SEDUCTION

Bestfriends ???

I have known them for at least three years, these two; we all went to school together and at one point I dated the blond but it was brief. The timing was off and both of us were swept along by the river of another match. I have flirted with the brown-haired one for years.

I have this fantasy, I say one evening, when all of us are slightly drunk, sitting on my apartment steps on Gardner on a clear July evening. Would you come back? Four o'clock? Saturday?

Sure, they tell me, curious. The word marked by brake lights and bitten fingernails. Everybody facing out. We all hold hands at once, and we are all lonely when we go home, but this is helpful, this hand-holding, this sitting on the stoop of my apartment building, watching while other people look for parking.

I have recently broken up with someone who I did not expect to break up with, and every morning, the earliest time I wake up is suffused with remembering. I can't seem to beat that moment, no matter how early I rise. I once thought that if I traveled in France, I would have a different brain, the brain of a girl who travels in France. I saw myself, skipping through meadows in a yellow and blue print dress.

On Saturday, there's a knock at the door right at four, and I open it up. Hi! Hi, hi. We're all joking and nervous, and they brought beer. Me too. I usher them in. My apartment sometimes reminds people of a warehouse; the space is high and elongated and feels empty. The living room is a stripe. It's too narrow to watch TV in, so I put the furniture on a diagonal.

They both look great, thriving out of control. These are solid men, with square kneecaps and loving mothers, who are still sort of awed by women. They have a line of fur instead of hair at the napes of their necks, sometimes dusting the hinge of their cleanly-shaven jaws. Me, I'm clothed and workman-like in overalls with many pockets. A red tank top, legs covered. They have had crushes on me at some point, and me on them, but everyone knew that friendship was best, and it is in this spirit that they walk through my door. They're good at the greeting hug routine. There is a wild fondness in the air. We grab beers, twist off, fling bottlecaps into the air.

They're friends with each other, too. Sometimes they play soccer together.

They said they would do what I asked them to. That's the agreement. It's a four o'clock afternoon and the July sun is lazy and inviting and it's a second floor apartment so it's always a little warm from the rising heat, and here are these two men I've captured, inside my house, wearing worn white t-shirts. One of them has a stain right in the middle from the peach cobbler he ate at lunch, leftover from the potluck he went to Friday night at Janet's. He is the type everyone gives their leftovers to at the end of the party because they know he will eat them, and he does. Somehow this makes me proud. Whenever these two walk down hallways, or through crosswalks, in their tall boyishness, I feel a surge of pride that is faintly motherly and also not. I want to fuck and birth them at the same time.

Today, they have another beer. Me too. We joke around. We play bottlecap hockey. I serve cookies on a chipped green plate. They eat them, fast. They have sweet tooths, they say. One prefers the chocolate chip; the other enjoys the texture of oatmeal. They're deep in the stripe, by the windows at its end, and I sit down in the chair that I've placed closer to the door. Stay over there, I tell them, as they swallow the last two bites off the plate. Alright, they say. They sprawl out on the carpet, hands propping up their heads, and they know how to own space, how to feel important without realizing it. They have never questioned their right to be alive; it is borne in them, and obvious. One is wearing shorts and has blond hair all over his knees. Like poured milk from a glass carton.

Okay, I say, after the third beer is finished. I bring out tequila. I give each of us two shots. Down, down, down.

Then: Just touch hands, I say.