The Friend Zone

by Abby Jimenez

Said if our arrangement was keeping me from dating, we should end it. I think she felt bad she wasn’t ready to commit to me and didn’t want me to miss out on finding someone who was. She knew I wanted to get married, have kids. That I already felt late to the game.

  So I lied.

  I’d say I was meeting someone for drinks and then I’d just go home for the night and sit around. Maybe go to the gym. When she’d ask me about my fake date, I’d just shrug and say we didn’t have a connection. That seemed to placate her.

  But the weird thing was, as much as she pressured me to see other women, I didn’t think she was seeing other men.

  She only ever sent me orders from her laptop. So when I was at the fire station and I got an order at 10:00 at night, I knew she was at home sitting on the couch going through emails. Not on a date. Then I’d wait an hour or so and reply with a dumb question about the order. If she replied right away, I knew she was still sitting on the couch working. She always replied.

  On my days off, when I came over, she never did anything other than hang out with me. She never left the room to take calls, and she didn’t disappear for mystery appointments or give me any reason to believe she was keeping to her promise that she’d date other people.

  So why, then, didn’t she want to be exclusive? Because by all accounts, I was the only man she was with. And that was a good thing, because I didn’t think I could handle it if I wasn’t.

  I was just patiently waiting for her to move on from Tyler. I wasn’t really sure I was actually making progress, but at least things didn’t seem to be getting worse.

  There was something to be said for that.

  It was a little after 5:00 p.m. when a black SUV pulled into the driveway. Since I worked with the garage door open, I’d become the unofficial doorman for Doglet Nation. I signed for all the packages.

  This didn’t look like a delivery though. The driver was a man in sunglasses. He got out, and something told me I wasn’t going to like who this was.

  The guy was good-looking. Taller than me. He worked out—that much was obvious. He was well dressed, maybe my age.

  He came straight into the garage with a confidence that told me he had official business here. Someone who’d been here before and had a right to come back.

  “You must be Josh,” he said, taking off his glasses and offering me his hand.

  He had an accent. Not exactly Spanish, something else. More exotic, foreign. He wasn’t a client. No way this guy owned a purse dog.

  “I’m Tyler,” he said, shaking my hand. “Is Kristen around?”

  Hot, thick jealousy seared through me.

  This was Tyler? This guy looked like an A-list actor in a goddamn action movie.

  How the fuck had Brandon not said something about this? It was all I could do to keep my expression flat.

  “She’s in the house. Is she expecting you?” I crossed my arms over my chest, not making any move to take him inside.

  He looked toward the door that led into the laundry room. “No,” he said, his voice lowering. “She is not.”

  He seemed to notice my rigid posture, and he sized me up. “You were in the Marines.” He eyed the Marine Corps tattoo on my bare chest.

  “Infantry,” I said.

  “Gunny sergeant.”

  He outranked me. But then I wasn’t a career military man like he was.

  But he outranked me with Kristen too.

  He seemed to be aware of this. Something in his eyes made me feel like I was the help. The lowly security guard giving him shit about his badge at a building he had full security clearance in.

  His green-eyed stare was cool. “I want to thank you for staying with my girlfriend while the police worked out who was coming into the yard. It made her feel safe to have you there.”

  Possessiveness gripped me. “Ex-girlfriend. She’s your ex-girlfriend.”

  His jaw flexed.

  I didn’t like this fucker. I didn’t like that he was the reason why Kristen wasn’t open to dating me. I didn’t like that she obviously cared for him more than she cared for me. I didn’t like that he was better than me, and I didn’t like that he’d hurt her. I glared at him.

  He glared back.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said stiffly, and he started for the door.

  I put a hand to his chest. “I’ll take you in.”

  He looked down at my hand, and I watched him bristle.

  Make a move, asshole. I fucking dare you. Give me a reason.

  His eyes came back up slowly, and I saw my own hatred reflected in his stare.

  He knew. He knew I’d had her.

  And he was the one who’d probably get her.

