Where We Left Off (Middle of Somewhere 3)

“Ugh, stop being so annoyingly mature and logical. This is feelings stuff! Feelings stuff isn’t logical.”

“‘Annoyingly mature and logical’—can I quote you on that to Layne?”

“I’m sure she already knows. She’s annoyingly logical too. Clearly you’re meant for each other.”

It was a divisive episode, with Milton and Gretchen taking Noel’s side and Thomas and me in the Felicity camp. Charles, as usual, was only partly paying attention to the content of the show. Today he was stuck on the conviction that they hadn’t shot a scene where it was set because the traffic was going in the wrong direction for that street.

“But don’t you admire how she tells him how she really feels? See—” I turned to Gretchen. “—the radical truth, like Layne says.”

“I… don’t think that’s what she means by that,” Gretchen said.

“Well, okay, but this is still about telling the truth.”

“Mmm, I think there’s a big difference between forcing yourself to look at things honestly and blabbing out your personal truth because it makes you feel good,” Gretchen said.

“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “I think it’s brave to just put it all out there like that. I could never do that; I’d be too scared of rejection.”

“But Felicity doesn’t tell the truth because she’s brave,” said Gretchen. “She tells the truth as a compulsion. She tells the truth because she doesn’t want to have to handle her emotions on her own. She makes people complicit in them.”

“Well, I think she doesn’t know what she wants sometimes too,” Milton chimed in, “so she tells the truth hoping that someone will make the decision for her. Take it out of her hands.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe she just wants genuine connections with people. And she doesn’t think you can have that if you don’t tell the truth, even when it’s hard or it makes someone uncomfortable. And she does know what she wants, it’s just different from day to day. Like, she pays attention to how her feelings change. They’re still real, even if they’re not consistent.”

“I like Meghan,” asserted Charles from across the room, perched on the filing cabinet to see the schedule he’d tacked high on the wall.

He was taking a one-credit sports medicine class this semester to fulfill some arcane distribution requirement and was developing systems to integrate movement into his daily schedule, which included putting things around the room in configurations that required him to climb over furniture or jump on top of it to access them.

He’d relocated his underwear to the top of my closet and his socks to under his bed so the two things he’d usually reach for at the same time were as geographically distant as you could get in our room—notably smaller than the dorms in Felicity—and begun plugging his laptop into the farthest outlet from his desk with a system of extension cords that I was certain would one day kill either me or his computer.

“No surprise there,” Milton muttered, looking around. “Your senses of décor are about on par.”

I LET myself into Will’s apartment with the keys I still had from January, sniffing myself to try and determine just how much like milk I smelled. I’d come right from work, figuring Will was just going to pull my clothes off pretty soon after I got there anyway, the way he had the last few times I’d seen him. I had stopped briefly to get a piece of tiramisu, though. Hopefully even if I reeked of coffee shop, the tiramisu would make up for it. It was Will’s favorite, and I knew work stuff had been stressing him out the last few weeks.

He’d been staying late and bringing more work home than usual. He still hadn’t decided what to do about Gus’ offer to go into business for themselves, and he was having a problem with a client whose agent wanted him to produce a cover that would change the face of publishing even though the book she was representing was the third in a pedestrian series.

When I opened the door, I heard a noise from the direction of the bedroom. A low groan. Unmistakably Will. For a moment I held myself suspended in a bubble of fantasy that I was about to walk in on the super hot scene of Will jerking off. He’d be startled to see me at first, but then I’d sit on the edge of the bed and touch him as he pleasured himself. Run my hands over his thighs and between his legs. Suck on his nipples and dip my tongue in his belly button to feel how it changed the way his hand moved on his cock.

Then the bubble burst.

Another groan. This one decidedly not Will.

I should’ve left. I should have taken the tiramisu and backed out the door like I’d never been here at all.