17
About thirty minutes after Andy’s abrupt departure, there’s a knock on the apartment door.
My eyes snap up. Reruns of Law & Order have been playing on the TV in front of me, but I’ve been too lost in my thoughts to follow the plot. The knock jolts me out of the labyrinth of my brain and back to reality.
I take a deep breath, then stand and walk to the door.
With each step, I thank God that Andy is both courteous and prescient enough to give me a warning knock, instead of just using his key to barge in on me freaking out.
As the door inches closer, I remind myself of the plan: play it down, laugh it off, don’t make it weird and get kicked out of this apartment.
Thirty minutes has been plenty of time to imagine what Andy would say when he gets back. Something along the lines of, I don’t know what came over me. I’ve told you before that I just want to be friends.
Or maybe, It was one kiss—we don’t have to make it a big deal.
Or worse, Yes, that kiss was amazing and soul-shattering and I can’t deny it was the best kiss of my life but that doesn’t change anything. You shouldn’t have gotten your hopes up, silly girl.
Okay, maybe he won’t put it that way exactly, but the underlying message likely stands.
Mid-spiral, I’m absolutely shocked when I open the door to find Nolan’s sunny grin beaming back at me.
“Hey, Soph! I brought the goods.” He’s carrying a four-pack of iced coffees in one hand and a paper Market Basket bag in the other. “How’s it going, babes?”
He kisses the top of my head and walks in like he owns the place. Which, to be fair, is normal for NASA—what’s mine is yours and all that. But today it feels like an avalanche.
“You have to tell me everything that happened last night. I can’t believe Elliot was there.”
His burly man arms grab a large plastic bowl out of the kitchen cabinet, tear open a family sized bag of chips, and dump them out to share.
“I didn’t even see him. Not that I wanted to. I’m mostly just curious if he’s figured out what Lia did to his pants while we were there getting your stuff.”
Nolan has this way of occupying all the space in a room.
I usually love it. It’s sweet—like innocent himbo Hercules barreling into the town square full-steam ahead.
But today, right now, his cheer is just disorienting.
I spent the last half hour burrowing into a sullen self-doubt hole that felt like a perfectly suitable permanent residence.
Then in comes my own personal Kronk, pulling levers at random and shaking me awake.
He doesn’t even notice that I haven’t responded until the snacks are all laid out and he’s taken the first sip of his coffee. He holds a second bottle out towards me, asking, “You want one?” but all I can do is weakly shake my head.
“Hey, are you alright?” His thick eyebrows furrow as he urges me into a kitchen chair, then takes the seat next to me. “Where’s Andy anyway?”
My face feels like an open flame and I’m stammering, not quite sure how to say what I’m about to say. “Uh… Nolan, right before you got here… Andy and I… we… kissed.”
I watch the gears turn in his head. His eyes slowly widen, then a grin bursts across his face and he rockets up from the chair. “WOO! YES!” His arms are raised, punching the air like he’s just won some sportsball world championship.
“Well, I’m glad you’re so happy about it,” I yell, “but I’m freaking out!”
That sobers him quickly. He sits back down. “Wait, so you’re not together now?”
“No, we’re not together now! Nolan, it was a kiss. He—I—we just...” I pinch the bridge of my nose and try to unearth something that resembles a sentence. “We kissed. We kissed just now.” I gesture helplessly toward the spot where it happened. “And I don’t know why or what to do about it.”
I explain everything. The fight with Elliot last night, Andy taking care of me, then this morning when he was in such an awful mood until all of a sudden…
By the time my story ends, Nolan is up and pacing. He looks about as stressed out as I feel.
“And he just bolted?” Nolan asks. “No explanation, no… declaration?”
“No. What? Nolan, I swear I told you literally every word we said to each other, and then he was gone.”
He sits back down, elbows on the table as he cradles his head in his hands. I can’t help but roll my eyes at the dramatics. When he finally looks up at me again, he asks, “If he had stayed, what would you have done?”
I feel the blush that scorches across my cheeks.
The memory of his lips on mine, his grip on the side of my neck, his hardness pressing against me.