  But in that moment we had an understanding. This was my house. At least right now it was. And if he wanted to go in, it would be me who took him.

  I made him stand there for a tense couple of seconds before I turned for the door.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Kristen

  The garage door opened, and I called out before Josh came around the corner. “Hey, do you want to try that Thai place in a minute? We could walk. They’ve got that tea you like.”

  I sat on the floor sorting my shipment of new plaid dog harnesses. The sizing seemed off. The extra smalls looked like smalls, and the smalls looked like mediums. I was pondering this as I looked up just as Josh walked in with Tyler directly behind him.

  My breathing stopped.

  Stuntman lost his ever-loving shit. He dove off the sofa and went right for Tyler’s ankles. In one fluid movement, Josh scooped him up before he attacked.

  My dog yapped and snarled, and Josh stood there for a moment before he finished depositing Tyler the way he dropped off a box when I was on the phone: He made eye contact with me, set him by the door, and left.

  “What are you doing here?” I breathed.

  Goddamn. He looked good.

  I mean, he usually looked good. But that thing that always happened when he’d come back from leave, that moment of instant, primal attraction that smacked me in the face and reminded me what had drawn me to him in the first place—that thing happened.

  He wore a long-sleeve striped button-down shirt rolled up at the elbows, with pressed black pants and a tan belt and shoes. His brown hair was thick and combed, and he had a five-o’clock shadow. He wore the silver watch I got him last Christmas.

  “You won’t answer my calls,” he said, slipping his hands into his pockets.

  He looked wounded. Slightly slumped. I’d never seen him anything but confident and smiling.

  “Why would I?” I got up and crossed my arms. “We’re over, so…”

  Sadness flickered across his face.

  For the first time since we’d broken up, it occurred to me that this had been hard on him.

  I just thought his career was more important, and he was relieved he wasn’t going back to civilian life. From his apologetic “I reenlisted without talking to you” message, I got the impression that while the breakup was an unfortunate by-product of his decision, he understood it was the choice he’d made and was at peace with it.

  He took a step toward me. “Kris, can we talk?”

  “Talk. Go for it,” I said defensively. “But do it from there.”

  He glanced back toward the garage. “Let me take you somewhere. A nice restaurant. Where we can sit down and discuss things.”

  I scoffed. “I’m not going anywhere with you. You have two minutes. Say what you came to say and get out.”

  His jaw flexed. “Kris, I’m not leaving until we talk, and it’s going to take a lot longer than two minutes for me to say what I came to say. So unless you plan on having him throw me out”—he nodded to the garage—“then let’s go somewhere private.”

  The set of his mouth told me he meant it. He wasn’t leaving until I let him talk. I thought of Josh, of him walking in and out of the house while Tyler and I had what was probably going to be a really shitty conversation.

  I rolled my eyes. “Fine.” I g
rabbed my purse off the coffee table. “Let’s go.”

  He looked over my outfit. I was in shorts, flip-flops, I had a sweater tied around my waist, and I wore a T-shirt that read THE MORE I MEET PEOPLE, THE MORE I LIKE MY DOG.

  Tyler liked expensive restaurants. The food on deployment was terrible, so when he came home, he wanted to treat himself. We’d probably end up at some fancy fusion place or something. I’d be epically underdressed, and I didn’t give a shit.

  “You’re not going to get changed?” he asked.

  “Nope.” I marched past him to the front door. “You’ll just have to make my excuses to the maître d’.” I stomped outside.

  He ran around me to the passenger side of his SUV and held my door open. I got in grouchily and stared into the garage as Tyler slipped into the driver’s seat.

  Josh stood over a staircase holding a nail gun with Stuntman leashed by his feet. Josh looked at me for a flicker of a second before he turned back to his project, his jaw tight. I wondered what he thought of all this.

  Stuntman barked and strained against his leash as we pulled out of the driveway, and I couldn’t shake the super weird feeling I was leaving my family behind.

