49. Helen
I’m in week two of officially being Thad’s friend. I never realized what a loaded word that was before. Friend. I always assumed it must have a positive connotation, but now—now, it’s complicated. Because despite everything that’s happened between us, I trust that he hasn’t come back just to toy with me. If he says he’ll be a friend to me, he will.
My worry is that all he wants from me is friendship, and that every time I’m near him, my heart will race, and I’ll get clumsy and awkward and won’t know what to say, and I’ll wonder what he thinks about me, and I’ll catch my breath every time we touch.
My worry is that I’ll always be just a little bit in love with him.
But maybe…maybe with time that will dim. Maybe being friends might actually be a good thing, because it will take him off the pedestal in my mind. He’ll stop being this unreachable being—my first love, first kiss, first time—and just be Thad. My friend.
My friend, who brought me donuts at work to surprise me. And who took me to the film noir festival last week. And who texts me cute GIFs of puppies falling asleep before bed every night.
Normal friend stuff. I think. Nothing I should read anything into, right? Because we are just…friends.
“This is a terrible idea,” Matilda told me when I broke the news to her and Nina about Thad popping up in my life again.
Which, all things told, is a pretty standard Matilda reaction, and I’d braced myself for that. What I hadn’t braced myself for was Nina’s reaction—sort of the human equivalent of the grimacing face emoji.
And maybe they’re right. Maybe I am being stupid. Maybe this all will go catastrophically wrong.
But even knowing all of that, what I also know is that I’m not ready to let him go, even if we’ll only ever be friends.
I can get used to it. I will get used to it, and I’ll move on. Eventually.
Tonight, my friend Thad is making me dinner—his meemaw’s gumbo, which everyone knows is not a romantic food, so I’m in no danger of getting swept up in my feelings. And if it weren’t for the constant worry that I’m only falling more deeply in love with him with every minute we spend together, I might just be enjoying myself.
I give myself a mental slap to the face. I don’t want to be one of those creepy people who tries to force someone to be with me, especially when he’s made his feelings so clear. I’ve agreed to friendship, and so I will be his friend. I will move on, and he will, too, and I won’t let myself be weird about his new girlfriend, whenever she inevitably makes her grand appearance, and I won’t let pining over him keep me from being happy with someone else.
This too shall pass, and all that.
“You did not guess the murderer,” I chide Thad through my laughter, shaking my head as I dutifully chop up the peppers and celery and okra for dinner. Technically he’s supposed to be making dinner for me, but I couldn’t just sit around while he did all the cooking, especially in my own apartment, so I’m on vegetable-chopping duty.
“It was obvious. I figured it out by chapter three.”
I roll my eyes. “Arguably Agatha Christie’s best novel, and you guessed it by chapter three? Bullarky.”
Thad glances over at me from where he’s making the roux, looking deeply offended. “I’m a bounty hunter. I can read people. I know when someone’s lying.”
He’s smiling as he says it, but the words send a jolt of panic through me. For the first time it strikes me that that’s what I’m doing, in going along with this whole friendship thing. I’m lying. To him, to myself. I’m pretending that my heart isn’t broken, that I’m not hoping something will change, that I’m not waiting for him tochange his mind and tell me he loves me, he wants to be with me, he can’t live without me.
Matilda was right. This is a terrible idea.
“Hey.” Thad’s low, gentle voice pulls me out of my panic. He’s standing close to me, frowning with concern. “You okay? Where’d you go just now?”
He steps in closer, raising his hands to tuck my hair behind my ears. His fingers gently trace over my cheekbones, the shell of my ear.
The air in the room instantly changes from friendly to intensely charged, at least on my end. At his nearness, his light touch, a jolt of want shoots through me. I’ve been making my brain repeat the mantra that we’re just platonic friends now, that there’s nothing romantic or sexual between us, but my body has not gotten the memo. It remembers those same fingers tracing other parts of me, his skin on mine, and it responds so quickly and urgently I’m afraid he’ll notice.
I step back, just a little, but it’s enough. The spell is broken. Thad’s hands fall back to his side. “I was just remembering something I have to do for work,” I say, lying yet again, because the truth is too mortifying to say out loud. “I’m back now.”
“Okay.” Thad’s hands flex at his sides. “You ready to make the roux?”
His smile and tone are both easy, like none of that affected him in the slightest. Of course it didn’t. Just in case I needed another reminder, I tell myself again—he’s the one who left me. He’s the one who didn’t want me. Even though he’s popped back into my life again, he hasn’t made any gestures that could be read as romantic. I have my answer.
It’s only that, looking into his blue-gray eyes, I realize what I’ve probably known all along: no matter how long we’re friends and what we go through together, a part of me will always yearn for him.
“I’m going on a date,” I blurt out without meaning to.
Thad stills, blinking at me. “What?”
“I just thought I should be honest,” I continue, because the only way out of this mess is through it, I guess. “His name is Barry something. He works with Matilda. She’s setting us up.”
