18. Chris
18
N atalie’s invitation to her Friday game night felt like a step in the right direction.
When I got there, the air was still thick with tension. The natural rhythm between us was off. I hated it. It was my fault, and I knew that. I also knew that I could only bear so much responsibility in fixing it. There was a small part of me that thought they were overreacting, but I swallowed it down. It wasn’t going to help me fix things with my friends. Playing the blame game didn’t help build bridges. It only burned them to the ground.
The first game we played felt wrong. The second one felt a little more natural, but things still felt off. I needed to make the steps to rebuild the bridge. I had the plan in place: movie night at Eli’s. Natalie was already interested, but she was the only one I’d extended the invite too so far.
When we finished the second game and started to transition to a third, I decided to make my move. “Are you guys busy Sunday?”
Six heads swiveled toward me before they all began to exchange glances. I caught the way River raised their eyebrow at Luce. I caught the questioning look on Vince’s face when he looked at Mason, and I wondered how much he knew about our group’s current issue. Had Mason spilled everything to him in a very boyfriendly manner, despite constantly claiming that they weren’t boyfriends? Natalie gave Ronnie a small smile, and Ronnie shot me the most subtle thumbs up I’d ever seen.
Clearly, Natalie had told Ronnie the movie night plans already.
River was the first to speak. “We’re free. Luce and me.”
“Depends on what you’re about to suggest if Vince and I are free,” Mason answered. It was such a stereotypical Mason answer that I couldn’t help grinning at him.
It was the first time that things felt normal between us since the truth had come out. It was the first time that I felt like things would return to normal since then too. It reassured me. Maybe not everything was lost. Maybe it was a sign that Eli’s master plan would work. He was smart, just like Seb had said.
“Movie night.” My words were answered with more questioning glances. “Seb’s best friend, Jonas, is hosting on Sunday. It’s at his place with his boyfriend, and they suggested I invite you guys so everyone can get to know each other.”
“Sunday?” Luce questioned as she grabbed some small paper plates from the stack on the snack table. She began to pass them out. “Any idea what movie we’ll be screening?”
“Not a clue,” I admitted. “Hopefully nothing that sucks too much.” Luce let out a small chuckle and another wave of reassurance washed over me. If she was able to laugh, then that meant that things were looking up. Maybe the time they’d needed to cool down was over. “I can ask them, or we can all just go and hope it’s a good time even if the movie sucks?”
“What time is it?” River asked, pulling out their cell phone.
“I think Jonas said that people should be arriving around 7:00. He was thinking about ordering pizza.”
“Or you could tell him not to order pizza and I’ll cook,” Luce suggested with a grin. “I mean, as a gesture of good will.”
“Good will or needing to be in control of the menu?” I questioned.
“Does it matter if the food’s good?”
“Can I tell them that you’re coming?”
My friends exchanged looks again, but this time, I could see the skepticism written on their faces. That wasn’t a good sign. It wasn’t showing a lot of faith in the future of our friendship, and I didn’t like it. It felt like time hadn’t been enough to heal the problems between us. Or maybe I hadn’t given them enough time. It hadn’t even been a full week. Maybe I was pushing things too hard and too fast. There was a chance that I was making things worse, causing irreparable damage to the bridge I was trying to rebuild.
I had to fix this. Clearly an invitation wasn’t the right way to go about it.
I had to think about this in terms of our group. Our friendship had always been based in honest conversation. The night they’d come over, we’d barely scratched the surface. They’d been too hurt, and I’d been too blindsided by the fact that the truth had come out. I’d been embarrassed. My head had been shoved too far up my own ass to properly apologize, to properly talk about it, or to properly fix it.
An invitation wasn’t going to change any of that. Conversation would.
I drew in a deep breath. “I’m really sorry,” I told them quietly.
Luce turned from the snack table, bringing a carrot stick up to her mouth. “We know you’re sorry,” she told me bluntly. That didn’t make me feel any better. Not that this was about me feeling better. Luce looked at me for a moment before her green eyes softened. “I guess I still don’t understand why you’d lie about being in a relationship, and it’s really hard to move past everything when I don’t understand. ”
I nodded. That made sense.
It was time to have a real conversation. It was time to lay myself bare, open myself up to all of their prodding questions, and probably hurt my own feelings in the process. Luce herded us all away from the snack table and to the living room. We all settled on Natalie and Ronnie’s giant sectional.
If someone looked in from the outside, it would look a lot more casual and relaxed than I felt sitting on the couch, surrounded by my closest friends, and feeling an icy draft coming off of every one of them.
An awkward silence settled over us like a wet, heavy blanket. I shifted in my seat, trying to figure out how to start. They already knew the basics. They knew why I’d started the lie and why I’d continued it, but the emotions behind it? I hadn’t laid those out for them. Maybe that was the place to start.
“You already know why I started the whole charade.” Six heads nodded. “It was more than just being tired of everyone setting me up all the time.”
“What was it?” Natalie asked softly.
The question was prodding but not in a way that made me feel pressured. It was like she was urging me to expand on what had motivated me to tell such a ridiculous lie and rope someone I barely knew into it. “I felt like the dates were pity dates. I was the only single one at all of our events. It was always an odd number,” I started. Mason and Vince exchanged a look, and I could just feel their protests starting to form. “Even the two of you who like to claim you’re not actually dating show up together and spend the whole night acting like a couple. Then there I was: chronically single as you’ve all liked to point out too many times.”
My friends nodded.
“I think Mason’s blind date attempt was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“You could have just said that you weren’t interested.”
“Do you know how many times I’ve said that?” I questioned. The blank stares were all the answer I needed. “Almost every time you guys tried to set me up, I said I wasn’t interested. Then you kept pushing about it, so I’d just agree to it. There was never a spark. There was never any kind of compatibility, and I didn’t want to deal with it this time.”
