Being in love with a straight boy is a straight-up nightmare. Especially if it's been like that for years. But it's even worse when he's your best friend's brother, who has a girlfriend that's there to remind you how straight he is. That's when it b...
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An eternity seemed to pass, painfully slowly, frustratingly uneventfully. And I thought of Jamie and Mason and Harriet and Jackson and everything in between, but nothing made sense, so I kinda just... stopped thinking. For a whole week, I stopped thinking. About all of it. I did my coursework like a good student, I replied to messages whenever my friends would send them, I played card games with Leonard and Bri because they were dumb (Leonard) and bad at it (Bri) which was probably only funny to me, but I digress, and when Jamie asked me if I wanted to go on another date, I told him I'd think about it.
And really, that was all I could do for the time being. I was letting it happen. Allowing time to pass. Doing only the things I needed to do. Because emotions were too much to handle. I'd just deal with them again when the time came. Later.
Surprisingly, I didn't hear from Mason even once and it was... strange. I was so used to talking to and about him every single day that it almost felt like someone had died—like my heart ached for a person that was never even there.
Sometimes I wondered what he was doing, but then I reminded myself that I wasn't supposed to care.
What finally shook me out of my reverie was a text message. My phone was in front of me, on the table, right next to my deck of cards, and it buzzed just long enough to skid across the surface and bump into the deck. When I didn't make a move to look, Bri reached across the table to slide the phone towards me with a smile, whispering among the murmur of students, "Kenny, you got a text message."
As if I hadn't noticed.
"It's probably just Jackson," I muttered.
But it wasn't.
Harriet: Mason said he wants to talk to me. What should I do?
I froze.
Like a spontaneous, violent avalanche, all my feelings and thoughts and emotions came rushing back, and I actually had to take a deep breath and grip the phone a little tighter just to be able to tell her that... I had no idea. Why was she asking me anyway? Why would I know the answer? More importantly, what did this mean?
"Kenny?"
I looked up at Bri. "Huh?"
"Everything okay?"
No.
"Yeah."
My phone buzzed again and my eyes grew wide, because I had a text message from Mason now, too. My heart was pounding so hard with confusion, curiosity, anger, excitement, sadness and at least a million other emotions, that I didn't even want to look at what he said. I only saw the word 'sorry' in a fleeting glance, which was enough for me to throw my head back to stare at the ceiling, because I couldn't bring myself to read the rest. He probably wanted to talk to me, too. (What else?) But I didn't know if I wanted that... More importantly, I didn't know if that was a good idea.