I shake my head to clear the fog of it all.
“I don’t know,” I lie. If we hadn’t been interrupted, I know exactly what I would’ve done.
“I just wish I knew what he was thinking. I’m so nervous he’s going to come back any second and tell me he needs space, and that I have to move out because things are irrevocably weird between us.”
“Well, he’s never going to do that, so you can let that one go right now. Even if he wasn’t in—” Nolan cuts himself off, a look on his face like his brain short circuited.
“Even if he wasn’t in what?”
“Nothing,” he says quickly. “I just… he’s a really good guy, Sophie.”
“Why are you being weird right now? I know that. He’s my best friend, you think I don’t know he’s one of the best people on Earth?”
“Maybe you should give him a chance.” Nolan’s expression is painfully sweet, and it’s so like him to assume things are that simple.
“He doesn’t…” I start to explain, but then back up. “He was just upset. He didn’t mean it. He doesn’t see me that way.” I glance down at my hands as I say it, trying not to remember how they felt running through his hair, pulling him against me.
“What do you mean? He just kissed you. Of course he sees you that way.”
“I know! I mean… for a second I thought…”
I shake my head to reorder my warring thoughts.
“Look, one kiss doesn’t have to mean anything. I think emotions were high after last night and we were both confused and possibly generally horny. I mean, the second we stopped kissing and actually had to face each other again… you should have seen the way he ran out of here.
He literally told me it shouldn’t have happened and then he left. I don’t think I can deal with another rejection like that, especially from him.”
He sighs. “Okay, but you don’t know—”
A buzzing sound cuts him off, and I pull my phone out of my back pocket.
“Hang on, Lia’s calling.” I answer and throw her on speaker. “Hey Li—”
“ANDY KISSED YOU? WHAT THE FUCK!”
Andy’s voice immediately follows, like he’s yelling from somewhere in the background. “Lia, stop! Jesus—Sophie, I’m so sorry about this.”
“You’re together?” I ask, my face burning at about a billion degrees.
Nolan pulls my outstretched palm towards him, leaning directly over the phone. “Andy, man, I’m so happy for—”
“Nolan, shut the fuck up right now,” Andy barks, cutting him off. “I’m serious. Shut up.”
“He’s at my café show,” Lia explains. “He just showed up. So does this mean you’re dating now?”
“For fuck’s sake,” Andy says in the distance. “No, we’re not dating now.”
"Then you two can’t just start kissing each other! It’s going to mess up the NASA dynamic.”
“Guys—” I try to cut in, but I’m bulldozed as Nolan fully snatches the phone from my hand.
“Lia, grow up. This isn’t about you.”
“Grow up? GROW UP? Andy and Sophie just frenched like horny 16-year-olds and you’re telling me to grow up?”
“Can we please not make this a group discussion?” I beg, but no one is listening.
“I’m going to murder you,” Andy’s voice threatens. “You’re dead in the ground.”
“You murder me and you’ll have the Italian mob on your ass.”
“Stop saying that. Our family isn’t in the mob.”
“What did it mean?” Lia screams into the receiver. “What does it mean for NASA? Will things ever be normal again?”
“It didn’t mean anything,” Andy insists.
“Bro, come on, you don’t mean that—”
“NOLAN,” he shouts. “I’m fucking serious, man.”
I grab the phone back from Nolan. “Guys! Can Andy and I please talk about this alone before we present our case to the Supreme Court?”
“Sure,” Lia says, all bite. “You talk about it. But I will not have you two messing up my friend group. Keep it in your pants unless you’re gonna fucking marry each other. Got it?”
I sigh. “Yeah. Got it.”
“If you think you’re still my friend after this, Lia, you’re out of your fu—”
Then the call cuts off.
Two Law & Order episodes later, the jury is about to return their verdict when I hear the sound of a key in the lock. Nolan and I jolt up to attention, partially spilling the bowl of chips on the cushion between us as we look towards the sound, then back to each other.
The door slides open. Andy takes one step in before looking up, right at me.
“Hi,” he says quietly.
