Seducing My Best Friend

When I was twelve, I told my best friend I had a crush on his best friend. Don't tell him, I said.

He didn't.

He kept his mouth shut for nine years. He kept it shut all the way to the wedding.

The night of the wedding, I got both hands around his throat. You, I said. You can really keep your mouth shut.

He didn't blink. "Say his name like that again and I'll deck you."

Chapter 1

Caleb Reyes is getting married.

The high school group chat lost its mind at 7:04 in the morning.

I bit into an apple. "Married. Straight out of school."

Which meant a gift. Which meant cash.

We did not have cash.

I called Theo.

"Hello?"

"Speak."

A pause on his end, the specific pause of a man deciding whether to hang up.

"Did you know Caleb's getting married?"

"I'm the best man."

I almost sobbed into the apple. "So you don't have to chip in for a gift."

"Correct."

He must have heard something in my breathing, because his voice went flat and irritated, which is what his voice does instead of asking if I'm okay.

"Quinn. Do not tell me you're still hung up on Caleb Reyes."

"What. What?"

Behind him, a shower was running. I could hear it hitting the tile.

"The man is getting married on Saturday. Have some decency."

I was still forming a sentence when he hung up.

I bared my teeth at the phone like an animal. Then I called back.

"What."

The water had stopped. Why did he sound worse.

"Send me two hundred. For the gift."

Nothing.

Then, predictably, he got more annoyed. He got annoyed in complete silence for four full seconds, and then my phone buzzed against my palm.

Two hundred dollars. No note.

For the record, I did have a crush on Caleb Reyes.

He transferred to Ridgeview in seventh grade and got the seat right next to Theo. Two of them, side by side, like someone had double-booked the room. There were love letters every single day. Pink, scented, sincere.

Don't ask. Yes, I wrote one.

For Caleb.

Theo helped him throw them out.

Thanks.

So I went around.

On the walk home I spent what was, at the time, a fortune, on the good ice cream, the kind in the gold wrapper, and handed it over.

He looked at it. He looked at me. "What."

I smiled like a dog. "Neighborly relations."

"What do you want."

I pushed my lips out and rocked on one heel, going for shy. "So. Your deskmate. He's kind of hot, right?"

He smiled at me. "Did your eyes fall out. Look for yourself."

A perfectly good hot guy, and then he opened his mouth.

Keep it. Damaged goods, clearance rack.

I stayed shy. I went up on my toes, got my lips near his ear, and said, with tremendous difficulty, "I'm in love with Caleb Reyes. Don't tell him."

Then I fled, shyly.

You know how a lizard runs. Elbows out, no dignity, full speed, straight up a wall.

That was me. Bashful.

Watch, I thought. He'll know by tomorrow.

Then I waited a day.

Two days.

Three.

Caleb Reyes got married this afternoon.

Theo never said a word.

I came in late. The ceremony was already wrapping.

Brynn grabbed my arm. "Where have you been. Also, what happened to your hair."

I tossed it back with the air of a woman who has made peace with death. "Went to Vellum and Vine. Asked for something French."

Sure.

Here is what happened. I asked for bangs and fell asleep in the chair, because I had been up since 7:04 doing math about two hundred dollars.

The stylist took the bangs. Then she took everything else.

So I came to my crush's wedding wearing a bird's nest.

Theo came across the floor toward us in a suit.

Chapter 2

He put his hand flat on top of my head. "Your little sister got big," he said to Brynn.

I ducked out from under it. "I'm nobody's little sister."

He clicked his tongue. "Who cut this. I'll find them."

He wasn't joking. That was the thing. There was real alarm in it, the way you'd sound about a car accident.

"Forget it. They refunded me two hundred. I'll send it to you."

Post-grad life is very glamorous. The envelope in my purse, the one with the wedding cash in it, came out of his jacket forty minutes ago.

Brynn leaned in with her phone. Caleb kissing the bride, shot from the aisle, slightly shaky.

I ate shrimp and watched.

Caleb looked good.

Mila looked better.

In my defense, I only watched it twice.

Later, after the reception, Brynn and I went out and drank to twenty-one years of being single.

There was one thing I didn't tell them.

