Chapter 23
Six
Ihate this fucking dress. I didn’t like it when she bought it for me, and I don’t like it now.
The fabric is too tight, it’s scratchy, and makes me feel like I have bugs crawling just beneath the surface of my skin.
It is taking everything in me to not immediately burn this dress the second I can get my fingers around the goddamn zipper.
“Please, God, help me. I’m going crazy, please,” I begged, the stress and anxiety of the event finally wearing on me, tears begin to prick at the corners of my eyes.
She hurries out the bathroom door into our room on bare feet, her dark brown hair that was tied up in a messy bun let down in a wild array of misshapen curls, and her dark green, floor length gown kissing the floor of our apartment.
“Okay, okay, calm down. Turn around, and it’ll all be over.
We won’t have to do it again until next year!
” Her voice is placating, but a desperate, frustrated cry bubbles from my throat.
“I know, Laney, I’m sorry. I know you hate the crowds, and the clothes, and the stuffy, stuck up bullshit.
I hate it too, but it’s my job. I need this job. ”
“I know. I just really hate this fucking thing,” I say sharply, tugging at the bottom of the too tight dress. I feel her hands cupping my shoulders, trailing down my arms in a soothing motion. Instinctively, I lean into her touch.
The last few years, my need for her presence has only grown.
Before I was satisfied with just being near her, hearing her voice and laughter, getting faint whispers of her lotion.
But then college happened, and we stayed true to our agreement, seeing each other and spending time together as much as possible, but it wasn’t the same as high school.
Back then, we spent nearly twelve hours a day together.
From classes to hanging out afterward and even spending most of our breaks and vacations together.
Something changed during college, though.
I started needing more. More time, more touches, more of her smiles thrown my way.
A voice inside me thinks she felt the same.
She’d always try to come up with ways of staying together longer.
Spending nights in each other’s dorms, just to wake upearly and drive back to our schools for class.
Surprise visits during free time when the other didn’t have class that day.
Then we moved in together, a couple of weeks after our graduations.
It’s been six months, and while I’m the happiest I have ever been, I’m also the saddest as well.
The same fears and worries I have had about my feelings for her since I was sixteen lurk around every corner.
I know I should have told her by now. I know it’s not right to keep this hidden, but I know that if I tell her, and she doesn’t feel the same way, our friendship won’t be the same.
A small part of me has always wondered if she was scared too.
If she also felt like our friendship meant more than her feelings, or even mine.
She wouldn’t hate me, she wasn’t that kind of person.
But it would make things awkward,wouldn’t it?
Uncomfortable. Because she’s so kind, and thoughtful, I know she wouldn’t want to lead me on or make it harder for me to get over my feelings.
She’d pull away, distance herself. It’s what she did to Noah.
In the seven years we have been friends, she’s only been on one date, Noah.
It was around October, the first year of college.
This guy started hanging around with us.
She said he was in her Intro to Political Science class.
He’d come by a few times a week, studying, grabbing dinner in the main hall, or stopping to see if she needed anything when he went out for a weekly stock up at the store.
I remember the day she called to tell me he had asked her out.
She sounded so surprised, shocked, like she didn’t expect him to feel that way towards her, when I saw it the first time I laid eyes on him.
He had the same wistful look when he watched her in those small moments she was clueless to the eyes on her.
Those moments were my favorite because they showed the real her.
I helped her pick out the perfect outfit and fix her hair.
I stayed in her room waiting for her to come back to hear all about it.
To see the happiness and excitement on her face as she gushed about how great the guy was, just like in the cheesy ass movies she loved to watch.
I knew it would crush me, but I didn’t care because I just wanted her to be happy.
But when she got back to the room, she looked defeated.
Resigned. I was so worried that something bad happened, and when I asked, she just shook her head.
“No, it was nothing like that. He was sweet, funny, and charming. He was…a perfect date. He just isn’t the person I want.” And nothing else was said.
Her hands inch back up my arms, going for the tiny little zipper secured at the nape of my neck.
I try to focus all of my attention on the feel of her hands on me, the jolted movements of the fabric tightening around my neck as she pulls.
I gulp down a lungful of air in hopes of calming the slight panic heating my blood.
Or maybe it isn’t so much the panic of being stuck in this god forsaken dress, but from her nearness.
The small puffs of her breath against my neck, and the cool touch of her fingers grazing the top of my naked spine.
“Shit,” she mumbles under her breath.
“What? What is it? Is it stuck!?”
She peers around my shoulder at the panic stricken expression on my face. She cringes. “Um…maybe?”
“Fuck! Get it off me please, just get it off!” I jump forward, attempting to shimmy it over my hips, but the sound of the seams stretching beyond their limit filters through.
“Laney, please take a deep breath. It’s okay.”
I inhale deeply pacing in front of her, while she thinks.
“How much did we pay for this?” She asks, walking around me to her desk, opening a drawer and shuffling through what’s inside.
“I—uh, I’m not sure honestly.”
“What size is it?” Her question catches me off guard.
“An 8, maybe? A 10? Something like that, why?” I ask her confused what she’s thinking.
“Oh, good, which means I can’t wear it. Get your ass over here, I’m gonna do some surgery.
” She quirks a dark brow, clicking the scissors in her hand a few times.
“I know you’ll never wear this again and I would never ask you too because I watched you all night fidgeting and tugging at this stupid thing like you had ants in your pants.
” She gives me a pointed glare and I smile sheepishly.
“I wouldn’t have even pushed you to buy it if you didn’t look so damn good in it, and it matched me so well. I wanted us to look nice together when we met my boss. Good impressions and all that—” she cuts herself off waving the pair of scissors around and motioning me toward her.
I cross the floor turning as she kneels down, grabbing the bottom of the dress and beginning to cut it away.
“I wanted him to see how beautiful the most important person in my life is, and how fucking smart and quick witted she is, and to be honest, how cut throat and passionate you are, too. The way you shut down Matthew’s little rant about how single moms shouldn’t be working corporate positions because they aren’t—how did he say it— “reliable workers”—fucking prick.
Anyways, yeah, you swooping in cutting him off and proving him wrong like some kind of facts and statistical based Batman was hot as fuck—”
“What?”
“And seeing your hair shining in all those twinkly ass Christmas lights and standing there beneath the crystal chandeliers looking like you were ready to stab someone or jump out the window from how uncomfortable you were,” she continues ignoring me.
“I just,” she stops cutting half way up my thigh but I just stare at her.
Completely taken aback by what’s coming out of her mouth. Sure, she's made comments and jokes over the years that I have probably dwelled on far too long, because they were just that, passing comments or flirty jokes, completely platonic.
But something about this…something about the way she won’t look up at me as she says it, and her hands look shaky as she grips the fabric of the dress, tugging it in different directions, trying to rip it over my hips because it’s too tight to cut, is telling me there’s something else happening here.
“You suffered through four hours of a holiday party for my job that you didn’t have to go to, but you did because I asked—”
“Well, yeah. That’s what friends are for—”
“Laney, shut up. Let me talk.” My mouth shuts automatically. She’s never done this to me before. She always teases me for not talking enough, but this is a first.
“Okay,” I murmur, picking at the nails she glued onto my fingertips earlier in the day.
“Do you remember the first day we met?” She asks, still pulling at the pieces of cut fabric, a little harder now.
I don’t answer her, knowing its rhetorical because of course I do.
It was the day my life completely changed, when she barreled into my life after she moved three states away from her hometown into the house that was shockingly only one street away from my own.