Green: a friends to lovers romantic comedy

by Kayley Loring

  “It’s my pleasure.” I felt totally calm and confident—so much so that I asked a passing server for another glass of wine.

  “You sure you haven’t had enough?” My best friend/secret husband/hot as hell first real date raised an eyebrow at me. “Maybe pace yourself. The night is young.”

  “So am I. Who’s the grandma tonight? Yeesh.”

  While he chatted with a couple of men who’d approached him, I checked my phone and found a slew of texts from Chloe.

  Chloe: Did he like the dress?

  Chloe: How’s the party?

  Chloe: Have you guys had sex yet?

  Chloe: Seriously. How’s it going?

  Me: It’s huge and very impressive.

  Chloe: Please tell me you’re talking about his penis.

  Me: No, dirty bird. Party is on WB lot, impressive and winetastic. My date is hot and is yet to show me his penis.

  Chloe: Aww. You guys are so old-fashioned. I love you guys.

  Me: Go back to watching Netflix.

  Chloe: We’re both working on our laptops in bed actually. Naked. With vodka tonics.

  Me: You’re my heroes.

  When I looked up again, I followed Theo’s gaze. He was watching a young woman who was making the rounds, hand-in-hand with an attractive guy. She had lilac-colored hair, looked half-Japanese, super cool and 1000% gorgeous.

  He quickly looked back over to me just when the couple saw him and started heading our way. He calmly said to me: “You’re about to meet someone that I once dated.”

  Carly. He didn’t even have to tell me.

  “All you need to know is that we dated up in the Bay Area for a few weeks and when I ended things I introduced her to this guy she’s with now, because I thought they’d get along and now they’re engaged. So don’t be weird.”

  “So don’t do The Robot?” I assembled my face in the least weird expression I could manage and didn’t take a bite of food because I didn’t need to meet one of his former sex partners with food between my teeth or on my blouse.

  “How did we not run into you at the conference, bro?” The guy shook hands with Theo while still holding hands with his fiancée, who was smiling at me, wide-eyed and fascinated.

  “I didn’t even know you guys were in town.”

  “I thought I texted you.”

  “Did you?” He leaned in and gave Carly a quick peck on the cheek. “Hey you, good to see you.” Quickly stepping back to me, he rested his arm around my shoulder. “This is Grandma—uh—Gemma Kelly. We live together. This is Carly and Sean from the Bay Area.”

  “Oh hi!” Carly held out her hand and seemed genuinely happy to meet me. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

  “Hi,” I said. “You’re stunning.”

  “Oh my God,” she laughed and covered her face. “Thank you, that’s so sweet.”

  Sean shook my hand as Carly kept talking.

  “When did you two move in together?”

  I side-glanced Theo, waiting for him to answer.

  He rubbed my back. “When we were still at USC.”

  I watched as she processed this.

  “We just started dating recently,” he quickly added.

  “Very recently,” I said. “Like, an hour ago.”

  Carly looked relieved. “Awww, cute. Well, I don’t know much about Theo Walker, but I do know that if he’s stuck with you for years then it’s saying a lot.” There was no hint of malice in her tone.

  “It’s saying this girl is incredibly tolerant of me,” Theo said.

  Sean asked Theo if he could chat with him about a potential collaboration, and Theo politely told him he’d love to talk about it with him tomorrow but he promised his date he’d get her some more food. We all looked down at my full plate of food.

  “I have an eating disorder,” was what came out of my mouth.

  They bought it. Theo just blinked and shook his head. Fortunately, the DJ and his band started making a lot of noise, so we didn’t have to dwell on this.

  He didn’t want to leave me alone to talk with Carly. It was considerate, I thought, that he didn’t want to put me in an awkward situation, although it was also possible that he didn’t want Carly and me talking for his own reasons. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  “Wow. You’re so easy-breezy with the people you used to have sex with,” I said, after they’d walked away.

  He took my hand and squeezed it. “Don’t waste your time and energy comparing yourself to anyone else that I’ve dated. It’s not the same thing. You mean the world to me. No other girl comes close. You get that, right?”

