finn
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jesse still agreed to come over on Sunday evening.
Since we’d gotten to catch up, thanks to his roommate bailing on me, the plan was to watch a movie with the guys.
Mainly, I wanted to show Jesse just how wrong he was about fraternities.
Not all brotherhoods resulted in corrupt senators dealing and backstabbing behind the scenes.
Some were just groups of friends, and it was never too late to find new ones.
Jesse’s bleak outlook on pretty much everything that had ever existed needed a little arguing and a little undermining, so introducing him to my friends seemed like a natural next step.
What I didn’t know was that my friends were not giving up on my happy ending, so when I came downstairs on Sunday afternoon from a post-gym nap, Taylor was very eager to hear about yesterday’s date.
“There was none,” I said. “The guy never showed up.”
“You were out for four hours,” my loyal friend pointed out.
“It was only Jesse,” I said, feeling a little bad for phrasing it that way. Even Bennet winced. “Meaning, I had coffee with an old friend, and then we walked around.”
“That’s…romantic, Finn,” Taylor said, like it was obvious.
I shook my head vehemently and laughed at the idea. “No. No way.”
“Why? What’s wrong with him?” Taylor pressed on.
I laughed harder. My friends greatly misunderstood the situation.
There was nothing wrong with Jesse at all.
Not one bit. If anything, he was too perfect for words, and this sudden return of my childhood friend was a little unnerving.
Of course it made me think of destiny and various forces of the universe.
It even made me think of romance books my friends kept bugging me with.
“Jesse would never be interested in me. He’s way too smart, and he doesn’t get attached to people.
” And as I said those last words, my voice cracked.
Huh.
I hadn’t realized I was still bothered by that.
“Suit yourself,” Taylor said. “We’re putting together a second round of candidates. And we managed to recruit a girl desperate enough to give you a chance.”
“Nice,” I said, flipping him off. “Now, when Jesse shows up, don’t be weird.”
“I will be forever weird,” Jason said.
My sincerest hope was that my friends would simply welcome Jesse into the house and let us watch Harrison’s Sunday pick, which happened to be the original King Kong from 1933, which was a bold choice even for Harrison, but I liked popcorn and watching the guys debate minute and unimportant things just to make fun of Harrison for a bit.
As the day went on, I found myself pacing a little more than I normally would have.
Oddly enough, I was feeling a bit nervous.
The guy coming over was, on paper, someone I had known my entire life.
In truth, I didn’t know him at all. He’d made sure of that ten years ago when he erased himself from my world.
Jesse had been my everything when we were boys.
I would have forever remained in his orbit if he had allowed me.
He was my first true friend, the first person I allowed myself to cry in front of, the first to show up to any of my birthday parties because I’d invited him an hour before anyone else, and the person my parents had taken on vacations because I’d insisted I wouldn’t go without him.
When he’d left, a gap the size of a galaxy opened up in my life.
Every day was empty. Every activity contained a void where all of Jesse had belonged.
And it wasn’t until then that I’d realized just how I had been imagining our lives would play out.
It wasn’t until he was gone that I’d looked into the future and saw the emptiness in everything.
Without ever thinking, I’d envisioned a life where we remained inseparable forever. The fear of it being any different had driven me to be texting him constantly, calling, letting him know what I was up to, until he disappeared.
I couldn’t remember the details, not all of them in any proper order, but I remembered his messages growing shorter, mentions of new friends becoming more common, and reply times stretching from instant to hours, and then to days.
I’d pushed him, though. I’d pushed him hard, and something broke. But that was ancient history.
And it was best kept in the depths of my memory. It served no purpose roaming freely around my head.
I paced around my room for a while longer, then tried out several outfits that could pass for casual but also looked like I’d made an effort. Then I realized I was being silly, so I swapped it all for a good pair of sweatpants and a black T-shirt.
I stepped out of my room in a cloud of cologne. The downstairs common room was dim already, with just a couple of small lamps adding their subdued light to the atmosphere. Snacks were stacked on the table, and the projector was beaming the opening image onto a canvas on the opposite wall.
Harrison sat in a corner with Taylor’s head in his lap, while Taylor’s legs hung over the edge of the sofa.