That afternoon I had come off a bike share and gone down hard in front of a man sitting on a folding stool. Loose linen tunic. Thin, tall. Round black glasses, the little ones, the kind that don't reflect anything back.

He looked at my face for a while. Then he told me my love line was dead. No one was coming. Thirty, minimum. If I wanted to move the needle, he said, I'd have to change my look.

Thirty. By thirty I'll be rich. Rich women have boyfriends. That's just math.

But I got scared anyway. That's why I cut my hair.

It occurred to me two hours later, in the chair, upside down in the sink, that a psychic had set up his folding stool eleven feet from the door of a salon.

I got to Theo's building somewhere in the small hours. Went up. Missed the door on the first try.

I knocked with the side of my fist. Three times.

Something moved inside.

The door opened. "Quinn? What are you doing here."

The tequila arrived in my head all at once.

I took a running start and hung off him, both arms around his neck, feet off the floor.

I got my fingers on his mouth and pinched.

Soft. Cool.

"You can really keep a secret," I told him. "I have told you everything. Every single thing, my whole life, and you never leaked one. Not one. You have ruined me."

Thirty. I have to wait until I'm thirty.

He clicked his tongue against his teeth. "Say one more word about who you like and I'll deck you."

Something went up in me then, the last flare of a dying battery, and I brought my forehead into his forehead as hard as I could.

The last thing I knew, I got a taste of something.

Cool first. Then soft. Then the heat of his breath arriving half a second behind both of them.

Soft. Cool.

Noon came in across my face and I surfaced.

Dark gray walls. Navy sheets.

Not my room. Looked a great deal like Theo's room.

I was down to a camisole and shorts.

"Where's my jacket."

He appeared in the doorway on cue and leaned into the frame with his arms crossed. "You're up. I thought you were going to squat here."

"I came over last night?"

"Three in the morning." Something crossed his face and left. He pressed his tongue into the corner of his mouth. "You don't remember what happened."

I remembered.

I remembered it the way you remember a recipe you've made a hundred times, which is to say I could have done it again with my eyes closed. His mouth had been cool. It had been soft. I had been very drunk, and I had also, somewhere underneath that, been counting.

I sat up and clutched the sheet to my chest.

"So that's where my jacket went. Did you try something last night?"

I'm extremely hot. It's a reasonable question.

Theo looked at me for a moment with no expression whatsoever. Then he pulled in a long breath through his nose.

"I'd go off this balcony before I touched a hair on your head. Come eat. I have somewhere to be."

I was out of that bed in one motion.

At the table, his phone would not stop buzzing.

Message after message, face down, humming against the wood, and when it lit up I could see the little circle of the profile picture. A pink plush rabbit.

A girl.

Theo ate his eggs and did not look at it once.

I lasted ninety seconds.

"Who is that."

"A girl."

Thank you.

"I know it's a girl. What is she to you. Girlfriend?"

He glanced at me sideways. Then he leaned back in the chair, slow, and settled those black eyes on my face and kept them there.

"If I had a girlfriend, I'd have defended my honor last night. I wouldn't have let you in."

Chapter 3

My honor.

Something about that sentence was off, and I couldn't get at what.

I shook my head, which was a mistake, because the hangover was still in there and it moved when I did.

His phone kept buzzing against the table. Buzz. Pause. Buzz.

"Is she chasing you?"

"Probably."

I choked on my eggs.

Feast or famine. Some of us are the famine.

I have known Theo Calloway since before I could walk.

A lot of girls have run at that wall. Sweet ones. Loud ones. Girls who brought him coffee he never asked for and remembered which professor he hated.

He studied. He wrote code. He said thank you and nothing else.

Every girl who ever wanted Theo had one thing in common. They were good to him.

Then there's me.

At one, I dumped out his formula.

At two, I put him on the ground and he lay there and cried.

In seventh grade I got hold of a book called 199 Ways to Land Your Billionaire. My mother would have burned it, so I kept it in Theo's room and read it in installments while copying his homework.

Rule one: contradict him. Men are dogs.

I closed that book feeling like I'd been handed the meaning of life.

I have since noticed that the only person I have ever contradicted, in twenty-one years, is Theo.

