Chapter 6 #2
“So, what do you do for fun?” he finally asks. “I didn’t really get the chance to ask you the other night.”
Small talk. Great. “I crochet a lot.”
He gives me a slight head tilt, like he’s trying to work things out. “With yarn and stuff?”
I hold up the scarf that I brought with me.
It’s not a great example of my work. The only reason it’s mine is that it turned out so poorly I can’t possibly gift it to someone else.
There are a few skipped stitches and frayed ends throughout, places where the pattern got screwed up, and the edges only look straight after a few glasses of wine.
It was my first attempt at a more complicated pattern, and I couldn’t bring myself to unravel it or throw it away.
So it’s mine. When it’s on, people can barely tell it’s uneven.
I think.
“You made that? That’s incredible.” My face heats at his praise. Usually, people have strong opinions about crocheting.
Too feminine of a project.
Useless when everything’s available to buy with two-day shipping.
“What else do you make?” Aaron asks.
“Mostly gifts for people. Hats and scarves mostly. I make a bunch of little animals and stuff, too.” Those I send off to my various niblings.
The younger ones are always thrilled. The older ones pretend they’re too mature for a stuffed dinosaur, but they still end up on the shelves in their bedrooms, so who knows.
Honestly, are you ever too old for a dinosaur?
Also, it annoys my siblings that I keep sending these various creatures that they have to make room for—a nice bonus.
“That’s so cool. I can’t make anything.”
“You’re an engineer,” I say, scoffing. That can’t possibly be true. If I set out a bunch of stuff, I’m pretty sure he could turn it into some crazy machine in no time.
“Anything creative,” he clarifies. “I’m great at following directions, but that’s not the same thing. Like with Lego. I build exactly what’s on the front of the box, nothing more. I know there are hundreds of things I could do with all the sets I own, but I can’t picture it.”
I shrug. “I’m mostly following patterns.” Mostly because I’m terrible at counting stitches, anything where I have to go over five is a recipe for disaster. That means there’s some creative math later to fix whatever mistakes I’ve made.
The scarf I have with me tonight is Exhibit A for that one.
He grins at me. “Yeah, maybe you’ll teach me to make something cool?”
I swallow hard, and a whole swarm of butterflies hits my stomach.
That feeling I had at The Flaming Unicorn, the one that made me brave enough to invite him back to my place, returns with a vengeance.
“I could teach you.” I’ve already got a picture in my head of me holding onto his hands, helping him get the proper movement.
Fuck, it’s going to be hard for me to keep this strictly in the friend-zone, if that’s even where we are.
My heart is already running away with the situation, imagining us sitting on the couch each night, watching TV, working on our individual projects. Together.
AARON
I don’t know why I’m here.
That’s not fair. I know exactly why I said yes to Oliver’s text.
I thought we could get together and it would break me of these feelings that I misremembered the whole thing.
I’d had a few drinks, and there was every chance that the connection I felt between us was nothing more than beer goggles and alcohol induced inhibition.
And horniness. Given my months-long dry spell, it’s to be expected that I’d eventually cave. Although, I didn’t see Oliver coming.
As I sit here tonight with nothing but decaffeinated herbal tea, none of that’s true. I knew it the minute he smiled at me, the flush in his cheeks deepening as he promised to teach me how to crochet.
Why would I even ask that? I’m the opposite of crafty.
I’ve never managed anything that doesn’t involve drawing straight lines with a ruler on graph paper.
The rest of my engineering friends were always tinkering with things, taking equipment apart, and figuring out new and exciting ways to put them back together.
I preferred to stick to the manuals. I can build anything, as long as it’s the intended use of the pieces.
And now, I’m going to pick up crocheting.
It’s just that when Oliver offered, I couldn’t bring myself to say anything other than yes. If it means seeing him happy, getting to work side-by-side with him, then I’m in.
Which is a big problem I haven’t figured out yet.
Even being friends with him will be complicated.
More than that is off the table. I’m a terrible boyfriend.
Plenty of references can attest to precisely that.
It’s what everyone says when we break up.
I don’t want to hurt anyone, but especially Oliver.
Whatever this attraction between us is, I need to keep a lid on it.
“So you don’t crochet. What do you do with your spare time?”
It actually takes me a whole second to come up with an answer.
“I run.” It’s a bit of a sad offering. I know I told him the other night, but that was in the afterglow of our incredible orgasms. Besides, he probably doesn’t realize how much of my time that takes up. Training is basically a part-time job.