Jason occupied a big armchair, and Bennet was small enough to comfortably sit on Jason’s lap throughout the night.
Peanut lay on the floor next to the armchair, Jason’s arm hanging over the armrest to play gently with Peanut’s ear.
It was infuriatingly cute. Greg had decided to spend his Sunday evening doing anything but this, so the remaining sofa was reserved for Jesse and me.
And right on cue, the door opened, and all heads lifted, including Peanut’s.
“You said not to ring,” Jesse said as he stepped into the room.
My gaze swept the room as I told Jesse he was right and to just come in and make himself comfortable. All four of my friends looked at each other with wide eyes, pupils so dilated they looked high as fuck.
I shot them a look that should have flattened all four of them. It didn’t. They kept staring at Jesse like he was the last slice of pizza at a party.
“This is Jesse,” I said. “Jesse, these are the idiots. That’s Taylor, the one pretending he’s on a pillow. Harrison, the pillow. Jason and Bennet, and the dog is Peanut. He’ll love you in about five seconds.”
Peanut loved him in three. He crossed the room and shoved his whole head into Jesse’s hand, and Jesse crouched down and scratched behind his ears like he’d done it a thousand times. As I watched my friends watch him do it, I knew, I just knew, this was going to be a long night.
“Sit,” Taylor said, patting the empty sofa. “We saved you the good one.”
“It’s the only one,” I said.
“It’s still good,” Taylor said.
Jesse sat. I sat next to him because there was nowhere else to sit, and because it was my house and my sofa and my childhood friend, and I refused to be weird about any of it.
The cushions were old enough that they sagged in the middle, which meant we both slid a few inches toward the dip, which meant his shoulder ended up an inch from mine.
I left a respectable amount of space. I was very mature about it.
“So,” Bennet said, leaning forward off Jason’s lap with the focus of a man about to take a deposition. “Finn says you two grew up together.”
“We did,” Jesse said.
“How well did you know him?”
“Bennet,” I warned.
“It’s a normal question,” Bennet said. It was not a normal question. Bennet didn’t ask normal questions. Bennet ran a corkboard.
“Pretty well,” Jesse said easily, like he hadn’t noticed the four of them leaning in. “He used to make me climb trees a lot higher than I wanted to go. He made me jump off things, too. I broke my arm off a garage roof because Finn said I could clear the hedge.”
“You could’ve cleared the hedge,” I said.
“I cleared the hedge. It was the landing that needed work.”
Jason laughed too loudly, the way he did, and Harrison made a soft, pleased sound from under Taylor, and Taylor turned his head in Harrison’s lap to mouth something at Bennet that I chose not to see.
I knew this room. I knew these four. They had a frequency they hit when they thought they were being subtle, and they were hitting it now, hard, like a dog whistle for the emotionally nosy.
“Movie,” I announced. “We’re watching the movie.”
“We haven’t started the movie,” Taylor said.
“Then start it.”
Harrison started it, which was its own kind of mercy, because once King Kong was on, Harrison couldn’t help himself.
It went the way it always went. Harrison narrated.
He couldn’t watch a film he loved without telling you why he loved it, so we got the whole thing: the stop-motion, the man who built the puppet, the year, the budget, the way the fog was painted onto glass.
Taylor heckled him from his lap. Jason fell asleep twice and woke up both times insisting he’d been resting his eyes.
“This is the part,” Harrison said reverently, “where the special effects were so far ahead of their time that audiences screamed in the theater.”
“They screamed because a man in New York let a giant ape onto a stage,” Jesse said. “That’s just bad risk management.”
I choked on a handful of popcorn.
Harrison turned around very slowly. “He climbs the Empire State Building for love.”
“He’s abducted, displayed, and shot down by biplanes,” Jesse said. “For love.”
“It’s a tragedy.”
“It’s a workplace safety video.”
And the thing was, Harrison loved it. I watched his whole face change, because nobody argued with Harrison about films; they just let him talk, and here was a stranger taking the bait and pulling on it, and Harrison was lit up like Jesse had handed him a present.
Taylor was openly delighted. Bennet had produced, from somewhere, a small notebook.
“What’s the notebook for?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said Bennet, writing.