I could tell him how much prodding and cajoling it took on Matilda’s part, how I agreed to everything before Thad showed up again at the library that day…but if I’m being honest, what I really want to know is what he thinks of all this. It’s sneaky and manipulative, I know, but I want to call his friendship bluff. Is this what he really wants? Us dating other people and filling each other in on the details? I think of him telling me about some new woman he’s met and know that no matter how much time has passed and how long we’ve been friends, it will be pure agony. And if he doesn’t feel the same…
Then I guess things really are over between us.
Thad’s expression is impossible to read. He just stares at me for a long time, blinking. Is he trying to compose himself, or is it the raw onions I just chopped? After a moment, he grunts. “Does he have a criminal record?”
Despite the immense tension I’m feeling at this conversation, I have to roll my eyes. “I don’t know, bounty hunter. I haven’t checked.”
“You should run a background check if you’re meeting a stranger, Sister Helen.”
“Well, he’s a paralegal and he works with my friend, and we’re meeting in a public place, so I think I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll run a background check on him,” Thad mutters under his breath, quiet enough that he probably thinks I didn’t hear him. “What did you say his last name was?” Glancing over and seeing my expression, he shakes his head. “Never mind, I’ll figure it out on my own.”
“Please don’t.” I shouldn’t have brought this up. With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I realize that I have my answer, and all I’m doing now is picking at old wounds. “It’s not, like, a real date. It’s not going to go anywhere. It’s just…practice.”
“Practice for what?”
“For…” I gesticulate around. “I don’t know. The real thing. So when I meet someone I actually like again, he won’t run away after having sex with me because I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Whoops. Another thing I definitely didn’t mean to say tonight. That glass of wine I’ve been nursing as we’ve been cooking must have gone to my head. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“That’s not what happened,” Thad says quietly.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say quickly, because I don’t. I don’t want to rehash what happened. I don’t want to hear some horse-manure excuse about not wanting to hurt me. I also don’t want to scare him off. Despite knowing that being around him will only bring me misery now, it’s still better than the alternative. “It’s fine. Honestly. I’m not trying to make things weird.”
Thad’s voice shifts, and I can tell even without looking that he’s turned to face me. “I need you to understand that isn’t what happened, though. You don’t need practice to be good at dating or sex”—he says the word quickly, like it pains him to even put that suggestion out there—“or anything else. We didn’t work out because of me, not you.”
My heart squeezes in my chest. “Thad, come on.”
“Come on, what?”
A humorless laugh escapes my throat. “I’m naive but I’m not stupid. I know what the whole ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ speech really means. It’s fine. I don’t hold it against you. But men don’t break things off with women they’re actually interested in. We weren’t a good match. I get it.”
“Helen, look at me.”
Reluctantly, I do. Thad looks at me solemnly, his eyes full of meaning. “I meant everything I said to you. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re perfect.”
It actually physically hurts me, to be coddled this way. “Thad, come on?—”
“You’re the first person I want to talk to every morning. I used to hate waking up and now all I do is think about what I’m going to text you that day or when I’m going to see you next.” He takes in a deep breath, almost like it’s freeing to get this off his chest. “I fucked up. I shouldn’t have let you go. I was the problem. Not you.”
I stare at him, trying to process his words. “So you were interested in me, but you thought…you weren’t good enough?”
Thad nods.
“Even though I was a thirty-one-year-old virgin who’d never had a boyfriend or kissed anyone before, and I sing dorky old musicals in the shower, and I can’t swear without flinching?”
“I like all of those things about you,” Thad says.
I frown at him. “Like, as in present tense? As in, you’re still interested in me? Romantically?”
“Like, as in present tense. As in I’m in love with you.”
Thad says this simply, as if it’s obvious, as if he hasn’t just detonated an emotional nuclear bomb in my kitchen. He says it so matter-of-factly that I can’t believe this is actually a romantic expression of love, so I rack my brain for some other explanation. “You love me like a good slice of pizza?”
“I love you, Helen,” Thad says simply. “Not like a slice of pizza.” He takes in a bracing breath, and for the first time I see something in his quiet, guarded expression that I realize isn’t him holding me at bay. He’s been holding himself back, only I was so caught up in my own head that I didn’t notice it. “I know I hurt you, and I made all the choices for us before. I don’t want to bulldoze you or try to force you into something you don’t want to do. If you’re set on dating Barry”—his voice tightens at the name—“or anyone else, I’ll accept that. I meant what I said about being your friend, if that’s all you want from me. But you should also know that I’m in love with you. And I always will be.”
For a long moment, I can only stare at him. I bite my knuckle, tasting the various veggies I’ve been cutting, as I think over what he’s just said. “You’re in love with me. But because you’re allegedly so terrible, you just want to be friends. You’re never going to try to kiss me, or have sex with me, and you’re going to sit by and watch me date other people?”
He swipes his hand over the back of his neck. “I guess so. If that’s what you want?—”
I hold up a hand, silencing him. “I understand.”
And I finally do. I finally understand what happened between us, what’s happening between us.
This idiot thinks we’re in a film noir. I’m the good girl, the counterweight to the femme fatale, held up on a pedestal so as to not be corrupted by the antihero. The good girl may not get her happily ever after, but at least she’s safe; and in leaving her alone and chaste, loving her always from afar, the antihero proves to himself he’s a good man.
Little does he know, I’m about to show him this isn’t a film noir.
It’s a romance.