  Tyler’s sandalwood cologne was more concentrated in the closed SUV. It blasted my face through the AC, familiar and new at the same time, stirring feelings of nostalgia in my heart.

  “I missed you,” he said. He reached for my hand, but I yanked it away.

  The heavy-duty door that I’d stashed Tyler behind rattled and shook and then it burst open. A tornado of emotions rotated around me, and I couldn’t process any of them. All I knew was that the general consensus was that I was pissed.

  I felt indignant about him making his choice without the courtesy of even speaking to me first.

  There was guilt that he was no longer the last man I’d slept with. That I’d jumped on Josh literally within minutes of us breaking up without so much as a twinge of regret.

  Hurt that he seemed hurt.

  Confusion as to why he was even here.

  Surprise that seeing him made me wonder why I’d been so nervous about us moving in together.

  Anger that he didn’t have more of an effect on me when we were still together so Josh might have had less.

  Outrage that he hadn’t kept his promises so I would have to keep mine.

  Pissed.

  That was the muddied summary of how I felt. I was just pissed.

  I glanced at Tyler. He seemed to be upset that I hadn’t let him hold my hand. His face had darkened. “Are you sleeping with him?”

  We both knew who he was talking about. There was no reason to act coy.

  “That is none of your business,” I snapped.

  “Were you sleeping with him when we were together?” He didn’t look at me, but his knuckles were white on the wheel.

  I fumed. “You know what? Stop the car. Let me out.” I unbuckled myself.

  “Kris—”

  “Fuck you, Tyler. I was faithful to you. And I didn’t do this shit to our relationship. You did it. If you didn’t want me sleeping with other people, you shouldn’t have broken up with me. You gave up the privilege to be butt hurt the second you left me that voicemail.”

  He didn’t stop the car.

  “Okay,” he said after a moment. “Okay, I apologize. I know you wouldn’t do that. I just…seeing how he was about you, I…I’m sorry.”

  How was he about me? What the fuck happened in the garage? I wasn’t going to ask, but what the hell?

  We drove in silence for several minutes. When he finally spoke again, his voice was almost a whisper. “Do you love him?”

  I ignored him. This answer was one that hurt to admit to myself. I turned to the window and tried to sort my feelings by staring out at the freeway.

  As expected, he picked some ridiculously dim, hoity-toity seafood place in Malibu. Our table was under a stupid lamp made out of coral with a view of the ocean. He pulled my chair out for me and I refused to sit, glaring at him until he made his way around the table to his own seat.

  I’d had enough of his chivalry. I wanted to get this over with. As far as I was concerned, this whole thing was too little, too late.

  I sat and squinted at the menu. I was starving and irritable. The drive had taken forty-five minutes in rush hour. Josh and I would have been done eating dinner already. Josh never let me get this hungry. He would have put me in the passenger side of the car, closed the door, tapped the glass with his knuckle, and pressed a bag of chips against my window, grinning with those fucking dimples of his. Josh would have taken me somewhere I wanted to go, and he would have wanted to eat there too because we liked the same food.

  A server put a bread basket between us. It wasn’t even bread—just weird, jagged paper-thin crackers with sesame seeds on them. It totally triggered me, and I instantly felt hangry and more annoyed.

  “The tuna tartare is supposed to be excellent,” Tyler said, his tone conciliatory.

  “Is it?” I slapped the menu closed and dropped it on the table with a smack. “Order for me because I have literally no idea what the hell I’m looking at.”

  “We could go somewhere el—”

  “Nope. Let’s do what you want. Always,” I bit back. “Let’s have a long-distance relationship that leaves me alone for months at a time while you do you. And let’s eat what you want to eat. Because you’re the important one here, right?”

  It wasn’t fair and I knew it. I’d signed up for a military relationship. But I wasn’t rational at the moment—I was hungry.

  I leaned forward. “Order oysters. I dare you.”

  All I needed was shells filled with snot set in front of us for me to completely lose my shit.

