One Big Mistake: a friends to lovers rom-com

by Whitney Barbetti

  “Yeah, I know she will. That’s why I suggested it. And the fries. Lots of ketchup.” I said it more forcefully than necessary, judging by the way two pairs of eyes slid in my direction. Great. Now he’d probably spit in my drink.

  “Please,” Navy added, sweet as a ripe plum. “You okay?” she asked me, pressing her cool hand to the side of my face. My face was warm from the booze and the embarrassment of the boner that was straining against my pants, and Navy’s hand felt like nir-fucking-vana.

  “Peachy,” I said, forcing a smile. What was fucking happening? Were we flirting? Was this a thing? Why did Navy suddenly seem so much more… I don’t know what the word I was searching for was. She was always beautiful, but this was something different. My reaction to her wasn’t purely friendly, no. It was something else. Something more. Something I’d never entertained before.

  It made no fucking sense. I mean, I’d be lying if I’d said that the warm weight of her body against mine during the countless times we’d platonically cuddled had never elicited that kind of reaction from me. But usually I was able to ward it off with a gentle reminder that Navy was my friend. Apparently this time, my dick was bound and determined to embarrass me with its poorly timed erection.

  The bartender placed two pink beverages in front of us, giving Navy a straw but not me. Maybe that was his subtle way of sticking it to me without hocking a loogie into my drink. I’d take it. “Fries will be up in a minute.”

  Navy gave him a grateful smile and pulled the paper liner off the top of the straw and held it between the tips of her pale-pink painted nails as she took her first sip.

  Shit. I chose the wrong drink. I couldn’t watch her drink from a straw, her mouth puckered and her cheekbones all pronounced from the long suck and not keep my dick in check at the same time. This was gonna be a disaster.

  “Do you really need that straw?” I asked. I was a selfish dick.

  “Makes the alcohol go down faster,” she said with a wink in a grin. Oh, no. It wasn’t just the straw. It was her, all of her. It didn’t matter if she used the straw or not. I was a goner.

  I brushed her hair so that it tucked around her ear. She had a pretty earlobe, I thought absently. Except, who thinks that? Psychos, probably. This veered into Silence of the Lambs territory. Good thing I didn’t have a small, yappy dog or a basement.

  “Fries,” the bartender said, sliding them toward us like we couldn’t identify the shoestring shape. This was Idaho, land of potatoes. We’ve all seen a French fry or two.

  “My turn,” she said, snapping me from my thoughts. She popped a fry in her mouth. Good. Hopefully, this would offset any potential Exorcist style vomiting later.

  “For what?” I asked, half afraid of her and half intrigued.

  “This,” she said, her thumbnail gliding down the side of my neck.

  What was it about the slight bite of a fingernail into sensitive skin that set the rest of my skin afire?

  Oh, yeah, it was the sensitive part of that sentence.

  I wasn’t usually such an idiot.

  “Uh…”

  Yes, I was.

  Her fingers circled my skin, and had I ever felt such an exquisitely delicious touch to any part of my body besides the obvious one? There must have been a billion nerve endings in my neck because what she was doing to my body was totally abnormal for me.

  “It looks like a fishhook,” she said, reminding me of what she’d asked in the first place.

  “Close,” I said, gulping. “Asa was chasing me around the house, telling me he was gonna hang me by my toes.”

  “He was mad?” She finally stopped touching my neck, to my relief and disappointment.

  “Uh yeah. I pulled a Kevin McAllister to his wall of shelves in his bedroom. He didn’t have money or anything worth a damn—I was just a dumb ass kid who wanted to climb shit that wasn’t meant to be climbed.”

  “Let me guess, you destroyed it.”

  “Well, duh. If you’ve seen Home Alone, you can imagine what happened. I mean, it was that cheapy particleboard bullshit. Collapsed like a stack of matchsticks. And our mom yelled at Asa for it because I cried like the little baby bitch I was. As soon as Mom turned her back, I gave Asa a shit-eating grin and he proceeded to chase me around the house. Ran upstairs, through the jack and jill bathroom with him hot on my heels and on my way flying down the stairs, I literally flew and landed on one of the sharper coat hooks by the door.”

