Funny Story

WHEN PETER REACHES us, there are two full seconds of silence, as if all three of us expect someone else to speak first.

“Hi,” Peter says finally.

“Hello,” I say.

Miles stays silent. Probably for the best. I think he’s too innately friendly to give Peter the chilly reception he deserves.

After a beat, Peter glances toward the propped-open shop doors, like he’s hoping someone might call out for him, or the building might spontaneously burst into flames and give him something other than the weather to remark on.

We so easily could’ve avoided each other, and it irritates me that he instead decided to march up to us.

But of course he wouldn’t want to seem rude.

“Good day for picking some lavender,” he offers.

Miles pipes up with: “Yeah.”

Peter ignores him. “I was wondering if we could talk for a second, Daphne.”

Miles leans into me protectively, a reminder that I don’t have to say yes; we can just book it to the truck and pretend this never happened. Go back to our apartment and weep-drink to some Celine Dion.

“I’ll meet you at the car?” I murmur to him.

Miles holds my gaze for a moment before nodding. He doesn’t say anything else to Peter, just saunters back to the truck.

Another awkward beat of silence. I pinch the inside of my palm to keep myself from breaking it.

“So,” Peter says. “How are you?”

I wonder if my jaw is hanging to my collarbones. “Seriously?”

Peter sniffs, glances over his shoulder toward the rusty truck and the man leaned against it. “Look,” he says, voice gentling as he faces me. “I know how badly I hurt you. I know what I did was terrible—”

A laugh jumps out of me. “Wow, what an immense comfort to me.”

I expect him to go haughty, superior, like he did during the breakup. To his credit, he doesn’t.

His brow creases, the corners of his full lips twisting downward. “I deserve that, and whatever else you’re not saying. I get that. But it doesn’t change the fact that I care about you.”

I wish I could laugh again, but it feels like a sheet of ice is spreading over my organs, making any movement impossible.

“And I know how much this all must suck for you,” he says. “Being here, alone.”

“I’m not alone,” I say.

“I know,” he says. “That’s what I’m saying. It might seem easier to just . . . be with someone. But you deserve better than that.”

I’m back to gawping.

“Look, all I’m saying is, be careful,” he says. “That guy’s a mess, and I don’t want to see him drag you down.”

As if there’s so much lower for me to go.

“Do you know why he moved here?” he says. “Do you know his whole family doesn’t even talk to him? That guy is such a loser, Daphne. You can do way better.”

I’m caught off guard by that. A tiny bit of doubt sneaks in. Followed quickly by a wave of angry protectiveness.

Of course there’s a ton I don’t know about Miles. We’ve only been roommates for two months, friends for less than that. He doesn’t owe me his life story or unfiltered truth.

But Peter—Peter asked me to marry him.

Asked me to give up my whole life and glom on to his.

Asked me to accept his beautiful, straight, female best friend at face value because there was unequivocally nothing going on there, and I always said yes to everything he asked, because I trusted him. I decided to trust him. Promised to. A personal vow, taken long before our wedding.

And now he’s looking at me, in this tortured mix of worry and hope, like he’s thinking, I did it! I’ve gotten through to her! I’ve saved her from ruin!

“You know what, Peter,” I say, “thank you for pulling me aside today.”

His face brightens, relief flooding his features.

“It’s always nice to be reminded that your ex really was as big of an asshat as you remember him being.”

With that, I turn and power walk across the brilliantly sunlit parking lot to the guy slouched against the truck, the driver’s-side door hanging open, waiting for him.

“You okay?” Miles asks, right as I pitch myself into his arms, wrapping mine around his neck. His brows shoot up in amused surprise.

“Is he looking?” I whisper.

Miles nods.

“Can I kiss you?”

A half-amused, half-scandalized smile overtakes his face. “Okay.”

So I lean into him and lift my chin, and he ducks his forehead, and we have one of the top five worst kisses of my life, junior high included.

The problem is, I go in way too hot, whereas he’s aiming for a chaste teenage-actors-doing-a-high-school-play kind of thing, so basically I end up biting his entire mouth, which makes him laugh into mine, which in turn makes me laugh, only by then, he’s adjusted his approach to match mine, and the laugh dies in the back of my throat as he grips my hip in one hand, my jaw in the other, and kisses me for real.

Rough, impatient, but not clumsy.

His mouth is still cool from the lemonade, his breath tinged with hints of lavender, and his hand slides around to the small of my back, fisting into my shirt. His other moves into my hair as he pulls me tight against him, my spine curving up until we’re flush with each other.