“Shit,” Mason exhaled. “I’m sorry, Chris.” It took me a second for his words to register. He was sorry? The look of confusion must have been written all over my face, because he went on. “I never meant to pressure you. None of us did.”
My friends all nodded in agreement.
“We just wanted you to be happy,” Natalie whispered softly. “We didn’t mean to make you feel pressured.”
I reached across Ronnie’s lap to squeeze Natalie’s hand. I felt her small hand squeeze mine back, and our eyes met. There was more than just understanding reflected in her eyes when they met mine. There was forgiveness. It was a step in the right direction, if nothing else. I felt Ronnie’s hand on my wrist, and when I looked at him, I saw the same look in his eyes as his wife’s. I was not surprised. Ronnie tended to go with whatever Natalie wanted when it came to group affairs.
If she forgave someone, his forgiveness almost always followed immediately after.
“The original plan was to tell you guys that we broke up a few days later. Then Luce invited me to her birthday party—me and Seb.” Luce nodded. “I should have admitted the truth then, but I was embarrassed. So the new plan was to break up a week or two after the party. It was going to be an amicable breakup, one that we could still be friends after. Then Natalie told his mom about us, and we decided to reprise our roles with her so she’d stop worrying about the fact that he didn’t put himself out there enough. By then, I kind of liked him.”
“So your original plan was to keep lying? Never tell us the truth?” Mason questioned. I hated the hurt in his voice, the fact that I was the one who had put it there.
More than that, I hated the fact that he was right. My original plan had been for my friends to never find out the truth. I would have milked their sympathy, and they’d have never known that it was all fake. Looking at it from their perspective, it was kind of fucked up.
“I’m sorry.” My apology sounded different than the previous ones had sounded. It felt different too. The last apology had been genuine, but I hadn’t understood the depth of the pain I’d caused. I hadn’t realized how messed up it was that I’d been willing to lie to my friends, to milk them for sympathy, all to avoid the rotating door of blind dates and embarrassment.
It must have sounded different to my friends too. I saw the moment Luce and Mason’s facial expressions softened. I looked at River, and I saw acceptance. Natalie offered me a small smile, and Ronnie’s smile followed.
It wasn’t forgiveness, but it was a step in the right direction.
I watched as my friends exchanged glances, and finally, Luce spoke. “We’ll go to movie night.”
I let out a sigh of relief, sent a text to Seb to tell his friends, and we went back to our games.
The next day, Mason came over on his own. We talked longer, and I felt the moment it shifted to full forgiveness. Things would be okay with me and my best friend, and that gave me faith that things would be okay with the rest of my friends too .
On Sunday, Seb and I arrived at Jonas and Silas’s early. Jonas greeted us as we walked in and went back to a flurried dusting of all of the surfaces in the already immaculate apartment. “He’s nervous,” his boyfriend explained when I raised an eyebrow. “If this helps, I’m not saying shit about it.”
I chuckled, a chuckle that turned into a full belly laugh when Jonas turned around and threw his rag at his boyfriend. “Asshole,” he scolded.
“He says that with love,” Silas explained. “It’s practically a pet name at this point.”
“I wish I had something else to throw at you.”
“They’re always like this,” Seb explained. “You get used to it.”
If it worked for them, I wasn’t going to judge. My relationship was built on a lie to my best friends. If they enjoyed teasing each other as a part of their relationship, well, I hardly had the high ground. Besides, they were both smiling and laughing, so clearly it wasn’t an issue.
“What time did you tell everyone to be here?” Silas asked Seb after a little small talk. Jonas was now organizing the picture frames on a shelf, making sure they were perfectly aligned.
“I told Matt to be here at 6:15. I told Holden and Eli 6:30, and I think Chris’s friends are supposed to be here at 7:00. Figure this way, everyone’s here by 7:00, and we can start the movie. ”
“Smart,” Seb mused, looking at his friend with adoration. “We should start doing that for everything we do together.”
“If you told all my friends 7:00, then they’ll all be here by 6:55 at the latest. Most of them will be here by 6:45,” I warned. My friends were notoriously early. Mason would be the one arriving only five minutes early, and that was because Vince liked to be punctual. It was their compromise. I grinned. “I bet you anything at least one of them will be parked outside by 6:30.”
And it would be Luce and River. Luce would try to convince River to let them go up early, just so she could take a peek into the kitchen and probably try to take over the food prep. Which…
“I thought there was going to be food.”
I didn’t smell anything cooking, and no one had gone into the kitchen since we arrived. Maybe they were still planning on ordering pizza.
“Luce made me do it,” Seb burst out.
“Made you do what?”
“Give her Jonas’s number.”
I looked over at Jonas who was grinning. “She volunteered to cook, which trust me, you want her to cook. We were just going to stick some frozen wings in the oven or order a spread from Pie in the Sky. Pizza, wings, the whole nine yards. ”
I sighed heavily. Of course Luce found a way to take over the food preparation. “How did Luce make you give her his number?”
“She asked nicely.”
I groaned. That was hardly making anyone do anything. We continued to make small talk while Jonas flittered around the apartment, straightening up things that didn’t need it. He only stopped when Silas finally pulled him onto the couch and threatened to sit on him. Matt, Eli, and Holden all showed up by 6:35 and a few minutes later, Luce and River came in holding trays of food. By 7:00, all our friends were there and introductions had been made.
We all settled around, and a movie was put on: a classic that everyone had already seen so no one minded when we all started chatting.
I felt amazing, watching a cheesy old movie, surrounded by my closest friends and a whole group of new friends, with Seb curled up against me.
This was what happiness felt like. This was what was missing on all the blind dates my friends had set me up on.