He hates cilantro. I filled the planter on his balcony with cilantro.

He refused to read the book, so I made him read it out loud to me, word for word.

He read it the way you read a shipping manifest. "The billionaire stepped closer, his voice rough. 'You're playing with fire, woman.'"

I still get goosebumps. Not the good kind.

And he still didn't like me.

Which is how it is that nobody, in the entire history of this city, has ever landed Theo Calloway.

By the time I finished thinking all that, I was looking at him with open hostility.

"If you don't like her, don't string her along. Give me the phone. I'll let her down easy."

He handed it over like a man handing his keys to someone who has been drinking.

I typed fast.

Theo: [Did you eat?]

Her: [Not yet. Why, are you asking me out?]

Good. No.

Theo: [Go eat.]

Theo: [That's an order.]

Then I sent a reaction sticker of a very small dog looking stern.

Domineering, but on a budget.

If this girl still liked him after that, she needed professional help.

The typing bubble appeared. It appeared again. It stopped.

There it is.

Theo took the phone back and read the whole thread. He laughed the way people laugh when they are not happy.

"That's your method."

"Yep. Problem?"

"Yes. It's not that big a city and I'd like to keep my name clean."

He typed for four seconds.

Theo: [Sorry about that. My girlfriend was messing around.]

Girlfriend?

My name. My clean name. Collateral damage.

I left his place and went to the shop.

I run a dessert place downtown called The Lemon Room. It's small. The rent is not small.

I learned to bake in college. I was afraid of getting fat, so I used Theo as a test subject, and he accepted this the way you accept weather.

Then the six-pack became a one-pack.

Then he stopped eating my cake.

By then I was good.

My parents put money into the shop when I graduated. Between that and the build-out and the ads, I have, at present, no money at all.

Theo covers the gap. He has never once said the word covers.

The bell over the door went.

A guy walked in.

Chapter 4

Long lashes, jaw you could cut yourself on, straight nose, and somehow the whole face still came out looking like a golden retriever.

He'd been coming in a lot. Always the vanilla lemon.

Maddie caught my sleeve and started blinking at me in Morse code.

I speak it fluently.

"That guy's back."

I blinked at her.

He's very pretty.

"Right? Are you going in?"

"I'm old. I'm retired."

"Then I'm going in."

Maddie is a sophomore. Maddie saw a beautiful man today.

The beautiful man walked straight past her.

"Vanilla lemon, ma'am."

"Sure," I said, out loud, like a person.

I sent Maddie to box it up.

He watched her go. Then he turned back to me with both dimples out. "Can we be friends, ma'am?"

Maddie, behind him, mouthing: GO. IN.

I bit my lip, went shy, and gave him my number.

His profile picture was a man from behind, standing at the edge of a cliff over the ocean, everything gold and going dark.

His display name was a single period.

.: [Ma'am. My name's Micah.]

If this child had been born four years earlier I would never have gotten off that bike, never listened to that man, never sat down in that chair.

I've been telling myself for years that the drought was cosmic. Bad luck. Wrong stars.

It's not that nothing ever came my way. Plenty came my way. It was all rotten.

But I grew up two feet from Theo Calloway and three seats from Caleb Reyes, and after that you cannot make yourself want less. It ruins the palate.

Micah is the first genuinely good thing to walk in that door.

I caught my reflection in the display glass. Hair just barely covering my ears. Makeup immaculate. Tall, thin, expensively dressed, and still, unmistakably, a woman with a bad haircut.

I closed my fist.

If I ever see that man on his folding stool again, he is going to learn something about me.

My luck has been strange lately.

The rain started when I was halfway home and I didn't have an umbrella, so I ran.

My door was standing open. Not open. Ajar.

I got the pepper spray out of my bag before I got my key out, and I went in low.

It was my landlady.

The apartment was destroyed.

"Rent's not due for three months," I said.

She's a decent woman. She has never once tried to cheat me.

"Honey, the pipe went. I've got a guy coming. The bathroom's about to come down through the ceiling of the unit below us. You can't live here. You need to go find yourself somewhere else."

"Today?"

"Today. You'll get the rest of your rent back, and the deposit."

I went and packed.