  Did I? When he put it out there so simply like that, it was difficult not to. Don’t stop. Don’t stop being so handsome and looking at me like that and saying all the perfect things.

  “If you want to leave, we can.”

  “It’s okay. We can go after one more glass of wine.”

  “You didn’t eat anything.”

  “I’m fun. I mean fine. I’m fine and I’m fun and I’m having fun.” I curtsied. “Hope I’m being confident and not too goddamn hot to your liking.”

  He frowned at me.

  “What?”

  He grabbed my hand and pulled me along with him.

  “Are we leaving?”

  He kept looking around. He nodded at people as they called out to him. He pulled me away from where people were hanging out, to the perimeter of the New York street set, saw the railing for the subway steps and headed for it. He peeked down at the darkened stairwell and took a step.

  “Watch your step,” he said. “Keep quiet.”

  When we got to the bottom of the stairwell, he pressed me up against the cool cement wall, staring at my mouth and sending shivers all through me. “Everything about you is to my liking,” he whispered.

  I was up on my tiptoes, lifting my chin, but he just kept staring at my mouth and it was killing me.

  “Baby, you make me harder than the P versus NP problem.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It’s considered the hardest math problem in the world. It’s a theoretical computer science joke.”

  I snort-laughed. But in a really sexy way. “You’re such a nerd.”

  “You’re such a fox.”

  “Shut up. I’m not.”

  “I wish I could develop the technology for you to see yourself the way I see you.”

  “I’d rather look at you.”

  “Aren’t we lucky things are the way they are, then?”

  “Shut up and kiss me.”

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  And there we were, kissing each other for real, in fake New York City.

  While my hands were feverishly exploring his back and butt, he was ever so slowly undoing the buttons on my blouse. He traced his fingertip along the top of the bustier, kissed my neck, my collar bone, my breastbone, and then the mounds of flesh that were protruding from the top of my dress. So slowly, with such control. There was so much tension between my legs, it felt like he was pinching me down there, but his hands were cupping my breasts.

  You think you know a guy and then he looks at you with lusty eyes and bites his bottom lip and suddenly he’s a sexy mysterious stranger in a dark stairwell who’s introducing you to a side of yourself that you didn’t know you had.

  Apparently, tonight I was meeting the side of myself that was a drunk shameless hussy who had completely forgotten that she told this guy he’d have to work for it.

  “You know what I think?” I said. Or maybe I slurred it. My tongue felt loosey-goosey, but maybe it was not as bad as it felt. “I think…that…this dress…would look good…on…your…bedroom…floor.”

  I felt the warm air on my skin as he laughed while kissing my neck. It took me a moment to realize that he was now slowly buttoning my blouse back up.

  “I’ll let you tie your blouse the way you like it,” he said, as he pulled away from me and straightened himself out. “We should go.”
r />   “Are you taking me home?”

  “Which home would you be referring to?”

  “Yours. Ours. Yours. Take me back to your place and screw me.”

  He shook his head. “You are wasted.”

  “I’m being wasted on you tonight, apparently.” I snort-laughed and high-fived myself, because that’s what sexy classy sober ladies do on dates. We snort-laugh and high-five ourselves.

  Apparently, we also get very angry and quiet when we realize that our dates are not taking them back to their place for end-of-date sexy classy screwing. Once I realized that Theo had been driving on the 10 freeway and was slowing down to exit for Chloe and Ethan’s place, which was in the opposite direction of his place, my whole body stiffened and I was convinced that seeing Carly had changed his mind about me. It made perfect sense.

  I didn’t say anything when he went through the McDonalds drive-through and asked what I wanted to order, because I was so hangry and I needed to eat something so I wouldn’t have another hangover. He got me two cheeseburgers and large fries, which is exactly what I wanted, but I didn’t thank him because fuck him if he wasn’t going to bang me.

