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.