Hard to Pretend (Hard to Love #2)

11. Seb

11

M y cheeks hurt. I was smiling so hard that my cheeks actually hurt. I’d spent more than twenty-four hours with Chris, and I hadn’t gotten sick of him once. There were only five people I could do that with: my mom and the boys. Even in my past relationships, twenty-four uninterrupted hours usually had me wanting to hide in the bathroom with my phone for at least an hour.

I actually hated to call it a day. I hated to leave and go back to my place, but I had plans with Jonas. I wasn’t going to be one of those guys who blew off his best friend, because he was hanging out with a hot guy. It didn’t make leaving him any easier. Especially when I got back upstairs and saw Chris’s shirt still balled up on my bed. I picked it up to fold it. That was all I planned on doing with it, but somehow, I ended up holding the fabric to my nose and taking a deep whiff, inhaling the smell of his sweat, deodorant, and whatever else it was that made Chris smell the tempting way he did.

I took a few deep whiffs and forced myself to fold it and place it on top of my dresser.

My eyes kept traveling to it. Before I could stop myself, I snapped a picture of the shirt and sent it to Chris.

Seb

it’s my hostage until you return mine

Chris

guess that means we need to hang out again, huh?

Seb

guess it does

once i know what this week looks like, i’ll send you a text

Chris responded with the thumbs up emoji, and I pocketed my phone. I needed to straighten up my place before Jonas got there. I knew that he wouldn’t judge the mess, but I would. It was bad enough that Chris had seen my place looking like a disaster. If Jonas showed up with my place looking the way it did, he’d have questions. Like what I was doing all day that kept me from cleaning up. Because Jonas knew me. He knew how I was raised. He knew that I’d been raised to always clean up before company, even if that company was someone who had known me since I had Spiderman bed sheets.

I did a quick clean up. I put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher and turned it on. I folded up the lemon blanket and put it neatly on the back of the sofa. I picked up the clothes from my bedroom floor and put them in my hamper where they belonged. It took less than twenty minutes, and my apartment was back to looking the way it should. Maybe not as nice as it did the first time Chris came over, but at least I wouldn’t want to put a blindfold on Jonas so he couldn’t see the wreck.

I was still straightening the yellow throw pillows when I heard my door open.

“Seriously man, how many times do I have to tell you that you don’t have to make the pillows perfect for little old me?”

I turned around and saw the teasing look on Jonas’s face. I stuck my tongue out at him, but I did stop messing with the pillows.

Not that it mattered, because Jonas flopped down on the couch and immediately grabbed one of the perfectly positioned pillows and put it on his lap. I sat down beside him, and the other pillow sunk down a little. There went all of my hard work .

“What did you get up to last night?” Jonas asked after he finished updating me on the latest theories about his haunted apartment. “Tried calling you, but no answer.”

“I was on a date.”

“A real date or another fake date with your fake boyfriend?”

I rolled my eyes at him. “A real date,” I answered, the small grin on my face growing larger as I thought about my date. My perfect date. “It was with the fake boyfriend, though.”

“Really?” Jonas rotated around almost comically to look at me, his eyes wide. It reminded me of him at twelve, the two of us sitting on my twin size bed, as I admitted to him that I had my first real crush. Just like then, he was looking at me with such an intensity that it made me want to spill all the beans. He was obviously waiting on me to do just that. When it took too long, he started gesturing wildly with his hand, urging me to speak. “Tell me everything.”

“We went out to eat at that seafood place over by the beach,” I started. I told him about the walk on the beach and about running into his friends at Dana’s that morning. I told him about antiquing and all the time I spent with him that day. The entire time, he sat and listened with a sparkle in his eyes. He looked almost as excited as I felt. The only things I didn’t tell him was the sex stuff. We had a tendency to overshare in my friend group, but I wanted to keep parts of Chris to myself.

It felt private in a way that sex never had before.

A few beats of silence passed between us when I finished, ending my story with the kiss in Chris’s car when he dropped me off. (Okay, I left out the part where I also smelled his shirt, but who wouldn’t leave that part out of the romantic retelling of their amazing date?)

“You like him,” Jonas noted after he was sure I was done.

“Yeah,” I confessed. “I mean, maybe. I think I do.”