Fall clothes are thin, so it wasn't much. It was everything else that took time, the four hundred small objects a life accumulates, and when I finally zipped the second suitcase and looked up, the rain had not stopped.

I called Theo.

It rang for a long time.

When he finally picked up, his voice had gone low and tired and rough at the edges, and under the rough there was something else, something unhurried, and he took a breath before he said anything at all.

"Quinn. If this isn't important, you're dead."

My eyes narrowed.

Why did that take so long.

What, precisely, was he doing.

I looked at the clock on the microwave.

Eleven.

Eleven. A very particular number.

A single man. A single man in excellent health.

Chapter 5

I would like to represent my feelings here with three small sounds. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.

Sit with that. Really sit with it.

I proceeded carefully. "Did I interrupt something?"

There was a sound of him rolling over, and then no politeness at all. "Who the hell do you think you just woke up?"

"Wait. You were asleep?"

Apparently something in my voice was too honest, because he caught it immediately.

"You're disappointed."

"Devastated."

I went straight in. "Were you dreaming?"

The line went quiet for one beat.

"Yes."

"About who?"

Nothing.

I counted to five in that silence.

"Say what you called to say. Three seconds. Then I hang up."

"My apartment flooded and I have no money so I want to stay at your place for a few nights or possibly a great many nights is that okay."

Three seconds.

Quinn "Quick On Her Feet" Harlow.

Nothing on his end.

"Okay."

"Okay? That's it? OKAY?" I screamed into the phone.

"Come over. Nobody said you couldn't."

His voice was thick and slow, still full of sleep.

He wanted me to come. I know he did. His mother told me to move in with him the week we graduated, and I said no thank you, because it would have ruined my prospects.

"Well, since you're so enthusiastic. Come get me."

That's a cab fare saved.

It was almost midnight when he got me back to his place.

My hair and clothes were still damp and clinging in the places you don't want them to cling, so I got a suitcase open and started digging for something dry.

Theo stood there and watched me work.

A man of leisure.

At the bathroom door I lifted my chin at him. "Since you're doing nothing, put my clothes away. I'm going to shower and go straight to sleep. It's not like you're busy."

I shut the door before he could answer.

I shut it in a way that communicated, clearly, that if he refused, he would end up like the door.

He knocked anyway. Over the water I could hear every word.

"Softer next time."

"That door was expensive."

If I ever hear anyone call Theo Calloway a spendthrift, we are going to have a problem.

The man does live well. His bathroom belongs in a hotel that would not let me in the lobby.

You can trace the fastidiousness back for years. See also: the cilantro I planted on his balcony.

He had torn every stalk into the shape of a knife.

There was a moment, once, when he thought about it.

I came out an hour later. Most of the lights were off and I assumed he'd gone to bed.

But the lamp in the living room was still on, warm and yellow, and Theo was lying on the couch. He'd changed. Gray sweatpants, white tee, barefoot.

I walked over without deciding to.

It's a wide couch. He took up most of it anyway. Lucky for me I'm slim.

I lowered myself down beside him and bent over to get a look at the boy who grew up across the hall.

They say men with thin mouths are cruel. I've never known whether he's an exception.

Heavy lashes. Double lids. When those eyes open they make everything they land on look loved, which is a fraud, because they do it to the mailman.

The face lost the softness somewhere and came back sharper.

I reached down to pull out one of his eyelashes, purely to see what would happen.

I never got there.

Theo opened his eyes, the way a man opens his eyes when he has been waiting.

Unfocused. Amused.

Chapter 6

A warm hand closed around my wrist.

His body heat went into my blood and took my arms out from under me.

I was working on an explanation for my behavior.

He pulled.

I came down onto his chest, one palm flat against him, and there was a heartbeat under it, going fast.

His other hand came up and stopped a half inch short of me, long enough that I felt the heat of it before I felt the hand.

Then it settled on my waist.

The heat climbed my neck and got all the way to the tips of my ears before I could do anything about it.

His voice came out low and shredded.

"Don't, Ava Sinclair."

What.

Who.

He he he thinks I'm Ava Sinclair?

He's over there having an entirely foreign dream.

I threw his hand off, and the motion brought him swimming up out of it. I brushed off the place where he'd touched me.