His tongue slips into my mouth, experimentally, and then a little deeper, tangling with mine. A thrill shoots down the front of my rib cage as he turns us one hundred and eighty degrees, backing me into the side of the driver’s seat, settling his hips in against mine.

I’ve read interviews with actors, about how filming sex scenes isn’t sexy, how the performance of it is mechanical. A little awkward, but overall professional.

But that’s not what’s happening to me. What’s happening is biological, not cursory.

My nipples are tightening against his chest, and heat is sinking lower in my stomach until it drops between my thighs, and when I feel him hardening against me, the shock of it almost instantly gives way to a frazzled, confusing want.

I don’t remember moving my hands into his hair, but I feel it slip between my fingers, hear a small, needy sound in my throat at the brush of his tongue over my bottom lip.

He draws back slowly, the kiss settling like the tail end of a fast-moving storm, a tapering off rather than an abrupt stop.

My breath is shallow, and I can feel his heart racing.

“How was that?” he asks quietly.

“Yeah,” I manage. “Good.”

“Is he still looking?” Miles asks.

Right. Peter.

Since Miles turned us around, I’m the one facing the shop and its adjoining patio.

Peter’s not watching. I’m not sure Peter’s even still here.

He’s either gone inside the store or gotten in his car and driven away. Without craning my neck to scan the parking lot conspicuously, I can’t be sure which.

Heat blazes up my throat to my forehead. “No.”

Miles’s fingers graze clear of my jaw, his other hand relaxing against my back. “Should we head out?” he asks.

“Yep!” I squeak, and squeeze out from between him and the truck. It’s a good thing we took his car: I’m in no condition to drive.

WE RINSE THE cherries and eat them while we grill the asparagus to mix into a massive salad for dinner.

Neither of us broaches the kiss, and I genuinely can’t tell whether he’s had a single thought about it since we left the lavender farm. Every time I zone out, though, a snippet replays in my mind, my skin warming from the memory.

On the one hand, it feels like maybe I just had a very vivid sex dream about him and need to act normal until a salacious dream about, like, Santa Claus overshadows it.

On the other hand, I’m positive it really happened, because if I’d had to imagine what kissing Miles would be like, it would’ve been sweet and playful and fun—maybe just a little bit sloppy. Because he’s sweet, playful, fun, and a little bit sloppy.

But that’s not at all what it was like.

Of course, maybe if the kiss had happened under less vengeful circumstances, it would’ve been different. Maybe that’s just how he kisses when he’s recently been confronted by the man his girlfriend left him for. With a vengeance.

“You okay?” he asks.

I look up from the cucumber and tomato I’ve been chopping on autopilot. “Yep!”

He frowns, his hips sinking back against the counter. “You want to talk about it?”

My head snaps back up.

“Whatever he said to upset you,” Miles clarifies.

I carry the cutting board to the salad bowl and swipe the contents into it. “He was just being shitty.”

Miles turns back to the countertop grill and tongs the asparagus onto their other sides. “It’s fine if you don’t want to tell me.”

After several seconds, I say, “You were right that he’s still jealous. He really can’t stand the fact that anyone might like you. Thinks it’s, like, a direct condemnation of his character. And you know what? Maybe it is.”

Miles’s head cocks on a knowing smirk. “It’s not about me. It’s you. He wants you both. He’s with Petra, but he still wants you to be in love with him.”

“Right, because if I’m into someone who’s totally different than him, it’s a blow to his ego.” I backtrack immediately. “You know, if he thinks I’m dating someone who’s super different from him.”

Miles shakes his head. “I don’t think that’s it. He took a big leap, and now that the initial high is wearing off, he’s wondering if he did the right thing. And then seeing you with someone else reminds him what it was like to be with you.”

I catch myself worrying at my lower lip. When his gaze drops toward the motion, I stop. “He said something about you,” I blurt.

Instantly wish I could take it back.

Miles’s brow rises.

“He was just being shitty,” I repeat. “And it made me mad. And that’s why . . .”

He folds his arms, his face going neutral. His face is very rarely neutral. “What’d he say?”

There’s a lump in my throat. “First of all, keep in mind you don’t owe me any kind of explanation.”

“Daphne,” he says, like, Cut to the chase.

“He said your family doesn’t talk to you.”

The reaction is instantaneous and unsubtle. A flare of shock. Hurt.