“Oh? Like how far?”
I grimace a bit because this discussion is always a little awkward. “I’m training for a marathon right now.”
“A marathon? Like a whole marathon? Aren’t those ridiculously long?”
“Twenty-six point two miles,” I say. I think somewhere around my fifth one, I stopped thinking of them as being ridiculously long.
Maybe that’s the issue, but they’ve turned into something I consider reasonable.
I run one or two a year, typically, so it’s all part of a process. Train, race, recover, repeat.
“I don’t think I’ve ever run further than a mile. And that’s only because they made us in school.” He wrinkles his nose as though he’s remembering the experience. “I’m not sure I would like running. Aren’t you bored listening to your own thoughts?”
“Sometimes, but I can always listen to music or an audiobook.” I tend to like the silence, listening to my feet striking the pavement and my controlled breathing, but some days I need a little more to get me through the monotony. “You could come with me sometime. I’d be fun.”
What the fuck? Barrett is the only person I ever let run with me. That’s mainly because he wore me down, asking over and over again until I was too tired to say no. I certainly didn’t offer.
“Um… I don’t think so. First of all,” he says, holding up a finger. “I’d never keep up. And secondly, you’d have to scrape my dead body off the sidewalk at the end.”
“It would be hard to explain that to your siblings. I have a feeling one of them would put a hit out on me.” For the little he’s told me, his siblings are wildly overprotective. I can see why. Oliver is so earnest. I’d say innocent, but having been to bed with him, I know that’s not true.
He snorts, and it’s the cutest thing I’ve ever heard. “No, they’d all be on your side. They’re always telling me I need to exercise more. Two of them are doctors, so they constantly lecture me about taking better care of myself.”
“I’d slow down for you.” It’s an offer I don’t make often.
Ever, actually. Given how little time I have, I’m typically focused on hitting the required pacing for each of my runs.
Slowing down—or speeding up—comes with a bunch of issues and could hurt me in the long run.
That’s something I learned the hard way in my twenties.
I like to think I’m older and wiser now, but apparently not when it comes to Oliver.
There’s something about the way his brown eyes sparkle when he looks at me.
“How about this. When you finish making your very own scarf, then I’ll go for a run with you.” That sounds suspiciously like he thinks I’ll never manage to finish a scarf. He might not know this about me, but I don’t back down from a challenge. I’m also not a sucker.
“Counteroffer… I’ll pick out something to make, but while I’m making it, you train for a five-k with me.” It’s a fair deal. We’ll both be putting in the work to do something outside our comfort zone. I ignore how much time that’s potentially putting us in the same space.
His mouth falls open as he stares at me. “A five-k? Isn’t that like… I don’t know how many miles. What’s that in American?”
“Three,” I say, leaving out the extra point one tacked onto the end. We can talk about that when we get there.
Oliver groans and shakes his head. “That’s so far.”
“It’s an even exchange.” I shrug my shoulders and try to remember what it was like when I first started running, trying to build up those few initial base miles.
“We’ll both be putting in time each week to achieve our goals.
” Something tells me that he’ll have more success running than I will with crocheting.
He’s got the perfect body for it, so he’ll have no problem in that sense.
The real challenge will be getting his cardiovascular system on board.
“Okay, you’ve got a deal,” he says slowly. From the sly look on his face, I’m pretty sure he thinks I’ll give up after a week. At this point, I might make the worst scarf known to man, but I’m going to make it.
And he’s going to run a race. With me.
I smirk. I don’t know about the yarn part, but for once, I’m looking forward to running with someone else.
And not in the way I am when Barrett goes with me.
I’m actually excited, even though I know he’ll be slow.
I’m already mentally rearranging my schedule to accommodate the extra slow miles in my training.
“Why are you smiling? Should I be scared?”
“No, not scared.” I try to find the right words to ease his anxiety. “Cautiously optimistic.”
He raises an eyebrow. “That doesn’t sound ominous or anything.”
“How about this. I’ll find a pattern I like, and you find a five-k race that sounds good to you. Something about three months from now.”
“I… where do I even look for something like that? I usually only know about them when they’re blocking the road on Saturday mornings.”
“I’ll send you a link.”
And there it is. Not only am I meeting up with someone Nathan, one of my best friends, would call the enemy, but I’ve committed to seeing him a few times a week for the foreseeable future.