Since the day Alex had taught me how to drum (or rather, tried), he and I had met two more times, in secret. Both were clandestine meetings, arranged via ICQ, without telling our friends about it.
Both times were initiated by him, and during both, he was kind of rude to me, but also weirdly sweet. Meaning, he hadn’t done anything mean or degrading, but he was eons away from the realms of romantic. Mostly, he treated me like the annoying younger sister he never had and couldn’t stand but would take a bullet for.
Makes sense? Yeah, no. It didn’t make any to me, either.
But the fact that he treated me weirdly didn’t bother me in the least.
Let me tell you what did—he. Did. Not. Kiss. Me.
He didn’t even touch me.
He didn’t even try to touch me.
Not even the accidental stuff guys do. A brush of his fingers over your waist. Touching the small of your back. Pinkies high-fiving one another when we passed the salt (one of the only things our vegan asses could actually eat).
I didn’t know what to do.
On one hand, I thought we were sharing some intense sexual chemistry every time we were in the same room. The air crackled with tension, and every minute that passed without him kissing me, I was becoming more and more aware of the fact I was going to spend the rest of the night screaming into my pillow.
On the other, I was beginning to suspect maybe I got it all wrong. Maybe Alex friend-zoned me on purpose. Maybe he wasn’t attracted to me. Or maybe the fact that I asked him explicitly not to kiss me twice on our first date had put him off and now he thought he was being friend-zoned.
Or maybe he wasted my time just so I wouldn’t go out with Ryan.
Or, I don’t know, maybe he was gay.
As you can see, I clearly did not overthink the reason.
Blueballed to the extreme, I was forced to examine my seduction skills, which, unfortunately, were nonexistent.
The worst part was that I didn’t have anyone to talk to about all this. Whining to Ryan was out of the question—he still didn’t know that Alex and I were even talking to each other, let alone meeting. Plus, I doubted he’d muster enough sympathy to spit in my face once he found out I was seeing his archenemy.
Pauly, my best friend, would never understand my attraction to someone who excelled at making people cry and making loud music about animal rights and anarchism. And even though I had a good dose of girl friends, none of them were really keen on the punk rock world I was drawn to.
After our third hang-out, things started to change between Alex and me.
He and I found ourselves talking on ICQ almost every day. It had come to a point where I thought, okay, time to talk to Ryan about this. Alex and I were obviously (at the very least) friends. On top of the guilt, I was getting paranoid, too. What if Alex beat me to it and told him? My crush had the emotional capacity of a stapler. He was going to tramp all over Ryan’s heart and make him feel extra hurt just for shits and giggles.
I decided I was going to tell Ryan in the upcoming week, whenever a good opportunity presented itself.
That Wednesday, Alex asked if I wanted to come to a vegan picnic with a bunch of his friends on Saturday. The plan was to demonstrate a little, get into a few fistfights with the cops, try to free caged animals, then chill and play soccer while eating tofu which had been spiced as if it was something else (pizza tofu. Chicken tofu. Shoestring tofu. You name it, I chewed on it dispassionately).
I knew Ryan was going to be there, and I couldn’t just show up there out of the blue. I told Alex I was going to think about it, and explained that I still hadn’t told Ryan he and I were friends.
The conversation went like this:
Alex: WTF is the problem? It’s not like you guys are dating.
Me: Yeah. No. I know. But still, he is a good friend.
Alex: A good friend who wants to fuck you.
Me: A good friend nonetheless.
Alex: I can tell him. It’s NBD.
Me: DO NOT TELL HIM.
Alex: You don’t trust me?
Me: Not even a little bit.
Me: Not even with cotton candy.
Me: I’ll tell him.
Alex: Just as long as you don’t deny yourself shit because of him. This picnic is important. We all need to stick together.
He was talking about vegans, and people who were fighting for The Cause (the cause was anarcho-communism. Honestly, I was so not down with the agenda. I totally fell asleep ten pages into Das Kapital by Karl Marx when Alex had loaned me the book. I was still hoping he’d grow out of the idea of anarchism. Alex, not Karl. Too late for Karl, I guess. But Alex still had a chance to jump ship).