Grumpy Best Friend

“It’s not stupid,” I said through clenched teeth. “I’m angry with you for a reason.”

“Yeah? What’s that reason?” He stood there, looking so damn arrogant, and I just exploded.

I couldn’t handle it anymore. All that pressure came pouring out of me, all those repressed emotions, all the anger and resentment that had been building for years came out of my mouth like molten hot lava, spewing all over him.

“You abandoned me,” I said. “You left and didn’t bother to call. No, don’t mention those two stupid emails you wrote me, you abandoned me the first chance you got and never looked back. You knew how bad things were at my house. You knew you were, like, the only thing keeping me sane. And you still left.”

He stared at me quietly and I seethed in his direction, so angry that it came to this already, and even more angry with myself for letting him steer me here.

“I know,” he said quietly, and I had to lean forward to hear him. “I made a mistake back then. But you know why I did it. We both had it bad, Jude.”

“Yeah, we did,” I said, shrugging a little, and some small bit of my anger melted away. “But you still ran, and you didn’t even bother to look back.” I stared at him and he said nothing, only looked back at me, and I turned away from him. If I stood there for a second longer, I’d say all the things to him that I’d wanted to say over the years—that I loved him back then, that he was the only good thing in my life, that when he left, my mother got addicted to pills and somehow my already miserable life got even more miserable, and some part of me blamed him for all of it—but I swallowed that and walked toward the entrance.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Home,” I said.

“I drove,” he said, following me to the steps.

“I’ll get an Uber,” I said, and paused at the door. I looked back at him, and past him, into the main office space. “Rent this place. It’s fine. We’ll make it work. And you can have the corner office.”

“Jude,” he said, like he was scolding a child.

I pushed open the door and left. I stormed downstairs, and I didn’t care if I was being a baby, I didn’t care about anything at that moment. I had to get away before my emotions took over, and I really said things that I’d regret.

There was no possible way we could work together. I didn’t know how we’d salvage this, or if there was something worth saving at all.

He wasn’t the boy that left me all those years ago, and maybe I could find some way to move past what happened—but I’d never forgive him.

4

Bret

That didn’t go great.

I knew we’d have problems. It was practically a guarantee with the two of us. Even back when we were as close as two people could get, we still fought all the time—about where to get lunch, about what music to listen to, about who we wanted to hang out with on the weekends, about everything. We fought like animals, and sometimes even wrestled, and yeah, that sexual tension was always there, even when we were kids. We didn’t quite understand it, but by the time I hit high school, and she was starting to grow into a young woman—it became obvious that she was beautiful, and I wanted her way more than I realized.

So we kept on fighting, up until the day I left. Then the fighting stopped, and I knew we were really fucked.

I couldn’t let this go on. If I didn’t figure out a way to move past what happened, there was no way we could work together. As much as I wanted to make this project happen, we were stuck in the past, and we’d keep on staying stuck if something didn’t change. I wanted to shake things up—I wanted to break us out the muck and mire of our fucked-up failings.

Or at least I wanted to call a truce and move forward.

I called her that night, after the blow-up at the office complex, which was partially my fault. I needled her—I couldn’t help it. Sometimes I was like that, and she was too damn easy, and I knew her too well. She made it obvious when something bothered her, and I could keep on going, keep on pushing, until she finally got upset.

I needed to stop doing that, obviously.

She answered her phone. “Hello?” She sounded chipper. She didn’t know it was me yet.

“Hello, Jude,” I said. “It’s Bret.”

Silence. That was the reaction I expected. Then: “What do you want?”

“I was hoping you’d come out to dinner with me tonight.”

She let out a harsh, surprised laughed. I wandered around my living room, past the secondhand coffee table piled with Car and Driver magazines that I never bothered reading, but did love the pictures, past the framed vintage ‘80s movie posters, and the shelves with old books piled on top of each other in a mish-mash of titles and authors, and the big TV I hung on the wall, which took two attempts and currently hid an enormous chunk of missing paint from the hole I made on the original try. I paused in the kitchen where I leaned on the granite countertop, staring at my life, scattered near the sink, dishes and plates, none of them matching. It didn’t matter how much money I made, I could never make this place feel like a home—it was always an apartment I was renting temporarily, always one step away from leaving and going somewhere else.