I knew I did, but it made me feel vulnerable. Liking someone meant lowering my guard, letting someone in. It meant risking rejection. What if Chris didn’t like me back the way I liked him? It would suck.

“You’re overthinking it, aren’t you?” Jonas asked with a knowing look in his eyes. Out of all of my friends, he’d be the one that would understand that. Jonas overthought everything. “What’s holding you back?”

I shrugged. That answer wasn’t good enough for Jonas. I wondered if there was a part of him that was taking pleasure in this, because I never let him off with just a shrug when something was threatening to eat him alive. It was different, though. When it was Jonas, he was typically hiding something that was threatening to send him into a panic attack. It usually lead him down the path of self-destructive thought—or even just self-destruction in general.

I was just being insecure.

He kept looking at me, and I shrugged again. “I don’t know,” I lied.

“You don’t know?” I hated that he knew me well enough to call me on my bullshit.

I leaned back further into the couch and picked up the other pillow, holding it in my lap in a mirror of Jonas’s position. He sat there, looking at me and waiting patiently for me to open up. I could only take the weight of his stare for so long. I heaved a heavy sigh and hated the look in his eyes when I did. He knew that he was wearing me down, and he didn’t even have to say anything for it to happen.

“What if he doesn’t like me back?”

Jonas reached out and squeezed my hand. “Then you move on.”

We wouldn’t just have to move on. We would have to fake a breakup when we moved on. We would be throwing away the friendship that was starting to build between us, because it would be too awkward to be friends with him after I made an ass out of myself. This whole thing was a recipe for disaster.

Jonas looked at me like he could read my thoughts before pulling out his cell phone.

“What are you doing?”

“Texting for reinforcements,” he answered. I waited for my phone to light up, because I thought it’d go to the group message. It didn’t, and unlike me, he didn’t break under the weight of my questioning stare. He did, however, let me change the subject until his mystery reinforcements arrived twenty minutes later.

I didn’t even know what we were talking about when Matt walked into my apartment. It wasn’t anything meaningful. It wasn’t anything that would stick in my memories for years to come. I was pretty sure it was about a television show. I just know that the moment Matt came in and got settled, Jonas switched gears.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think that Eli’s single minded personality had possessed him, because he immediately got back to what he thought was the most pressing topic in the world: my potential (okay, very real) crush on Christopher Singh. I sat back and listened as Jonas told Matt all about my date, only answering to make little corrections about things that he got wrong. Things that didn’t matter to the story but made Jonas grin that knowing grin of his and probably made it that much more obvious that I has a major thing for the man.

“I don’t get what the problem is,” Matt said when he was finished.

“Seb here is worried that Chris might not like him back.”

Matt blinked once and then twice before shooting me the most what the fuck coded look I’d ever seen on him. “He took you on a twenty-four hour date. ”

“It wasn’t supposed to be a twenty-four hour date,” I countered.

“That doesn’t make the evidence any less damning,” Matt pointed out. “In fact, I think that points more to him having feelings for you than him not having feelings for you. A date only lasts that long when you don’t want it to end.”

I hadn’t wanted it to end. I hadn’t wanted to go home, but I didn’t want to blow off Jonas. Not that we’d started doing anything that we originally had planned, which was just eating dinner. We hadn’t even ordered the Chinese food we’d talked about grabbing yet, and now I had a feeling it was going to be dinner for three. I didn’t mind Matt’s addition. In fact, I might even suggest that we invite Eli and Holden before we order food.

Or maybe not.

I didn’t need their added input as to why or why not Chris liked me.

“But what if he was just too tired to go home last night?” I suggested. “I mean going home post hook up—”

“Is normal,” Jonas cut me off. “After Silas and I hooked up the first time, I went home. At two in the morning.”

“And after my first hook up with Chris, I crashed at his place,” I reminded them. They’d all gotten the rundown of that hookup the day after it happened. Of course, we’d also been talking about a lot of other things. Like Matt’s breakup and Jonas having to work with Silas, who he hated at the time. Luckily, Matt and Jonas were the kind that either paid attention and remembered or didn’t feel the need to clarify.

Either way, they let it lie and continued down the mental journey with me. “Okay, he still took you to breakfast.”

“We were hungry.”

“And then spent the day with you,” Matt repeated. He studied me for a moment. “After breakfast, did he act like he wanted to head back home without you?”