  He pressed his lips into a line. He seemed to sense I was too hungry to be reasoned with. So when the server came back, Tyler placed our order, watching me the whole time from the corner of his eye like I might flip the table or something.

  Afterward he tried again to reach for my hands.

  “Kristen—”

  “What?” I put my hands in my lap. “Say what you have to say, and do it without touching me.”

  “Kris—”

  “You broke up with me in a voicemail. Two years and I get a voicemail.”

  Everything I did after that was fair game.

  His thick eyebrows drew down. “I couldn’t get you on the phone. I tried for days. Where were you?”

  Hanging out with Josh. Panicking that you were coming home.

  “You called twice, Tyler. I missed two phone calls, so you decided to replan our lives without discussing it with me?”

  The indignation surged again. “Do you know what it’s like to have a boyfriend you can’t call? To not know where you are because it’s classified? To never have a date for things? To go to weddings alone? I did this for you for years. And the first thing you’re supposed to do for me, you bail on me.”

  I snatched one of the crackers from the bread basket and took a grumpy bite. “What about my surgery?” I waved the cracker around. “I could have had it months ago and had Sloan take care of me, but nooooo. You told me to wait. You wanted to be there for me.” I put my fingers in quotes. “Thanks for all the months of extra needless suffering. And what about that big house you made me get so you’d have room for your things? I guess I’ll just continue to foot that enormous rent, right?”

  I glared at him, sitting back in my seat. “Oh, and you know, you really fucked me over with Evelyn too. Tossed me right into the lion’s den. So thanks for that.”

  He let out a slow breath. “I know. And I’m sorry.” He dragged a hand down his face. “I need you to know that this wasn’t because I didn’t want to be with you. It was never that. This just wasn’t the life I wanted, Kris. The military is all I’ve ever known.”

  “Fine.” I crossed my arms. “So you’re doing what you want, as usual. You made your choice. You did it without including me. Why am I here?”

  “Don’t you even
miss me?”

  The question hit me in the heart. His eyes begged me. Begged me to miss him.

  Not really. Not until I saw you and I let you out of your storage room. Now I’m confused…

  …Josh.

  An urge to talk him out of wanting me took hold.

  “You know, it’s for the better anyway,” I said, tossing a hand. “Because I’m not even myself around you. You would have hated living with me once you really got to know me.”

  He just looked at me, his eyes going soft like he knew what I was doing and thought it was cute.

  “Okay, you don’t believe me? This place—” I threw a hand up at the restaurant. “I don’t like eating at places like this. What the fuck is squid ink pasta? I go to places like this with you because you like it and you only get to choose where you eat, like, fifteen days out of the year.”

  I put a hand to my chest. “I am very opinionated about where I want to eat. You don’t even know that. That is a core part of who I am as a person, and you have never seen that side of me, Tyler.”

  The corner of his mouth came up into a small, amused smile.

  “This is not funny. I’m being totally serious. I get very easily annoyed. I’m impatient and moody. I hate almost everyone. We don’t even really know each other. All you’ve ever seen is me at my best, being agreeable and wearing makeup. That is not the real me.”

  Josh knows the real me.

  I went on. “You reenlisted. It’s done, and my position on another deployment hasn’t changed. I’m not doing it. We are not getting back together. So I appreciate the explanation and the face-to-face. But none of this changes anything.”

  He leaned onto the table with his forearms and spoke directly to my eyes. “I love you.”

  My heart clenched.

  I’d heard the words on the phone a hundred times. He’d written them in letters. But it had been almost a year since he’d looked me in the eye and said it to my face. And now that he did, there was no question that he meant it.

  He waited, but I didn’t say it back. I wasn’t sure if I loved him.

  I wasn’t sure that I didn’t.

  Someone dropped off some weird salads while Tyler and I stared at each other tensely across the table. The green menagerie smelled faintly like seaweed, and I actually felt a little nauseous looking at it. The only thing I recognized on the plate was a cherry tomato, and even that was yellow instead of red. I pushed the plate away and crossed my arms, scowling.