by Selena Scott
She’d made herself at home already, which soothed some of what he was going to have to classify as nerves.
Which sucked. Because he was not a nervous man by nature and he honestly couldn’t think of a single other time in his life that he’d ever been nervous around Natalie.
“Beer?”
“Sure.”
She finished setting out the Chinese food on a big tray that, according to tradition, they’d then take into his living room so they could stuff their faces and watch a trashy movie.
He grabbed the beers and then leaned over her to take the tray. “I’ve got it.”
“Okay.” She looked up at him with a funny look on her face, and stepped away.
He was being weird. He never offered to carry trays for her in the past. Raphael cleared his throat and waited for her to go first into the living room. He followed her and while she clicked around on some channels, he kicked a bunch of mail, two open books, and a bunch of unmatched socks off onto the floor before he set the tray of food down on the coffee table.
“I take it Seth hasn’t come over for a while?” she asked dryly.
Raphael grinned as he sat down on the far end of the couch. Seth was a complete and total neat freak. And whenever he visited Raph’s house, he damn near had a coronary. He was basically an unpaid cleaning service.
“Nah, he and Sarah have been too busy getting everything together for the wedding. I go and visit them these days, instead of the other way around.”
She was quiet for a minute. “Everything ready for the wedding?”
Raph chuckled. “Hell if I know. I’ve been thoroughly cut out of all wedding planning.”
“Well, that makes sense considering Seth is the most organized person I know, and you’re… you.”
Raphael laughed again. “Thanks.”
Seth and Raphael were technically identical twins, but there were a few things that kept them firmly distinguishable. Raphael’s dirty blond hair was always messy, just a bit too long, and he always had a dusting of five o’clock shadow on his face. Seth was always scrupulously groomed, his hair perfect. Raphael was even convinced that Seth pruned his eyebrows here and there. The other physical marker that distinguished them was their size. Though they were the exact same height, Raph was several inches wider with the muscle he’d put on over the years. Seth managed his anxiety through supreme and meticulous organization of his life and his space. Raphael managed anxiety through a lot of physical activity.
“I still can’t believe he’s getting married,” Nat said after a minute, peeling the label on her beer. “Little Sethy, walking down the aisle.”
“I can believe it.” Though it had taken Raphael a few months to get used to seeing Seth and Sarah joined at the hip, at this point, it was weird to see them without one another. It was hard to explain, but something about them just meshed. They fit. “In a lot of ways, I already feel like they’re married.”
“I feel that way, too. It’s like they’re meant to be.”
“Right.” He didn’t know why her saying that made him feel awkward. It was true. But something about those words in her mouth at that particular moment made his stomach tighten down a little bit. “So, uh, what are we watching?”
“Blockbuster from 2004 or Blockbuster from 2006?” she asked, squinting at the screen.
Raphael groaned; the mid-2000s were not exactly his favorite era of movie making.
“Strike that!” she crowed, still scrolling through the menu. “We’ve got Con Air, people.”
Raph threw a fist in the air. Nicolas Cage movies were, perhaps, his and Nat’s favorite thing on this green earth.
They caught the movie in the middle, but for the next hour, they slurped Chinese food, quoted all the very familiar scenes, and everything felt normal.
So normal, in fact, that Raphael actually felt just a tiny bit disappointed. He got up, scooped them both bowls of mint chocolate chip ice cream and came back to sit down, trying to figure out exactly why he was bummed.
After they’d finished their ice cream, Nat yawned, tossed her bowl on the tray with the rest of the dirty dishes and went to the bathroom.
While she was occupied, Raph brought the dishes to the kitchen and quickly loaded them into the dishwasher, knowing that if he didn’t do it now, they might sit in the sink for a couple days.
He washed his hands with lemony dish soap and then gripped the edges of the sink. He stared out his kitchen window into the black night. Raph lived in the northwest corner of Boulder, on a large park that was pitch black at night. At first he hadn’t really liked it, he’d wanted the more hustly parts of town. But now, he was grateful for the calm he felt looking out at the black world.
He could see his own reflection looking back at him, lit up by the kitchen lights. And a moment later, Natalie’s reflection as well, as she lingered near the back of the kitchen.
He turned to her, leaning his butt against the sink. “You outta here?”
“Yeah,” she said, drawing the word out in a way he took to mean ‘not quite yet’.
Silence extended between them.
Natalie balanced on one foot in the doorway, scratching the back of her leg with the other. It made her pencil skirt stretch around her thighs.
His eyes skittered quickly away from the sight which, upon reflection, probably made it even more obvious that he’d just been looking at her legs.
“So….” she started and his stomach backflipped off the high dive.
“So,” he replied after it was clear she wasn’t going to continue.
“So,” she said again and made both of them laugh nervously.
Raphael leaned forward, scrubbing a hand over his scruffy face. He smelled the lemon dish soap. “This is ridiculous,” he muttered. “Why am I so nervous?”
“I’m nervous, too.”
“Yeah?” He let his hands drop and shoved them in the pockets of his pants.
“Yeah.”
