“You might want to take off your boots. Darah will skin you alive if she finds out that you tracked water all over her clean floors.” This wasn’t actually true. I couldn’t imagine Darah even threatening to do such a thing, but Dusty shucked his boots off and put them next to mine. Seeing him in his socks reminded me of sliding around in his apartment and how much fun we’d had. No, bad thoughts, Jos. Gotta shut those suckers down.
We went back into the living room and sat on the couch. This talk was going to be very different from the one I’d had with Renee, that was for sure.
“So let me get this straight,” he said, holding his hands up, as if he was asking me to slow down. “You told your sister that you don’t feel the same as me.”
Time for Oscar-worthy acting performance number two.
“I did because it’s true.” My lines sounded like something out of a bad play. A really bad one. Like, not even community-theater caliber. More like a crappy high school production that the kids had been forced to participate in for an English grade.
“Joscelyn.” I shivered as he said it.
“What? It’s true. I am putting you firmly in the friend zone, where you belong. I got carried away, and when I sat down and thought about it, I decided that it wasn’t something I wanted. With you. I have a lot going on right now, and I don’t think this is the wisest choice. You know, even if I wanted it.” I could see the reviews now. Joscelyn Archer is the worst thing to happen to theater since Cats!...I got up and walked out and demanded a refund...This girl has no talent and will never act in this town again.
I peered at Dusty out of the corner of my eye. I couldn’t make eye contact with him directly, because I would have blinked too much, or given some other sign that I was lying.
He was silent for a second, watching me.
“You have got to be shitting me. Do you honestly think I would believe that? If so, then you must think I’m pretty f**king stupid.”
No, I didn’t think he was stupid. He was too smart for his own good.
The smile on his face this time was one of confused bewilderment. It was too adorable.
I went with the truth.
“I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“So why are you doing this to me? You kissed me not that long ago, and that kiss is sort of the opposite of what you’re telling me right now, and I’m thinking if I kissed you again right now I’d get the same reaction as before. Your voice is saying one thing and your lips and your body are saying another. Do I have that right?”
Well, yeah. He did.
“Dusty.”
“No, Red. I wanna hear this. Tell me why we can’t be together.” He sat back as if he was waiting for me to put on an encore performance. I was kind of at the end of my rope.
“Why do you have to make this so hard on me? If you were just...a jerk or you smelled bad or you didn’t say nice things it would be so much easier.” I got up from the couch and went to the recliner so I could have some distance from him. Also to get away from his smell.
“Maybe it’s hard because you’re attracted to me. And you don’t put people you’re attracted to in the friend zone.”
“Some people do.” I was certain that, at some point in history, someone, somewhere, had put someone they were attracted to in the friend zone for one reason or another. There had to be a precedent.
“Okay, I’m going to talk now, and you can listen to what I’m going to say and tell me if I’m on the right track or not. Okay?” he said.
“Do I have a choice?”
“No.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Proceed,” I said, waving my hand.
“We were going along just fine a few days ago. If you remember, you were the one who wanted to take this to the next level, correct?”
I nodded.
“I kissed you, you kissed me back, things got a little intense. We both wanted it. Correct?”
I nodded again.
“And then, for reasons unknown to me, you freaked out and left my house, and now you are trying to come up with anything you can possibly come up with to get me to go away, even though you still want to be with me, based on the kiss. Correct?”
“That’s not exactly—” He cut me off.
“Yes or no?”
I glared at him.
“Yes.”
“So what I need to do is find out what occurred to make you change your mind. If my memory serves, you went into my bedroom to get Napoleon and decided to snoop around—”
I tried again to interrupt him, but he held his hand up.
“Just let me finish and then you can comment. So, you were in my room and picked up a picture of me and my brother and dropped it. I came in to find you looking like you were scared for your life, and then you shoved my cat at me and ran out the door without your shoes on. Correct?”
I had to swallow a few times before my voice would work.
“C-correct.”
“So it seems, from my view of the events, that the moment when you decided was when you saw and then dropped the picture. So. What was it about that picture that caused you to drop it in the first place? What could a picture of me and my brother do to freak you out that much? Let’s look at this in depth, shall we? You have seen me. You have kissed me. You know what I look like.” At this point, I felt like I was on the witness stand in one of those cop dramas, and he was the hard-ass lawyer cross-examining me about what happened the night of June 14. He would make a great lawyer.
“So it couldn’t have been me that led you to freak out, and the only other one in the picture is my brother.”
I was beyond stupid to think that he wouldn’t figure this out after my freak-out from seeing the picture. I shouldn’t have left. I should have pretended that I’d gotten an emergency phone call. Hell, I should have told him I was a virgin. That might have done it. In fact...
“I’m a virgin,” I blurted out. It was better him knowing that than finding out the truth. Embarrassment would trump the hatred he would have for me if he really knew. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? It was perfect!
“I’m a virgin and I was in your room, and looking at your bed made me think of sex, and I realized that I wasn’t ready and I was scared and that’s why I left. It had nothing to do with the picture.” For the love of GOD, please buy it, Dusty.
He looked at me really hard, and I, for the first time ever, was glad that my face and ears were turning red. It was more from fear that he wouldn’t buy it than from embarrassment about revealing I still had my V card. But he didn’t have to know that.