No more movies in the dark alone.

Shit fire and save the matches.

You know how smug I was about me and Mike being the textbook example of how a man and a woman can in fact be close platonic friends, if ones that pretend sexual tension doesn’t exist? Trust me. I was smug about that and how deeply we love each other as friends.
Well. I was smug until tonight, when our ignored spark started burning.
We met up to watch the 9pm free student union movie like we have 5,000 other Thursday nights. We joked around and ate and talked like we have since forever.
I gave him a noogie and asked if that made him uncomfortable; he said just don’t do anything obviously sexual (which immediately made me think of starting a strip tease in the middle of the student union). Okay, so: boundary noted.
When we sat down in the theater before the movie and I stretched, he touched my bellybutton exposed by my sweater hem riding up. That surprised the hell out of me, but…sure, let’s just go with it. Mostly it felt unfair because both his shirts were tightly tucked in.
As the lights go down and we’re still giving each other shit and halfway looking for Cape to walk in after grabbing another ride, we settle into those tiny-ass chairs which make it easier to let our knees touch than not. When the movie starts, Mike puts his arm across my back, and I see if I can get away with resting my head on his shoulder.
I can. He lets me, and oh God it’s such a comfortable rush.
I keep my arm as still as I possibly can resting in between us, fingers on his knee and DO NOT DO THAT THING WHERE YOU STROKE, FINGERS. DON’T. STAY STILL FOR ONCE IN YOUR EAGER LITTLE LIVES.
At one point, he pulls us apart to respond to a text message on his phone. I pull away too and try to figure out what just happened, and then we fall back into place when he’s done and I’m just as romantically comfort-drunk as before.
Then his hand drops to cup my waist. His fingers start MOVING. Mine do, too, curled up against his chest.

*runs screaming from the room*

That’s not what we did. But he did lean over and whisper, “We should leave the movie.” We did, shaking and staring at the floor. With normal people, this would be a husky invitation to one or another’s place to make out or hook up, any regret to be left to the morning.

Since it was me and Mike, we had to have a serious talk about what just happened.
He likes me. He’s attracted to me, he’s felt and catalogued and repressed everything between us exactly like I have for the past year and a half, and this is how it comes out.
Follows is the upshot of the rest of our conversation.
Mike: “If you were a Christian, I’d have tried to start dating you a long time ago.”
Me: “If you didn’t believe in God, I would’ve jumped you already.”
Verdict: “Maybe we shouldn’t go see movies alone in the dark anymore.”
We didn’t solve anything that a little healthy repression wouldn’t’ve taken care of, at least until I get out of school. Five motherfucking weeks; I thought we could make it.

I don’t know whether to be in joyful awe at such strong proof of such a strong mutual attraction, relieved that Mike felt just as deeply and it wasn’t my overactive imagination (which is so very rarely justified on things romantic), or terribly beaten down that I’ve lost my best friend to sex and Jesus.

Bookmarks.

"We're not on the same page, but we see each others' bookmark."

I'm so frustrated.
The more I try to talk about it, the less I make sense. Why am I so bad at coordinating things?

I’m going home again this weekend, voluntarily. I want to go home because lately it’s been just as—let’s not say fun. Let’s say relaxing. It’s been just as relaxing going home as staying up here. Here, I root around for stuff to do and people to do it with. Lately the results haven’t been worth the efforts, and that’s more depressing than lying around in my dorm all weekend. Trust me; I’ve done studies.

There's a thick-ass fog layered over everything I think right now. Not a good time, extreme nihilistic apathy.

Sudden pleasant things.

Mike: "A pregnant pause, then."
Me: "I won't go into any detail but that's not physically possible for me right now."
Mike: "Ah, okay. That's already too much detail."

Does anyone know the proper etiquette for when you run into someone you like but are in the early stages of getting to know and they're on their cell phone? Are you suppose to:

• rapidly calculate how much you want to talk to them versus how much they probably want to talk to you on a sliding scale of how nice the weather is and in what sort of hurry you are while walking towards them? 
• eavesdrop on their side of the conversation to see if it sounds like they're almost done, then slow down/smile and wave and move on accordingly?
• stutter to a stop, look uncertain, and blush until they actually do hang up?

Spotting Cape in the wild makes me do strange things like that last clump of social awkwardness listed. But we segued pretty smoothly into a walk to his car where it was parked downtown.
After fits of I-want-it-NOW-itis, I've come to realize that it's always more fun seeing him spontaneously anyway because it's not infused with desperation. It's just taking advantage of a sudden pleasent thing, like a free chocolate bar.

Yeah. That happened too, and it was also delicious.

A whiff of sophomore year.

My fuck.
That was Ed. It's been almost exactly two years since we curled up on my dorm bed to watch a movie and we kissed like magnets.
No, I wasn't single when that happened.
Now he's got a girlfriend and is no longer a virgin. He invited me to hang out with them if I want. I wonder if she's pretty.
I halfway expected to see him at the con (yes, another one. I stumbled into this one on accident, I swear. I forgot the university's anime club was taking over the student union this weekend and I wandered in and stayed for hovering nostalgia), but in an abstract way. But he was there, in a chair I could sit next to. Which I did.



It made my heart want to scream, so after he and his brother left I took a rambling walk around town to clear my head. I'm still a little freaked out. Can this be any sort of good?

Threesome.