She didn’t look nervous, standing there across the kitchen. He’d seen Nat nervous before. Lots of times. Before band competitions in high school. Before her first day of work as a realtor. Before her first date with Paul.
Raphael backhanded the thought of Stapler Paul clear out of his brain. He did not want to think about Paul right now.
Because right now, he wanted to think about how though Natalie was sucking on her bottom lip, her face looked calm. Meanwhile, a flock of birds had taken up somewhere in Raphael’s gut.
“All right,” she said, stepping forward and making his stomach swoop. “That’s it. I can’t take the tension anymore. Let’s just get it all out in the open.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Natalie had not been lying when she’d said that she couldn’t take the tension anymore. She couldn’t remember the last time that Raphael had intentionally stood so far away from her. He was naturally a crowder. Personal space didn’t mean a whole lot to him. In fact, when Nat looked back on their friendship, she was inundated with physical memories of him falling asleep against her, crushing her into the door of a car when they were forced to double-buckle as kids. There were memories of his octopus-like birthday hugs where she’d have to tickle him senseless to finally be allowed to break free. Memories of him sitting on her lap at a barbecue when there weren’t more seats and basically crushing her bones into dust. Memories of the two of them squeezing onto one playground slide at the same time and getting stuck. Memories of his big feet plopping into her lap during a movie. His big hands taking his own winter cap, warm from his head, and jamming it onto her when it started snowing, wrecking her ponytail.
Raphael was the kind of person who’d sit next to you on the couch and knock his shoulder against yours and not even notice.
But not tonight. Tonight he’d sat on the other end of the couch and stood at the other end of the kitchen, his arms crossed over his chest and an inscrutable look on his face and Nat couldn’t stand it for another second.
She strode forward and held her hands o
ut to him, her palms parallel to one another, about eight inches apart. He grinned as he realized what she was doing. She was initiating ‘slide’, a hand-clapping game they’d learned in elementary school that they’d been particularly good at. In fact, no other pairing of kids could beat Raph and Nat.
Their hands clapped together as they fell into the rhythm of the game and she watched as Raph’s smile grew and the tension seemed to leak from his shoulders.
Good. She’d wanted to remind him that things could feel different but that didn’t mean they weren’t the same old Nat and Raph.
“Weird morning yesterday, huh?” she asked, her eyes on their hands as they made it all the way up to a five count and still climbing.
“Weird is one way to describe it.”
“How would you describe it?”
“Um.” His cheeks went slightly pink, which intrigued her because he almost never blushed. “Tense. But not in a bad way.”
He was referring to sexual tension, then. Which immediately relieved her because she really didn’t want to learn that she’d been the only one to feel it. How lame would that be?
They rounded a seven count and Natalie’s hands were starting to sting, but she didn’t care. Doing the hand clap game gave them both something to look at that wasn’t each other’s faces and she figured that was probably a good thing right now.
“Yeah. I mean,” she said slowly, “it was a lot to process.”
“Very new,” he agreed.
Later, she might laugh at how much they were dancing around the subject without actually addressing it. Dipping their toes in, trying to figure out if the water was nice and hot or frigidly cold.
“Is it crazy?” he asked.
“Are you considering it?” she asked at the exact same second.
They immediately stopped the hand clapping game which meant that their hands were frozen in front of them, palms pressed together, almost as if they were holding hands.
The kitchen had just been filled with the clapping sounds of their game, and there’d been somewhere safe to look. But now silence beat down on them, all the more obvious by the sudden lack of noise, and there was nowhere to look but eyes, eyes, eyes.
Raphael’s celery green eyes had always interested Nat. Because nobody had eyes like Raph, except Seth, of course. But Seth’s gaze was friendly. Raph’s gaze was always kind, but there was something else in it. Some unknown quantity that had kept Nat guessing.
She was still guessing.
“Ugh,” he finally said, taking his hands away from hers and dragging them over his face. “I can’t tell if we’re thinking the same thing.”
She scoffed, putting her hands on her hips.
“Raph, I’ve known you for twenty years. I can practically read your thoughts. And we’re obviously thinking the same fucking thing. So, you tell me, is it crazy?”
His eyes shot to hers.
“I have no idea.”
She needled her bottom lip with her teeth. This thing they were dancing around, there was too much at stake to not talk it all the way through. She needed to get everything out in the open. “Would we ruin our friendship?”
“Never.” His answer was immediate and steady. It wasn’t hasty, it was simply confident. “We could never ruin our friendship. We might, I don’t know, make it awkward for a little while, but you and me, we’re lifers, Nat. Even if we slept together and things got fucked up for, like, a decade, eventually, we’d be friends again.”
It was the first time either of them had actually said it out loud. All the dancing they’d been doing abruptly stopped. Sleeping together. It was as if, by saying those words out loud, Raphael had slammed a door shut on a bunch of ambient noise. And now it was just the two of them in the bare silence, able to really talk without all the noisy distractions.
Sleeping together. The two of them. Nat and Raph. Natalie Chalk and Raphael Durant, doing the dirty. Even though it had been embedded in a sentence filled with other words, the phrase brought up the hairs on Natalie’s arm.