  “Oh, my God.” Navy gripped her neck in her hands in horror. “I’m almost sorry I asked.”

  “Yeah, it just hung like a flap of skin. Mom yelled at Asa some more, and then me, too.”

  “Good,” she said, sipping more of her drink and drowning a French fry in a sea of ketchup. I adjusted my pants as casually as possible. “Sounds like you gave your mom hell.”

  “Still do. I think she secretly likes it though. She’s always talking about how we caused all the gray hairs to pop up on her head, and now she blames us for it falling out too.”

  “Your poor mom. She’s such an angel.”

  “She really is.” I dunked my finger into my drink and stirred the ice cubes around. Nope, no loogies to be found. “I think this Asa stuff has really shaken her.”

  “That’s understandable,” Navy said, her hand squeezing my thigh again.

  For fuck's sake, I could only take so much of that before Navy’s hand accidentally collided with something as firm as my thigh but not quite as benign. I took her hand from my thigh, holding it in mine on top of the bar. She had such small hands. Long fingers, fine knuckles. One little circular scar below her middle knuckle. How had I never noticed these little details about her before?

  Because you didn’t ever look at her too closely.

  I waved the thought away like it was a pestering fly buzzing about my temples. Even then, I mentally argued with the voice, why wouldn’t I have looked at her closely?

  Because you were afraid to.

  Horseshit.

  “What’s horseshit?” Navy asked, her drink half gone.

  I’d spoken that aloud? Fuck. The bartender hadn’t spit a loogie in my drink, but he’d probably given me the bulk of the bottom of the barrel vodka in easy retaliation for my stupid comment earlier. “Nothing,” I said, at a loss for words for the first time in as long as I could remember.

  Luckily, Navy wasn’t too absorbed in our conversation. She swayed back and forth on her stool to the song on the jukebox. My legs straddled her stool due to the lack of space between the inconvenient column and the wall. Her swaying caused her to rock against me, her hand in mine flexing with each staccato of the drumbeats.

  “This song,” she said, really feeling it now, her hair tossed back down her back. She had Disney princess hair, which was a pretty dumb thing to think. Shampoo commercial hair, that was better. Made my thoughts feel less pervy. “Do you remember this song?”

  How could I even think about the song when I was entranced by her? “No…”

  “Junior prom.” She was practically gyrating in her seat now, her eyes closed and her mouth moving along to the lyrics. “Technically, it was after prom. We went to Wendy’s, got some fries and a frosty and then you drove out to the parking lot that overlooked the drive-ins.” Her eyelids lazily slid open, and her head tilted so she was looking at me. “Come on, don’t you remember?”

  The memory was there, somewhere in my periphery.

  “Oh, Keane,” she said, drawing my name out like it took five whole seconds to say. “You don’t really remember?”

  “I guess you’ll have to remember for us both,” I said with a shrug.

  “You had blankets in the bed of your truck from the last time we’d gone to the drive-ins, with the whole group. We sat in the bed of the truck, watching the end of Divergent from our cheap seats.”

  “Free seats. Poor high school kids, then.”

  “Free seats. Anyway, that was the night that you taught me the magic that is fries dipped in chocolate frosty.”


  “What’s this song have to do with this memory?” I closed my eyes, trying to remember the memory tied with Get Lucky by Daft Punk.

  “You sang it to the drive through attendant while we waited for our food. You even held a fake mic to her, encouraging her to sing along. Remember? You probably made her whole night.”

  It pissed me off that I couldn’t remember. “Or ruined it.”

  “Noooo. It’s such a happy song. You had burned it onto a CD, so when we left the drive-thru you immediately played it again. It just makes you want to dance.” And as soon as she said it, she slipped off her stool and pulled me with her. There was no real dance floor to speak of, but Navy was right. This was a song you just wanted to dance to. So, we did, our bodies rubbing up against each other on accident and not as an excuse to touch. We didn’t need an excuse; it came as natural as everything else had in our friendship. But the difference now was that it was hard to determine whether these casual touches were strictly friends or the more than friends variety.