  After snatching the greasy paper bag of food from him, I did what I’d wanted to do ever since seeing him with Carly. I remembered that his ringtone for her was Let’s Get It On. He didn’t have ringtones for everyone, and didn’t have one for me as far as I knew. I pulled out my phone.

  “Who are you calling?”

  When I heard the upbeat jazzy intro, I recognized it immediately. He looked around, and realized that I had called his phone. He said nothing. He looked a little embarrassed. I ended the call, because I knew all I needed to know right then. It was Harry Connick Jr.’s version of I Could Write a Book from When Harry Met Sally. “And the world discovers as my book ends, how to make two lovers of friends.” What a cheesy dork. It wasn’t a sexy song, but I had no doubt that it was personalized exclusively for me.

  When he parked at the curb in front of Chloe and Ethan’s building, he said: “Hang on, I’ll get the door for you.”

  When he opened the door and helped me out of the passenger seat, he pulled me into him, kissing me on the cheek, then gestured towards the building. “Door to door service.”

  “Well. Thank you for the lovely evening,” I said.

  He grinned and grabbed me by the waist. He licked his lips and pulled me closer with one hand, with the other he tilted my chin up. “Good night, Gemma,” he said, as he lowered his mouth down to mine, so slowly that I swear I could feel each second ticking through my entire body, but when his lips touched mine, everything slowed down even more. With one hand on the small of my back and the other gently running fingers through my hair, he had me gripping his arms so I wouldn’t lose my balance with my eyes closed.

  When I caught my breath, I whispered: “Are you sure you don’t want to go back to your place?”

  “This is what you wanted,” he said in my ear. “You wanted to live apart from me so I could pick you up and drop you off, so I could work for it, remember?”

  “I know, but—”

  “You are not going to be intoxicated the first time we have sex, Gemma Kelly. You’re going to be high on me and you’re going to remember every single second I spend on your body making you gasp and moan and come like you’ve never come before.”

  Well, when you put it that way…

  I kissed him on the cheek, went inside, shut the door and tiptoed through the quiet apartment, holding my breath and covering my mouth with both hands, because I was one inhale away from belting out my favorite Harry Connick Jr. song.

  16

  Theo

  I was busy with meetings for two days straight after the party, with people I’d met at the conference, but I still managed to find a farm in Alaska that shipped out peonies long after they stopped blooming in the lower parts of North America. Gemma had been busy breaking down the film sets and returning rented props all over town, but when she came home to a big package of fresh cut peonies, our late-night call quickly devolved from her squealing with glee to her asking if she should come over, to her hanging up and texting me to say that she temporarily lost her mind and had to go to sleep.

  This behavior was so strange for her. I was used to her being grounded and confident and…sane. Still, it didn’t turn me off. If I was making her this nervous, it could only mean good things for when all that nervous tension gets released.

  The next day, after back-to-back meetings, I got out of my last one at five-thirty and was surprised to see seven new text notifications from Gemma Kelly when I’d gotten into my car. I was worried that something awful had happened.

  What had actually happened was: she’d sent me a picture of her new bra and panties on top of the bed in Chloe and Ethan’s guest room. She wasn’t wearing them. She was just showing me what they looked like laid out, with lots of pretty flower petals surrounding them. It looked like every girly picture I’ve ever seen on Instagram. However, it was a good use of all the flowers I’d sent her.

  Twenty minutes later, after getting no response from me, she’d sent another picture of her wearing the lacey black panties, but it was just a shot of the corner of her hip.

  Ten minutes after that, she sent a picture of her shoulder and the matching bra strap.

  Every ten minutes after that, she ordered me to delete those pictures immediately and forget she’d ever sent them.

  It was the kind of textual downward spiral I was used to getting from women a few weeks into dating when things had started to cool down on my end. Gemma was hitting the panic button after not hearing from me for about ninety minutes. If it had been anyone other than her I would have blocked her number and expected to return home to a boiling pot on the stove with a bunny in it. But I was steadfastly encouraged by her lunacy, and would have told her so if she’d just answered my calls.