“You think sleeping with me would fuck things up for a decade?” she asked, her voice quiet and electricity mapping a hundred routes over her skin.
“No, that was just an example. I’m just saying that I don’t think we have to worry about losing each other. Not permanently.”
They were quiet for a minute, both of them separately contemplating his words.
“I mean,” she sucked on her bottom lip for a minute, “it kind of makes sense, you know? You’d have somebody to sleep with while you’re off meeting and friending Wifey, whoever she’ll be. And I’d have somebody who I trusted to help me get back on the horse.”
Raphael waggled his eyebrows at her and they both laughed, finally breaking the strange, glass-like tension that had closed over them.
“I’m not referring to you or your man-parts as ‘the horse’, dumbass. It’s a turn of phrase.”
Raphael laughed, but after a minute, went serious again. “Nat, you don’t think there’s a chance of… feelings getting in the way, do you?”
She considered this again, even though she’d spent most of last night considering the same question. And she came up with the same answer now as she had then. “I mean, I’m not a psychic, but don’t you think that if one of us was gonna fall for the other one, it would have already happened sometime in the last twenty years?”
He nodded his head from one side to the other. “I guess.” He looked distinctly uncomfortable. “I’ve never had anything other than friendly feelings for you, Nat. You’ve never…”
“No! Never. Just friendship,” she answered immediately, laughing and obviously putting him at ease. Then, a thought occurred to her and with the same guileless honesty she’d been using with him their entire friendship, she re-answered his question. “Actually, there was one time in college that I had a sex dream about you. But I Googled it and it didn’t mean anything.”
He burst out laughing. “You Googled it?”
She shrugged. “I was freaked out it meant that I was in love with you or something.”
Again, the same way that Raph saying ‘sleep together’ let out some of the air from the tension balloon, the way she casually said the words ‘in love’ further relaxed the room. If they could talk about it without flinching, then it wasn’t a ghostly specter waiting to pounce and ruin their friendship.
“And what did All Powerful Google tell you?”
“That sex dreams rarely mean anything. Unless they’re recurring. And I never had it again.”
Raphael appeared to consider that for a minute. “Was it hot?”
“No comment.”
He laughed again. “That means it was super hot.”
Nat cocked her head to one side. “Actually, that’s something to take into account.”
“Hotness?”
She nodded and boosted herself up onto the kitchen counter. “I mean, what if we try and it’s super awkward and then we’re both too embarrassed to look at each other for the rest of time?”
“Nat, when’s the last time you saw me embarrassed about something?”
“Fine. What if I’m too embarrassed to look at you for the rest of time?”
“What would you have to be embarrassed about?”
“I don’t know, Raph,” she said sarcastically. “Perhaps the fact that I haven’t had sex in over a year and maybe I’m not good at it anymore?”
“It’s like riding a bike!”
“How would you know? Your longest dry spell is, like, a week.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets again, eyeing her, obviously trying to figure out the things that she wasn’t saying out loud. “You’re not self-conscious about your body, are you?”
She sucked her bottom lip. “Everybody is sometimes.”
“Natalie,” he shook his head. “You have nothing to worry about. I assure you, you’re smoking hot.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’ve never seen me fully naked.”
His face squinched
up as he considered her words. “So… what? You have a weird birthmark on your ass?”
Natalie shifted uncomfortably on the counter and Raphael’s eyes widened.
“Really?” he asked after a moment. “You have a birthmark on your ass that you’re self-conscious about?”
She frowned at him. “No.” Then she paused, groaned, and tipped her head back. “It’s not on my ass.”
“Where is it, then?” He looked playful and intrigued and light-hearted and that was pretty much the only thing keeping Natalie from melting down into an embarrassed lump of coal.
She kicked her feet in a circle. “On my chest. It’s a port-wine stain. A big red mark. I’m not embarrassed of it. It’s just that you’ve never seen it before and—”
“Show it to me.”
“No way!” She glared up at him. “It’s on my chest!”
“Nat, if we’re really considering sleeping together, I’m assuming you’re gonna show me your tits at some point.”
“Raph!” she barked out an involuntary laugh.
“What?”
“Just because you’re an Adonis underneath your clothes doesn’t mean that everyone is comfortable stripping down at the drop of a hat.”
“How do you know I’m an Adonis under my clothes? You’ve never seen me naked either.”
“Close enough.”
“You’ve never seen my dick.”
“That’s true,” she agreed, sucking her lip again. “Actually, now that you mention it. What’s your dick like?”
They both burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of the question.
“I mean,” Raph said, tipping his head to one side as he dropped his hands to the button of his jeans, “I could show you…”
“No! Nononono,” Natalie said immediately. “I’m not ready for… that. Just describe it to me.”
“Describe it to you,” he repeated blankly, as if her words didn’t make any sense.
She nodded.
“Okay.” He looked off to the side as if he were searching for vocabulary. “Um. It’s proud? And confident?”
She burst out laughing again. “Are you describing your dick on an emotional level? Raph, I’m talking physically.”