Disgusting.

He worked out roughly what had happened. "Sorry. Thought you were someone else. No wonder it felt so real."

It felt real, Theo, because that is my waist. It is soft and it is white and it is mine.

But.

"Who's Ava Sinclair?"

The corner of his mouth went up. He lifted an eyebrow. "You don't know her? She's the lead in that action franchise."

Oh.

Her.

Who says a full name in their sleep?

"Is she hot?" I asked, as though I were asking the time.

Theo laughed. He bent his left knee, laid his forearm across his eyes, and his voice came out full of it.

"She's unreal."

There it is.

Guess a nice rack beats a childhood bond.

Living at his place, I don't pay rent, which means I can't also eat his food and sleep in his bed and do nothing about it.

By seven he's usually off work. I texted him.

PettyInPink: [Coming home tonight?]

I sold a cake, and when I looked again he'd answered.

Theo: [Yes.]

PettyInPink: [Good. Hungry?]

Theo: [Starving. Didn't eat all afternoon, been slammed. You cooking? Stating for the record that I'd rather starve than eat takeout.]

Stubborn.

PettyInPink: [Obviously not. Hot pot. It's the only thing I know how to make.]

Theo: [Fine.]

PettyInPink: [Then come get me. We'll hit the grocery store under your building.]

I sent a sticker of a cat with its face turned away.

Theo: [Fine. Leaving now.]

Before I could answer, a clear voice said, above the counter, "Ma'am. Is there any cake left?"

Micah.

He'd introduced himself two days ago and then not said much. At some point he sent me a photo of himself playing basketball, and I could not manufacture interest in this child, so I said something polite.

His feed is exactly what it looks like. A clean, sincere college boy.

I smiled. "We had a good day. The lemon one is gone."

His whole face fell. "It's gone?"

I laughed. "There's a lot of gym content on your page. Doesn't cake interfere with the bulk?"

My own lab rat quit my cake the year he gained six pounds. He lived at the gym for a month getting it back. He dragged me along once.

That was the winter of the hula hoop challenge on TikTok, the one where you hang off the rig and keep the hoop going with nothing but your waist.

I nagged him until he did it. Black tank top. One take.

That video is still on my phone.

I have been thinking about Theo Calloway a lot lately. More than is reasonable.

Chapter 7

I came back to earth. Micah had said something.

"Sorry, what was that?"

He smiled. There are dimples.

"I said, ma'am, that I gave all the cake to my roommates."

And what am I supposed to do with that.

Why would you give it to your roommates?

Because of you.

Some things you see and you leave alone.

Wrong life, wrong decade. I'm not romantic anymore. I'm just trying to make money.

"Well, you could try the-"

I didn't finish it, because a shape came up outside the window.

Navy overcoat. Hair falling in his face like he'd lost an argument with the wind, which he had. It is December in Chicago. The end of his nose was red and his coat was still hanging open. His mouth was doing something small and entertained, and it was doing it at me.

My voice quit on me in the middle of a word.

Where is this coming from. Why am I embarrassed. Why am I afraid.

Theo pushed the door open and walked in, and without a hitch, without so much as looking at me first, he said to Micah, "Try the blueberry. She's better at it than she thinks."

Then he turned. A short laugh, barely there. "Ready to go? Thought we had a store to hit."

Something is off. I can't find it.

"Yeah. One minute. Then we'll head back."

Next to me, the tips of Micah's ears had gone red.

I bit the inside of my cheek and boxed up a blueberry.

I pushed it across the counter. "On me. It's good to try other flavors. Come back soon."

He sighed at the box, entirely deflated.

He is such a little brother.

I patted him on the head. "Bye. I have to go."

After he left I gave Maddie a few instructions, and then Theo and I went down to the grocery store under his building.

He runs the heat in the car too high.

I got in and unwound my scarf and something at the back of my neck kept catching.

Then I remembered. I'd bought the coat that afternoon on a whim, and the tag was still in it.

The wool was thick and my arm wouldn't come up behind my head.

I turned my back to him. "Theo. Get the tag out of my collar."

Behind me his palm came down flat on the steering wheel, one hard crack of sound.

I looked at him