Chapter 9
nine
the token straight friend
You would think, after twenty-six years on this Earth, I would be less of a dumbass by now. You would be incorrect.
For, as you can see, I have made a grave miscalculation.
When I cancelled my Saturday afternoon coffee date with Victory—with a vague excuse that made me feel like crap—it never occurred to me that she might still end up at Green Bean this afternoon.
That in itself is not such a problem, of course, but the fact that I told Damien I would meet him in front of Green Bean was an error in judgment of epic proportions.
I figured I was being practical; if we met outside Ink & Well, then my mother would see him and ask about him and it would be a whole Thing. This would be much more discreet. I thought.
But when I see Victory and Pal heading towards Green Bean Coffee—heading towards me—hand-in-hand, my dumbassery comes into sharp focus. (Why can’t I be as smart as my sister? Marie would never.)
“Audrey!” Victory beams at me as the two of them come to a stop in front of me. She glances at Pal, who seems equally happy to have me crash their date, before returning her radiant smile to me. “I thought you were busy today.”
“Yeah… I am,” I tell her, and she deflates a little. “I’m just waiting for—” I cut myself off when I see Damien approaching from across the street, and I think about bodily shoving Victory and Pal into the coffee shop before they notice him. But of course, it’s too late.
Because I am a dumbass.
“Hey, it’s Glasses!” Pal says, raising a hand to wave at him.
Damien stops several feet away from us, in the middle of the road, and waves back uncertainly. A car horn beeps at him, and he jogs a few steps to reach us. (Thankfully the drivers are used to pedestrians meandering about around here.)
Victory looks between the two of us, frowning in confusion. “What’s going on?”
“We were just—I mean, I’m—Damien invited me to go check out his N64.” I stumble over the words as they all spill out too fast. Even though it’s the truth, it sounds like I’m lying. Great.
Pal grins. “Now that’s a euphemism.”
Damien frowns in confusion as well. “I have an actual Nintendo 64.”
The awkwardness is palpable, though it’s possible that it is completely my own.
I told Victory I didn’t even know if Damien and I were even friends—I still don’t know what that word really means—and now I’m going over to his apartment like we’re besties, and cancelling plans with my actual bestie to do so.
I have committed some sort of friendship crime even though I don’t know what the rules are.
Panicked, I figure my best course of action is to end this scene as quickly as possible.
“Well, enjoy your coffee!” I give Victory a quick hug and Pal a nod before I back away to leave, like I’m ready to make a run for it if need be.
“Okay,” Victory says, eyeing me skeptically as she slowly makes her way to the door of the café. “Enjoy your Nintendo, I guess.”
I keep a forced smile plastered to my face until the two of them disappear inside and then I turn around, glaring at Damien as I march past him. “You were either two minutes early or two minutes late, but either way, you have terrible timing.”
“Sorry.” He shoves his hands in his pockets as he falls in step next to me. “Your friends don’t like me, do they?”
I sigh. “I may have had some ungenerous opinions about you before we, y’know, talked. And I may have shared those opinions with them. Loudly.”
“Right,” he says slowly. “And have these opinions changed, or…?”
“I think so?” I glance over at him as we keep walking. “I mean, yes, unless you intend to murder me today.”
“Hadn’t planned on it, no.”
“Okay, then, yeah. I don’t hate you anymore.”
“You hated me?” he says with an incredulous laugh. “That’s so harsh.”
“But my friends know I don’t hate you anymore,” I add quickly. “I’m pretty sure, anyway. I told them that we were, y’know, talking.”
He nods understandingly. “But they still don’t like me.”
“Victory is just protective of me,” I say with a shrug. “I’ve had some friends in the past who were dicks to me, and she’s worried you might also be a dick.”
“Because you told her I was a dick.”
“Correct.”
“Okay. Got it.”
“And Pal is just…sort of strange,” I muse. “They think you—” I stop myself before I inadvertently say the word horny in front of him.
“They think I what?” he asks, sounding mildly amused.
I shake my head. “Doesn’t matter. Both of them are wrong, anyway.”
“So what do you think of me, then?” We reach the stop for the streetcar, and he turns to face me, hands still shoved in his plaid pockets. “Now that we’ve, y’know, talked.”
I sneer at him jokingly for the way he mocked my wording, but I’m suddenly aware of how strange it is to see his face like this. I’ve only seen the bottom of it for years, in a tiny window at the corner of my screen, and our two other brief encounters were before I knew who he was.