He turns, messes with the asparagus again.

“He was acting like an asshole,” I say.

He nods without facing me, his shoulders tight, so unlike his usual lax and languid self.

I forge on: “Like I said, you don’t owe me any explanation. He just brought it up to be a jerk, and it’s none of my business.”

He nods, still tense.

Shit. I played right into Peter’s hands. He found a way to hurt Miles from afar, for having the audacity to love Peter’s best friend, and then, allegedly, his ex.

I step up behind Miles and set my hands on his shoulders, gently easing them down. He lets out a deep, tired exhale. I resist an urge to push my face into the gap between his shoulder blades.

“Miles?” I say.

He looks over his shoulder at me, the light catching the streaks of dark brown in his eyes, lightening them to a maple-syrup amber.

“I’m sorry for saying anything,” I say.

“Nah, it’s fine.”

He turns toward me, my hands skating over his back, coming to rest on his shoulders. He catches my wrists in light, loose circles, his gaze falling. “Sorry, I’m . . .” He takes a breath. “I guess I’m surprised Petra told him that. I just . . . I barely even talked about that stuff with her.”

I press my palms against his trapezius muscles, trying to release the tension from them. His thumbs move back and forth on the sides of my wrists, restless. I get the sense he’s trying to soothe and distract himself. It’s doing the opposite to me.

“I’m sorry,” I say again.

His head jerks slightly to one side. “It’s true. I don’t really have a relationship with my parents. It is what it is, and I can’t change it. But so much of life’s good. What’s the point of dwelling on the shit that’s not?”

“Wow. I couldn’t relate less,” I tease gently. “I’m a born complainer.”

He smiles, just a bit. “You are not.”

“Are you kidding?” I say. “My mom and I used to play this game we called Whiny Babies. We’d just take turns complaining about smaller and stupider things until we ran out. Like, the girl I sat next to in English lit chewed her pencil really loudly. Whoever had the smallest complaint got to choose dinner.”

The corner of his mouth curls. “Sounds like a blast.”

“It was, actually,” I say. “Sometimes complaining about stuff, just having someone to empathize with you, takes the sting out of it.”

“There’s no sting,” Miles says. “It’s fine. I’ve got my sister. That’s my family.”

“I guess all families are complicated, one way or another.” I think of my empty driveway, of standing barefoot on the floor vent, letting the heat billow through my pajamas as I watched the window and waited. To be worth it, to be chosen.

The corner of Miles’s mouth hitches. “Petra’s was basically a Norman Rockwell painting.”

I sigh. “Yeah, Peter’s too.”

Miles looks up at me from under a slightly furrowed brow, his thumbs still gliding back and forth along my wrists. “Were you close?” he asks. “With Peter’s parents.”

My chest pinches. “Sort of. I mean, maybe not close. But they were always really nice. His mom came wedding dress shopping with me and my mom. And she got a monogrammed Christmas stocking made for me to match his and his brother’s. They’re the kind of family with a million traditions. Certain plates and specific desserts for each of their birthdays. Every single thing in their house was some kind of heirloom with some great story, and he and his brother, Ben, would argue over who’d inherit what someday, but in this jokey way. The whole extended family always comes here for New Year’s Eve and they do a white elephant gift exchange, and it’s all very . . . I don’t know. I just really wanted . . .”

“To be a part of it?” Miles guesses.

I nod.

“Yeah,” he says.

I hadn’t heard anything from any of Peter’s local friends after the breakup, not even Scott. But both his mom and his brother’s girlfriend, Kiki, sent messages in those first couple weeks. Kiki told me to hit her up if I were ever in Grand Rapids, and I knew she meant it.

Mrs. Collins’s message, however, had only read: thinking of you, with a little purple heart beside it.

“For what it’s worth,” I say, “what Peter said—it sounded like he didn’t really know what he was talking about. Like he got the CliffsNotes from Petra and made the rest up. I doubt she was harping on you.”

“Yeah, I know,” he says. “She wouldn’t.”

There’s a levity to his voice, but he looks uncommonly distant, halfway here with me and halfway deep inside his skull.

It’s surprising, how powerful the urge to comfort him is, how comfortable it feels to let myself lean against him in one of only a handful of hugs to pass between us in the months we’ve lived together.

His hands slide down my arms to wrap across my back. We stand there for several seconds, tangled up together.

“Want to go egg his car?” I mumble into his chest.

“Seems like a waste of good eggs,” he says.

