set to explode. “I’m—uh—”

“Byron. Hey.” Amelia walked into my room. “Everything okay?”

“Fine,” I said, scratching my hot and itchy neck.

“Good.” Amelia glanced between us. “Glad I found you together. Did you schedule a time to do a video? It’s been weeks.”

Winnie swayed. Perhaps the question made her dizzy. “No, we—”

“Yeah.” I nodded once. “We’re on it.”

Winnie’s eyes widened, visibly confused and wary. I gave her a quick, tight smile. I’d told her the truth so that she might consent to allowing my help, to assuage her fears of being disingenuous. That’s all she was getting from me.

“Oh yeah?” Amelia folded her arms. “When?”

“I’ll be over tomorrow for the three-day weekend.” I cleared my throat of all lingering misery. “We’ll film two as we’ve missed a few weeks.”

“Oh. Good.” Amelia nodded at me approvingly. “Glad to hear it. Now can we go?” She turned to Winnie, grabbing her hand. “Our new friends left, and I can’t handle another conversation about tort reform.”

“Yeah. Yes,” Winnie said weakly. “We can go.”

“Thanks, Byron.” Amelia winked at me while pulling Winnie from my bedroom. “And get some sleep. You look tired, man.”

Sensing Winnie’s attention swing toward me, I lowered my eyes to avoid hers. They remained glued to the carpet as the two women departed. I waited for the sounds of their footsteps to completely fade along with the barbed ache in my lungs.

You shouldn’t have said anything. That was a mistake.

I shut the door. I would not think about it. I would not waste time or energy or thought on an unalterable situation. I’d told her. It was done. No eradicating the words now.

I decided to write.

Rubbing my chest, the air of my bedroom oddly heavy and stagnant, I walked to my office and was inexplicably reminded of my first and only car accident at seventeen years old: the release of adrenaline, the way time paused, fast forwarded, stalled, and skipped, the air heavy and stagnant. Briefly, I wondered if anyone had ever experienced PTSD as a result of confessing unreciprocated feelings.

Thirty minutes of irrational agitation, lack of focus, and no words later, I decided to go on a run.

Standing from my desk, I left my office and paced to the laundry basket next to my bed. I’d just pulled off my shirt when my phone buzzed.

Winnie: Were you joking?

The cinching rope around my neck returned and my stomach tensed, compressing itself into a tight ball. I wasn’t a liar, but I briefly debated whether a lie in this instance might’ve been the right course. A kindness for the both of us. On the rare occasions when I’d fantasized about telling Winnie the truth or pondered what she might actually say, her reaction had never been this big, this . . . tumultuous.

In my fantasies, she’d behaved fantastically.

But in my ponderings, when I’d endeavored to imagine what real Winnie might say or do, she’d expressed mild surprise, gently shared her inability to return such sentiments, and we’d laughed together at the futility of my feelings. She’d never been angry, or as violently disbelieving, or as aggressively aghast as she’d been this evening.

Perhaps her overreaction had been rooted in causes unknown to me, but now I could see that while my intent had been to ease her concerns about being disingenuous in the challenge videos, I’d instead made her upset and uncomfortable.

Still, I wasn’t a liar. Not even to spare someone discomfort, and especially not to spare me discomfort. If I started lying to myself, I would never stop. Thus, I replied,

Byron: No. Not joking.

The drum of my heart lodged itself in my throat, and I squeezed my eyes shut. Discomfort is temporary, lies are forever.

The phone buzzed again.

Winnie: I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say

Byron: Say nothing. If it made you uncomfortable, it shouldn’t. I don’t want or need anything from you

Winnie: I am very confused

My eyebrows inched upward at the second very in all caps, that she’d taken the time to capitalize such a prosaic word instead of opting for a synonym—excessively, extraordinarily, extremely—any of which would’ve been more effective than a double very.

While still contemplating her peculiar vernacular choice, Winnie’s number lit up my screen and my stomach tightened further. For the first time in our acquaintance, I considered not answering my phone when Winnifred Gobaldi called. Prior to now, she’d called me exactly six times in six years. This made seven.

Yet I’d promised I’d pick up the phone if she wanted or needed me. With a sigh to steady the renewed rapid percussion of my pulse, I finally did.

“Fred.”

“Byron, you can’t—you can’t tell me you like me and then act like it’s nothing. You can’t do that.”

I lifted my eyes to the ceiling. “Okay.”

“What do you mean ‘okay’?”

“Okay, I won’t tell you I like you.”

“But you do.”

“Correct.”

She inhaled sharply, making a noise of pure exasperation on her exhale. “You don’t like me! You can’t stand me. You treat me like I’m an idiot—”

“I’ve never done that.”

“Oh? Really? ‘It’s pronounced Al-kie Beach, not Al-key.’” She’d dropped her voice as though she were quoting a book or a movie.

“What are you talking about?”

“Those were your first words to me.”

My attention fell from the ceiling, and I stared at nothing, her words a riddle I could not solve, so I focused on a single piece of her puzzling statement. “Wait. You remember my first words to you?”

“That’s not the point! The point is, you never say anything to me unless it’s to correct something I’ve said or to criticize something I’ve done. How can you possibly say you like me? You don’t. You’re messing with me.”

If her goal had been to anger me, this call had been a raging success. “I’m not messing with you, Fred. Believe me, I wish I were.”

“What does that mean? And why are you mad? I’m the one who should be mad.”

“It means I like you, but I don’t particularly want to,” I bit out, perilously close to yelling.

“Why not? I’m nice, aren’t I? I don’t go around correcting other people’s grammar, do I? I don’t get my black underwear in a twist when someone says Roman Empire when they really mean Byzantium Empire, do I?”

“I’ve never corrected anyone’s grammar.” Out loud.

“No! Just their pronunciation of places and the minutia of trivial things.”

“Is it your wish for me to encourage you to espouse falsehoods and mispronounce the names of public places? Would you prefer I be nice and allow you to stumble around like an infant, appearing uninformed and uneducated?”

“No, Dr. Sarcastico Apathy Hole!” she yelled, and I winced at her volume, necessitating that I hold the phone away from my ear. “I’d like the first words from a stranger to be something other than a critique and—you know what? Forget it. Forget I called. I don’t even know why I called. I can’t talk to you! Even when you tell me you like me, it pisses me off.”

“Fine,” I said, careful to exude as much calm as possible. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“What? No.”

“Yes. I’ll be over tomorrow for the video.”

She huffed.

“I’ll be there at ten. I’ll bring scones. And since every word out of my mouth is so entirely offensive to you, I won’t say anything.”

Now she growled.

“And, since I do like you—whether you believe it or not—nothing about this is disingenuous, so you can’t use that as an excuse anymore.”

“I wasn’t using it as an—”

“Bye, Fred.”

I hung up, stopping myself before I threw the phone across the room. But then it vibrated. Grinding my teeth, I glared at the screen and the messages arriving in quick succession.

Winnie: I still don’t believe you like me or have a thing for me or whatever Sᴇaʀch Thᴇ ꜰindNʘvel.ɴet website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

Winnie: You don’t. And I’m REALLY ANGRY that you’re messing with me like this

Winnie: They better be gluten-free blueberry scones or your not getting in the door

Winnie: YOU’RE! Not your. You’re. You are

Winnie: Goodnight

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