That's on the top of my Words I Never Expected to Hear Mike Say list. He made me cough out a piece of roast beef in surprise last night.

We met up for our weekly excuse to eat and talk nerdy and laugh at each other and possibly watch a movie yesterday as soon as I got out of the j-school. (It's been a stressful week. I don't want to talk about it.) We ate and talked about threesomes in Echo Bazaar, split so I could go to a record-breakingly short 18 minute radio station meeting, and met up again after I took a shower and put on jeans and red lipstick before he drove us over to the movie theater on top of a parking garage/shopping center that nobody goes to anymore so we could use free tickets his roommate Cape could give us because he's an assistant manager up there.

Over spring break, I sent Cape a Facebook message saying that I enjoyed hanging out with him and I hoped we could hang out some more if his vampire spoof and my job-hunting don't take up the entire rest of our semesters. When I got back, he had replied with sure and he hoped he didn't make it seem like he didn't want to talk to me.
Let's blame Mike for that because I did complain to him--once, in a fit of frustrated loneliness that he got to hear because he's my only friend--about His Roommate's unexplained silence. Yesterday right after dinner he said, "[Roommate] did text you back, didn't he?" I call interference, but not out loud because then I start sounding like Suitemate.

Cape had on a navy blazer and a tie and his own gold-colored nameplate and everything. Mike would laugh his ass off to hear me say this (I HEAR YOU, MIKEY BOY) but Cape was downright handsome. Maybe it was the pinkish neon lighting in the dim, deserted lobby--it sort of felt like being in the middle of a merry-go-round at night. But it's also his floppy hair. I like his floppy hair.

I saw their house, too. It made me shy.
We got to the theater early so I told Mike to show me where they lived since he's been to my dorm at least half a dozen times. I was thinking just a slow drive-by tour, but he pulled into their driveway and unlatched the screen door and I padded in after him.
It was messy but in an interesting archeological way. I wanted to dig without disturbing anything; I had to keep slapping away my own impulse to plunge into the World Dialect Workbook open on a music stand, run my fingers down DVD spines, squint at the handwritten list scrawled on the back of a hymn copy.
But Mike had no such qualms and did all that for me.
He showed me his room, too, which. I mean. It looked like him, like where he stores the parts of his personality that he can't fit into his brain or heart or computer bag. Which is exactly what rooms are for.
It didn't feel sexual, it just felt very personal.
When we went to the theater for real, I couldn't think of a goddamn thing to say to Cape except "How's that German accent practice coming along? And your crunches? Get more than 15 out today?" which I didn't say for fear of being profoundly creepy.
But then when I beat Mike out of the bathroom a few minutes later, I did manage to respond to Cape's smile and greeting in a way that struck up a conversation.
Fuck save me from boys with crinkly-eyed smiles.

And who like to hug. Me apologizing for being a bit clingy because I miss having an excuse to do that just made Mike reach over and hug me harder. When he let me off in front of my dorm at the end of the night, we hugged sideways in the front of his car so our cheeks squished together. I felt his beard stubble my own chin.

Sweet merciful gahhhhh, he's making me melt.

Yet I'm calm. Last night was happy and peaceful instead of confusing. I call that progress. 

Mozzer Friday.

I'm getting all my boy angst out in this one post before I go on spring break. I don't want to think about whether writing my phone number and a note that said "Hey, let me know if you get that guitar club going" on an old library card catalog slip and then slipping it under Guitar and Biology guy's windshield wipers was creepy after watching him jam out with one of the guys from the radio show after me.
I don't want to think about why Prettyboy or Cape were so interested in talking with me and presumably continuing the conversations later and have said nothing after I responded cheerfully affirmative.
I don't want to dissect Mike's and my fan-fiction as a map into how we truly feel about each other. That's a little nerdy for even us.
I don't want to miss BF.
I don't want to feel like my brain is scrambling for a piece I think I'm missing when I skip around to different boys like they're different job options. It's been really teeth-grindingly jarring to realize that my subconscious thinks I need a man to be happy. And that I've been agreeing with it without really noticing.

Staring at an empty email inbox for hours on end will be easy enough to avoid. I'm going to impose a 10p.m. to whenever-I-get-up a.m. cell phone shut-off, too.

So. Take it away, Mr. Morrissey.



Reader, that's the last time I'll do that to you. I promise.

Oh God. Fan fiction.

Does anyone ever find love writing a joint fan-fiction about a new computer text-based game back and forth with his/her best friend?
There is absolutely no reason I ask this. Nope. Certainly not from personal experience over the last couple of days. I have for sure not started an epic writing quest with Mike over Facebook message that makes me happier than the journalism award contest form my editing TA handed to me to fill out to enter my “in-depth” Hunter S. Thomspson Lite article. Uh uh.

About that form: It might just be so we have a horse in the race. Fuck knows my editing professor had enough problems with it that he spilled out in green ink. (Sometimes I feel like laminating a 3 X 5 card that says, “I know what you mean, I just can’t read what you wrote” to hold up during our editing talks.)
But it’s my horse. Small validation.

More validation: Bluetooth commented on my last Facebook status. It was random and had nothing to do with anything except making me wonder about sex again. He always makes me do that.

I met another pretty boy while I was playing "Me and Bobby McGee" on the third floor of the Russell House tonight after dinner.

Not my guitar. But still catnip.

"Is it wrong to want to give back to the place that made me so much of what I am now?"
"No, no, but--how much more are you planning to give?"