“I agree,” I say. “I just wish my gynecologist told me that sooner.”

I’m joking, but Miles draws back enough to peer into my face. “You’d be a great mom.”

It’s the kind of thing everyone says to their friends, but I believe him when he says it, and I’m strangely touched. “What about you? You want kids?”

“I wouldn’t know the first thing about being a dad.” He smiles faintly, tucking my hair behind my ear. It makes me feel like a two-liter bottle of soda flipped upside down, all the bubbles suddenly rushing in the opposite direction. “Hey, tell me something.”

“What?” I ask.

“Something about you,” he says. “That has nothing to do with him.”

“Well.” I laugh. “I guess all you need to know is how blank my mind just went. That’s how sure I am about ‘who I am’ these days.”

“What about your family,” he says. “Any siblings?”

“None that I know of,” I say.

His head tilts.

“My dad’s had a lot of girlfriends over the years,” I say. “I wouldn’t be that surprised if I’ve got a few half siblings floating around.”

“Neither of your parents ever remarried?” he asks.

“My mom’s never even dated since my dad,” I say.

“Too brokenhearted?” he asks, which makes me actually laugh.

“Too busy. When I was a kid, she worked a lot to make ends meet, and she always said she’d rather spend her free time with me. I figured once I went to college, she’d give it a try. Instead she got really into CrossFit and made a ton of friends. She’s always basically either exercising with a lady named Pam or taking art classes with a woman named Jan, or drinking smoothies with both of them. She’s really happy, though. That’s what matters.”

Even as I say it, I feel a pang. I know she’s meant it every time she’s told me I could come stay with her, move into her tiny studio. But for the first time since I can remember, she actually has a full life, beyond just taking care of me.

The week Peter dumped me, it took a two-hour phone call to convince her to not cancel the five-day “backpacking journey” she had scheduled with Pam, to come nurse my broken heart. She’d spent too much of her life dropping everything for me, knowing it all fell to her.

I could just as easily weep in her arms at the end of the summer, during my scheduled post–Read-a-thon visit.

“CrossFit,” Miles says thoughtfully. “That explains it.”

“What could that possibly explain?” I ask.

“The screams and clanking metal I hear from the other room when you’re on speakerphone.”

“Oh, no,” I say, “that’s unrelated.”

“I don’t want any more information,” he plays along. “I feel totally uncurious.”

“My regularly scheduled calls with Christian Grey are completely mundane.”

His brows pinch. “Who?”

“It’s from a book,” I say. “Never mind.”

“Ah,” he says. “Not a big reader.”

“I know that’s a possibility,” I say, “and yet I truly cannot fathom it.”

“What do you like about it,” he says.

“Everything,” I say.

His mouth curls. “Fascinating.”

“I like that it feels like I can live as many lives as I want,” I say.

“What’s wrong with this one?”

At my pointed expression, he snorts a laugh. “Okay. But we’re more than just what happened in April. Let’s focus on the other stuff.”

“Like?”

“How did it start?” he asks. “The library thing.”

I cast my mind back, to before grad school, before undergrad even, all the way to the first moment I remember loving a story. Feeling like I was living it. Being, even as a child, bowled over by how something imaginary could become real, could wring every emotion from me or make me homesick for places I’d never been.

“Narnia,” I tell him.

“Now, that one I’ve heard of,” he says.

“Ever since Mr. Tumnus showed up at that snowy lamppost, this world was never going to quite cut it for me.”

“Who’s Mr. Tumnus?” he asks.

“I thought you’d read it!” I cry.

“No, I’ve heard of it,” he corrects me. “As a kid, I never read for fun. I’m dyslexic, and it took too long.”

“What about audiobooks?” I say.

“Does that count?” he asks.

“Of course it counts,” I say.

His eyes narrow. “Are you sure?”

“I’m a librarian,” I say. “If anyone gets to decide whether it counts or not, it’s me.”

His smile parts, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

For a second, we’re just standing there, a tiny bit too close. Or maybe it’s a totally normal amount of space, but the kiss is suddenly buzzing through me, replaying again and again.

His hands sliding around me. Lemon and lavender on his tongue. Our spines curving together. Him going hard. I’m fairly certain I can see it replaying in his eyes too.

“Shit!” He flinches away from me. “The asparagus!” He tries to yank one smoking stalk off the grill but jerks his hand back with a hiss, fumbling for the tongs before his second attempt to move them to the plate.

Meanwhile, I’m standing there, waiting for the fizz to settle.