Not just that he’s Scones, but that he’s the person I’ve spent the past three days talking to and joking with and thinking about—not that I’ve been thinking about him that much, really. A normal amount, for friends-or-whatever-we-are.
“I…don’t know?” My shoulders bunch up around my ears until my neck is swallowed by the roll collar of my sweater. “But I think you’re probably not as much of a dick as I once thought, if that helps.”
“It does. Thank you.” He nods so seriously that it makes me laugh, and then he’s laughing too and our chatter flows easier the rest of the way to his apartment.
The fear of being murdered has flickered through my head several times since Damien suggested that I come over, but it is usually short-lived, and my rational brain takes over quickly.
And for the entire streetcar ride to his place, the fear is gone.
It doesn’t hit me again until we reach his building and I see what looks like dried blood and vomit on the steps up to the front door.
The building is several storeys high, but he only lives on the third floor, so we take the stairs up instead of the elevator. Which is probably a mistake, given that I’m usually winded by the time I reach my second-storey apartment at home every day.
I try not to let it show that I’m breathing too hard for a young-ish person who just climbed a thousand steps, or whatever that was, when we stop in front of apartment 305 and Damien unlocks the door.
I slip my phone out of my pocket and discreetly text Victory the address and apartment number—probably a good thing that she knows about this, then—even though I’m ninety-seven percent sure that I’m not going to be murdered, before following him inside.
The first thing I notice when I step into the apartment is that it doesn’t smell nearly as bad as I expected.
The next thing I notice is that the entryway is very narrow, and we have to do an awkward dance to get around each other as we take off our shoes by the door.
The narrow hallway continues further into the apartment, with doors on either side. One of the doors on the left swings open just as we reach it, and his roommate, Malcolm, swoops out of the bathroom in a whoosh of aftershave, nearly smacking into Damien.
“Watch it!” Damien stumbles back a step, forcing me to take a step back as well.
“Damien, my glorious friend!” Malcolm says with a wide smile, sandwiching Damien’s face between his hands with a thwack. I notice he’s wearing sparkly nail polish on one hand.
“Ow,” Damien mutters, muffled through his smushed cheeks.
“Today is a great day,” Malcolm adds, finally releasing his friend before looking past him. At me. “Streamer girl!”
“Au-Audrey,” I say hesitantly as I lean back a little, worried that he’s going to thwack my face as well.
“Why so chipper, Mal?” Damien asks, rubbing the side of his face.
“Because I, my sweet summer child, have a date with Evan tonight.”
“Congrats, I guess.”
“Con-fucking-grats, my guy!” Malcolm grabs Damien’s face again and kisses him on the forehead.
“Oh, come on,” Damien groans, wiping his forehead as Malcolm twirls away down the hall and disappears through a door on the right. Damien glances back at me. “Ignore him.”
I follow him down the hall as well, past a small kitchen separated from the main living space by half a wall, towards an oversized couch that takes up the entire width of the room.
Parts of the space looks vaguely familiar, and I realize I’ve seen it in the background of his streams, but from the other direction, where his computer desk is situated under the window.
The desk is pretty sparse, which I wasn’t expecting. I thought it would be covered in nerd junk like mine, or at least have a huge computer with clear sides and flashing LED lights on full display on top of the desk, like some people seem to prefer. (Not me.)
Damien’s desk is clean and simple—something basic from IKEA, by the looks of it, but I’m obviously not one to judge—with two monitors taking up the width of the top and a computer tower tucked away discreetly below.
The mouse and keyboard are both wireless, so there are hardly any cables to be seen.
I make a mental note to get him to teach me his cable management magic.
“Yeah, it’s not that exciting,” he says when he notices me checking out his desk.
“No, it’s just… My desk is a mess,” I say with a laugh.
“I, uh, maybe tidied up a bit.” He looks away sheepishly. “Normally there are a lot more half-empty coffee mugs and food wrappers all over it.”
“You didn’t need to tidy on my account.”
“I didn’t.” He smiles patronizingly and I realize it was pretty presumptuous of me to think he would do anything on my account. Though he might just be kidding.
He walks over to the TV on the opposite wall from the couch and crouches down to open the cabinet below. He holds out a see-through purple N64 controller towards me. “I just need a sec to set up. You can go sit, if you want.”