  Luckily for me, my threats of pain that I’d never follow through on had worked their magic on my dick, so there was no awkward boner punches as she moved her arms along to the song.

  When it was over, we returned to our drinks and guzzled them like we were parched. A thin film of sweat coated Navy’s brow, resulting in her looking slightly disheveled in a way that was inherently sexy and caused me to do stupid shit like play with the baby hairs that curled around her brow.

  “We need another song,” I said.

  “What about that Usher song?” she asked and again, I looked at her dumbly.

  “Wow, alcohol has really done your memory a disservice tonight,” she said.

  “Usher has a billion hits. Give me a line.”

  “U Got It Bad.”

  But still, even with the title it couldn’t summon a memory for me. “I don’t know.”

  Navy pouted, her bottom lip jutting out in the most delectable way. I itched to reach forward and give it the slightest flick of my finger.

  Nope, couldn’t think about that. “After the homecoming game we won, you don’t remember? We had an impromptu party at someone’s house, down at the lake. Karaoke, terrible smuggled in beer that was already warm by the time we all started passing cups of it. Jocks in their tighty-whities because they weren’t prepared to go immediately to a party after sweating on a field for a couple hours.”

  I was going to tell her that, once again, I seemed to have some kind of memory-lapse, but her eyes were closed as if she was lost in, so I waited for her to continue.

  “I had that really unfortunate crush on… oh, what was his name?”

  “There were a lot of ’em,” I said drily.

  “Dennis.”

  “Dumb name,” I said, confused by the odd, misplaced flicker of jealously that lit through me. “Dumber dude.”

  “Oh, hush. Lots of respectable people are named Dennis.”

  “Yeah, like The Menace.”

  “I said hush,” she said, putting a finger over my lips. “You’re ruining my story. Anyway. Dennis had hit the booze pretty early so by the time he got to the party he was already totally blitzed. He caught me in the kitchen as I was cleaning up the mess from the s’mores they’d made over the gas stove.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I remembered that.

  “Anyway,” she repeated. “He cornered me at the stove, my hands sticky with marshmallow leftovers. I couldn’t push him away when he invaded my bubble a bit too aggressively, because my hands would’ve just stuck to him.”

  “And so I came in, swooping in at just the right time.”

  “You put your arm around me, got in between me and him, and popped a marshmallow into Dennis’s gaping mouth.”

  “He needed to eat, absorb some of that alcohol.” The truth was, Navy’s eyes had gone wider than I’d ever seen when Dennis had cornered her. Like a deer caught in a hunter’s sights.

  “Then you asked me to make you a sexy s’more,” she said, laughing. “And ‘U Got It Bad’ was playing and you were buzzed enough to obnoxiously sing along with it.” Navy was laughing so hard her eyes were wet at the corners. “And then you started serenading Dennis, pointing at him, giving him a ‘come hither’ look, doing the air hump to the beat of the song and everything.”

  “Yeah, and it worked, because he left the kitchen real fucking fast.” He’d called me a few slurs on his way, but Navy’s terrified look had been replaced with bright eyes and a mouth that couldn’t stop laughing. As Navy’s laughs calmed now, I wondered how she and I could have lived these memories together and she held them so vividly in her brain. It made me mourn for all the other memories that played like a brightly lit movie reel in her brain. “Do you remember what happened next?” I asked, mischief making my mouth curve.

  “No?”

  I slathered a French fry in ketchup, making sure a bit of the ketchup had gotten on my forefinger. “Thoroughly submerged in tomato juice, just the way you like your fries.” I held it in front of her face until she opened her mouth and slipped it in, past her very full lips. I’d done the same in the past with a leftover chunk of a chocolate bar. After feeding her the fry, I gently cradled her chin before pulling away. I’d meant it to be a joke, like I’d done with the melty chocolate years earlier, but something about tonight was making this feel like we were very firmly and consciously crossing the friend line into whatever lay beyond.