  Now I was really getting worried—that she had been texting while driving and gotten into an accident, or that she’d actually come to believe I was ignoring her and decided she’d never speak to me again. But then when I pulled into my garage, she finally called.

  “Hi.”

  “Hello.” She sounded sheepish.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Oh, you know. Just sitting here calmly, being very zen, chillin’…So you’re…Are you home?”

  “Yeah, I just got back from my last meeting. Where are you?”

  “Just ignore all those crazy texts, okay?”

  “Do I have to delete them? Because, I really liked that shot of one square inch of your hip and a tiny portion of your shoulder.”

  “This is humiliating.”

  “Where are you? I’ll meet you wherever.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  That was when I got out of the car and heard an ambulance siren going by a few blocks away, and distinctly heard the same siren through the phone. I peered out around the edge of my garage door and saw Gemma’s car parked half a block away. The poor little maniac had probably driven herself mad imagining I was at home boning someone else instead of responding to her texts.

  “Why not, Gemma?”

  “I just…”

  I sent her a text that said I want to see you. “I just sent you a text.”

  While she was looking down at her phone, I ran over to her car and bent down to look inside the driver side window. When I tapped on the glass, she screamed and dropped her phone. I’ve never seen her look so humiliated in her life. She scrambled to turn on the car engine, all the while I pleaded with her to just come out or let me in, and she sped off.

  She didn’t hang up, because the phone was still on the floor of her car, and I didn’t want to hang up because I wanted to listen to make sure she didn’t crash her car. I kept yelling at her to stop and wait for me to come to her, and she kept mumbling about traffic, becoming a nun, and then something about Josh Groban. It was stressful. She wasn’t kidding when she said I’d have to work for it.


  Finally, she pulled over and I heard her fumbling with the phone.

  “Are you parked?”

  “Yes. I’m on Pico.”

  “You’re un poquito loco.”

  “You think I don’t know that?! I can’t do this. I’ve turned into a crazy person. It’s too much.”

  “You don’t have any work scheduled for the next few days, right?”

  “No. Why, are you going to have me institutionalized? Did you even hear what I said? I can’t do this.”

  “Just calm down.”

  “Calm down?! Tell me exactly how many times since you’ve known me have you ever had to tell me to calm down before?”

  “Once.”

  “What?! Zero!”

  “Once. That night after you and Andrew broke up. You jumped around, yelling and swearing and flipping me off.”

  “I did not.”

  “You did. After you tried to kiss me.”

  “I did not try to kiss you.”

  “Agree to disagree.”

  “Okay, I remember being a tad on edge that night. But this isn’t me—this isn’t us—this doesn’t feel right.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t hide it, and I couldn’t help it.

  “You’re laughing at me. That’s great”

  “I’m laughing at us. In case you haven’t noticed—I’ve been feeling things I’ve never felt before and acting like a crazy person too.”

  “Yeah. You have.”

  “I think this is what happens when two people are crazy about each other. Señora Crazypants.”

  No comment from Gemma, but I swear I could hear her smiling.

  “So, this afternoon I did something really crazy. Are you finally ready to let me talk?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Good enough.”

  “I still don’t—”

  I talked over her and launched into it. “Okay, here’s how it’s gonna go, kid. The other thing I was busy doing today, and what I’ve been trying to tell you is: I’m taking my first vacation in five years. I’ve got two tickets to paradise and I’m taking you with me. We’re gonna have the real honeymoon we never had. We’re gonna have fun. We’re gonna relax. We’re gonna spend time together. We’ll see how it goes. If we decide we want to go to town on each other we are gonna fucking do it until we can’t do it anymore, and then we’re gonna eat and sleep and then we’re gonna do it some more, because otherwise, we will have unresolved feelings for each other for the rest of our lives, we will always wonder what it would have been like between us if we just stopped playing it safe and risked everything. So…Pack your swimsuit and a book and clothes and shoes for lots of different kinds of weather and have that sweet ass ready to be picked up at seven tomorrow morning. I’ll email you the information.” Drop the mic. Exit, stage left.