“No,” I admitted.

“That’s usually a sign that someone likes you,” he pointed out. He and Jonas exchanged a glance before they both looked at me in unison. I shifted under the pressure of their combined gaze. An awkward tension buzzed in the air between us. I wasn’t used to things being awkward with Matt and Jonas. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all. “So, what’s the real fear?”

Matt’s question pierced through the bullshit. I shrugged again. I didn’t know how to word any of it. How could I tell either of them what was really bothering me? It was more than just fear that he might not like me back. I didn’t know what I wanted to say about my fear, because I couldn’t put a finger on it.

I only knew that I was afraid.

Matt kept looking at me like he could see right through me, like my thoughts were on display and he was just trying to translate them into a language that made sense to him. I’d seen that look on his face. It was the same way he looked at a particularly complicated bit of code that he was trying to work his way through, a problem in a program he was building for one of his freelance gigs.

Finally, realization settled on his face. I wished I knew what he could see, what he’d found while studying me and piecing together things that I’d said and hadn’t said.

“It’s more than being afraid that he doesn’t like you back,” he said slowly. “You’re afraid that he does like you back, and he’s going to hurt you. You’re afraid that you’re going to show him the vulnerable parts of yourself, and that you’re going to get heartbroken.” He reached over and squeezed my hand. I could see Jonas on the other side of him, his hands folded tight on the pillow like he wanted to reach over and grab my other hand. I took comfort in both of them, in the fact that they saw and knew me better than almost anyone. “Being afraid of getting hurt is just being afraid of living,” Matt said after a few quiet moments.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean living means getting hurt,” Matt told me softly. His hand was still in mine, calloused from hours spent on his boat. “Getting hurt just means that you’re actually alive. It means that you’re open to experiencing life.”

“How do you do it?” I asked him .

He shrugged. “I just know that even if it hurts, it’s worth it.”

“What is?”

“Love,” he answered without missing a beat. Then he shook his head. “Not just love. Life. Living. All of it is worth the risk of being hurt.”

I would never not be amazed by the resiliency of my best friend’s heart. He felt everything deeply, but he never stopped feeling it. He never let fear of a little pain keep him from experiencing everything that life had to offer. I didn’t think that I would ever be as brave as he was.

I didn’t think I even had the capability of being that brave.

But Matt had the answer on how to start. “Go talk to him. Tell him how you feel.”

I looked at Jonas and he shook his head. “Matt and I are going to go get dinner,” he told me. “ You are going to go get your man.”

His voice was firm and left no room for argument.

My heart was pounding as I drove through King’s Bay. Jonas and Matt had stuck around just long enough to make sure that I actually made it to my car. Then they didn’t pull out of their parking spot until after I did. I was surprised they didn’t follow a car’s length behind me the entire way to Chris’s apartment, just to make sure I didn’t chicken out.

I wanted to chicken out.

The entire time I drove to Chris’s apartment, I was fighting the urge to turn around, to run back to my apartment and hide under the covers. I didn’t like letting myself be vulnerable, and this was the most vulnerable I’d ever allowed myself to become.

I had a crush on Christopher Singh.

And now, I was going to tell him.

I pulled up and parked in front of his apartment. I didn’t know what I was going to say. Maybe I should have brainstormed that with Matt and Jonas before I let them talk me into telling Chris how I felt. How was I even going to do this?

I’d confessed my feelings to exactly two people in my life.

It had worked out the first time. It had been a guy I liked in high school. We’d dated for exactly two months, and it hadn’t been the most exhilarating relationship in the world. The second time had been in college. I’d told this guy I liked him, and he’d laughed in my face. He’d actually laughed, and while he was laughing, he told me exactly why he didn’t like me that way. Points he’d made included the fact that I had a bad haircut and I was too scrawny.

I’d fixed the bad haircut. I’d put on a little bit of muscle since then. But I was sure that Chris could still find a thousand other things that he didn’t like about me. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to spend the day with me after all. Maybe he’d been happy that I had plans.

“Living means getting hurt. ” Matt’s wise words replayed in my head.

I took in a deep breath and forced myself out of the car. I didn’t let myself think as I raced up the stairs to Chris’s apartment and pounded on the door.

My heart was racing.

I was terrified.