  She chewed the fry as she eyed me thoughtfully. And then it clicked. Her eyes narrowed, she said, “Did you just give me a ketchup fingerprint?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Yes,” she said, not rushing to wipe the ketchup away. “I remember. There was chocolate on my face—from you—but you didn’t tell me.” She gave me a playful punch to the shoulder. “Dick.”

  Navy was normally so placid, hearing her call me a dick did something to my… well, dick.

  Stand down.

  “You’ve gotta wipe it off now,” she said, holding a stack of napkins toward me. “You told me I can’t use the bathroom here, and it’s too dark in here to see on my phone, so it’s up to you.”

  “Okay.” I took the top napkin from her and leaned in. It was dark in the bar, but I really just wanted the excuse to be closer to her. Inhaling her fresh perfume, her ocean-smelling hair shit—these were more intoxicating than whatever liquor we had been consuming all night.

  “Hold on,” she said, bringing her hands behind her head and pulling her hair up into a bun. The movement pushed her chest forward and in our already tight space, put her dangerously close to brushing her chest against mine.

  Don’t look at her boobs, don’t look at her boobs.

  “It’s really warm in here.”

  “Uh, what?”

  “It’s warm in here.” She fanned her face.

  “I think that’s the secondhand smoke,” I joked, to keep from fixating on all the angles of her face that she’d exposed just by pulling her hair back.

  “Am I good now to clean your face?”

  “Ugh.” She made a face. “Don’t say it like that. I’m not a toddler in need of a mommy to clean me up.”

  I brought the napkin up, holding it between our faces. Navy and I locked eyes, and her warm breath washed over my mouth. We were inches apart. There was so much seriousness in her face. We could cross the line tonight—in a real way, not just one I imagined in my head. But I wouldn’t do that—she’d have to make the first move, that much I was sure of.

  I was also sure that I wanted her to. I really, really did.

  “Should I lick this and then wipe your face?” I asked. “Like mom used to do?”

  “Do it and die.”

  Man, I loved this feisty side of her. She rarely let it out to play. Gently, I touched the edge of the napkin to the small spot of ketchup on her face, wiping it away in small but thorough movements.

  When at last I pulled away, we both not-so-subtly sucked in fresh air, as if we’d been too afraid to inhale one another.

  And
, of course, I had a boner like a hormonal thirteen-year-old. No half-mast here, this was a full-on fucking salute.

  6

  NAVY

  “Your bar tab is gonna be really high tonight,” I lamented when the bartender took away the third or fourth empty glass. Or maybe it was the fifth. I picked up a tiny whisper of a French fry crumb, popping it into my mouth.

  “Want more fries?” Keane asked.

  “No.” I was deliciously loose in my limbs. My head, on the other hand, was fuzzy around the edges. It had been at least an hour since we’d last danced and I was fairly confident that the next time I moved to stand, I’d probably fall.

  But I felt good. So, so good. Relaxed for the first time in I couldn’t remember how long. It’d been a fun night. When was the last time Keane and I had gone out for drinks, just us? I wasn’t even sure if we ever had. Our social events always seemed to be filled with other people, so our attentions were constantly divided. Tonight, we’d both been solely focused. On each other. The song choices had given me the best trip down memory lane, when life was a lot more carefree than it was now.

  Keane hadn’t stopped smiling at me all night. I was buzzing from such singular attention; I didn’t really know how to handle it. Without the distraction of our other friends, we were able to just focus on one another. And it reminded me of why I’d developed that crush on him in the first place. He had a way of making you feel like you were the only person in the world, like everything you said or did was more fascinating than it actually was. It was addictive, really, and I knew better than to get used to it. But after several hours of drinks, I’d already forgotten why I’d needed him in the first place tonight.

  But the important thing was that I’d needed him, and he’d come. He was always coming to my rescue. And for the first time since high school, I let myself be reminded of the crush I’d always held for him, the crush I’d attempted to snuff out when he’d gently turned me down.

  He wasn’t looking at me like he had the night he’d told me I was pretty; he was looking at me like the way he’d looked at Tori. And all the others that followed. I knew, because I’d witnessed it too many times to re-live.