“Hi,” I return.
Then nothing. We’re frozen in place, eyes locked. Nolan’s gaze darts between us like we’ve gone insane. The jury foreman declares, “We find the defendant… guilty,” before anyone in the room remembers how to speak.
“Okay…” Nolan drawls. “I’m just going to see myself out.”
He stands, grabs his jacket and shoes, and mutters something under his breath as the apartment door shuts. It might be in Italian. I can’t even tell at this point.
Once he’s gone, Andy reanimates. His eyes leave mine as he hangs up his jacket, hastily, clumsily. “I forgot Nolan was coming over,” he says, pulling off his boots and placing them in their spot on the shoe rack. “I kind of thought he was joking.”
“He never jokes about inviting himself somewhere.” My smile feels forced, but it doesn’t matter because Andy isn’t looking at me. “So… how was Lia’s show?”
“Uh… it was good.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah.”
Andy hesitates, then finally joins me in the living room.
He sits stiffly in the corner armchair as I send up a prayer: God, please don’t let this ruin our friendship.
Please let things go back to normal. If Andy lets me keep living here, I swear I’ll never do something that reckless again.
I’ll go to church. I’ll be good forever. Whatever you want.
Lia’s phone call ambush—while possibly the most annoying thing she’s ever done—was a blessing in the end, because at least Andy’s contributions gave me a preview of the conversation to come: We’re not together now. We’re not dating. We won’t be doing it again.
(But what I wouldn’t give to skip over the verbalization of those facts straight into pretending it never happened.)
Andy leans back, running a hand through his hair. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Me either,” I admit. Then, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“So…”
I take a deep breath in. “So… you kissed me.”
“Jesus Christ.” Andy falls forward, elbows on knees, clearly ready to die.
“What! I’m sorry! But we have to get it out in the open.”
“No, I’m sorry,” he says to the floor. “I shouldn’t have… God.”
“I mean, don’t apologize. It was…” I start to laugh because I can’t believe what’s coming out of my mouth. “It was really good.”
Andy’s head pops up. He doesn’t say a word but his gaze is frantic—flicking from my eyes to my hands to my lips and back, the two curved lines between his brows deepening as he obviously starts to spiral.
“Don’t look at me like that.” I wave a hand through the air between us. “I know it doesn’t mean we’re together now or anything. I’m just saying, I think we can acknowledge it was a really good kiss. Right? Or am I wrong? Oh no—did you think it was bad?”
Andy’s face lands in his hands, palms rubbing forceful circles over his eyes. “No, it wasn’t bad.”
When he doesn’t say more, I reach forward to squeeze his knee. “Hey, stop worrying so much. Lia’s not actually gonna make you marry me or something. We’re friends and we’re roommates. That’s all. But it happened, right? Whatever was going through our heads at the time, it happened.”
“Yeah,” he mutters, face still buried. “It happened.”
“And… you’re not going to kick me out?” A bit of genuine nervousness creeps into my tone. “Because I really can’t afford rent on my own. I’m so sorry if this whole thing is making you uncomfortable, but I really need this apartment, Andy, and I’m not afraid to beg.”
“No, of course not. See this is why I shouldn’t…” He takes a centering breath, then meets my eyes. “I’m sorry you were worried about that. I would never kick you out. You live here now. I didn’t mean to stress you out.”
I want to put a period at the end of this interaction. Start a new paragraph, a new page. Draw dark lines under it in red and black, then lose track of it in the massive tome of our history. So I paste on a neutral smile and ask, “Friends?”
He almost-smiles, no dimple in sight. “Friends.”
But then, as I stand and head towards my room, Andy calls, “Wait—Soph?”
My heart shifts into second gear as I turn back. “Yeah?”
“Don’t get back together with him.”
I study him—the hard set of his jaw, the almost sorrowful tilt to his brow—then ask, “Why?”
He whispers, “Just don’t.”
His expression is layered and pained and it makes me wish I could reach into his chest and rip out his heart, looking for brutal honesty next to my name in all the pulsing atria. But I can’t. So I just say, “Okay.”