By the fourth week, we'd gotten close enough for him to share his women's troubles with me.
Or rather, his troubles with just one girl in particular.
In chick flicks, this was the part where the boy confessed his love for the girl by referring to a hypothetical mystery girl. The girl would get jealous and upset, until the boy revealed that she was the one he'd been talking about all along.
Maybe it was idealistic, but a part of me was excited by the possibility of Brown Eyes' mystery girl being myself when he first started talking about her.
"So... There's this girl." He was staring into the distance, smiling a little.
"You like girls?" I teased.
He laughed. "Am I supposed to feel insulted?"
"Nothing wrong with homosexuality," I said.
"Nothing wrong with it," he agreed, "but I'm straight. Sorry to disappoint."
I frowned. "Do I look like a dude to you?"
He swept an exaggerated gaze over me, "Hmm..."
I giggled. "Ass."
He smiled, but I could tell he was itching to go back to the original topic. I decided to help him out.
"So... about this girl..."
"Yeah." The tips of his ears looked a little red. "So... well... There's this girl I like."
"Yeah?" I tried to look casual. I could hear my heartbeat pounding in my ears.
"She's beautiful... and generous... and funny, and... I... Sometimes I feel like she's too good for me." As I gaped at him, he cleared his throat and tried to reassert his masculinity. "I mean, she's hot. I want to... you know."
Wow. He was so in over his head.
He straightened up suddenly. "I've never told anyone else about this. My friends would laugh their asses off if they found out I'm being such a wimp over a girl."
"No worries, bub," I drawled, "Aunt Kim is here to help."
He chuckled a little. "Okay, so, she's awesome and I want to ask her out. But it's gonna screw up our friendship if she doesn't feel the same way, you know? So... yeah... I don't know."
"So you want to know how to win her over?"
"Something like that. Yeah."
"That's easy," I said. "Just ask her straight out! How could anyone resist your chocolate brown-eyed charm?"
He looked worried. "And if she doesn't feel the same way?"
"She will," I said confidently.
He smiled. "And you're so sure how?"
I shrugged, unwilling to make the first move. "Of course there's always a risk involved. But if you don't take that risk, you're never going to know, right? I guess the question you have to ask yourself is, is she worth taking that risk?"
He stared at me for a long moment, before a grin spread across his face. "Yeah. I guess you're right."
I laughed. "I sounded like a commercial or something."
He nudged me playfully. "Thanks for the pep talk, hey. Coffee's on me this time."
I pretended to bat my eyelashes at him. "Gosh. I need to counsel you more often then."
He acted offended. "I do not need counselling!"
"So he says," I said in an undertone.
He flicked an empty paper cup at me. "I heard that."
Then we went on another one of our tangents. But I couldn't stop wondering what I'd done wrong. Hadn't I given him enough openings?
Or maybe, I admitted to myself with a sinking feeling, the hypothetical mystery girl in this case wasn't so hypothetical after all.
