But as I watch Skylar from across the classroom today, I have to take deep breaths not to sweat bullets.
Did the way I kissed her get on her nerves last week?
I glance over at Skylar, who is staring at Professor Gonzalez and pressing her pen cap just slightly into her mouth. I stare hard. Does Sky have some kind of an oral fixation?
Oh boy. I really have to turn off these dirty thoughts that keep rushing through my head.
This is Skylar we’re talking about. My friend. So what if the kiss had fireworks behind it?
So what if her ass pressing into my hips is a recipe for an insta-boner?
That means nothing. Just natural, two humans being human.
Maybe I crossed some line with the cuddling. I thought she laughed off the boners she kept giving me, but who knows?
No, no. That can’t be it. We have the sort of relationship where we have a great line of open communication. She would have just told me outright. Our friendship is as important to her as it is to me.
As I meet her after class, I worry she’s wised up and wants to call off the whole arrangement.
“So, you wanted to talk?” I ask her.
“How much time do you have before baseball practice?” she asks, businesslike.
“I have one hour.”
Her face is a little pink as she looks around. “Can you come back to my place for like thirty minutes?”
“Of course. What’s this about? Everything okay?”
Now my tone is laced with genuine concern. I worry that she might have something personal going on.
She runs a hand down my arm and rests it on top of mine. “It’s about our boundaries during Operation Romper. I’d like to talk about them.”
I was thinking about grabbing a quick bite at the Gizmo coffee shop before practice, but suddenly I’ve lost my appetite. Something in her tone makes my spidey senses tingle. This is serious.
The vibe between Skylar and I feels much different now.
I ignore it, playing it cool.
“I’d love to chat. Let’s go.”
Sitting at her desk chair, Sky puts on a Spotify playlist and scrapes a hand through her hair.
I don’t know if I’m making a mountain of a molehill, but my thoughts are rolling a mile a minute right now as we wait for the hot water to boil in her electric kettle so we can have tea.
Well, technically, we’re drinking yerba maté. With an accent over the second syllable, it’s pronounced ‘Ma-tay.’
It’s a shared tea drink they love in Buenos Aires, where we were studying abroad, and now we’ll both drink it occasionally back here on campus.
People often see us and ask what the hell we’re drinking and we have to explain this cultural import.
It’s maté, a tea drunk in the countries of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, where it is what coffee is to the United States. You drink it in a big gourd where you put the loose leaves of tea and insert a metal straw with a filter, passing it around so everyone gets a sip. And if you’re really curious, you can YouTube ‘how to drink yerba maté.’
Anyway, the thing I like about drinking maté is that it gives your hands, mouth, and eyes something to do while you just sit and chat, without having to rely on video games or watching television—which make it so you’re not really connecting with the person you’re with. But you’re also not just awkwardly sitting there worried about what you’re going to say to said person. As an added bonus, you have to remain within an arm’s length of the people you’re with, in order to pass the gourd.
Skylar fills the gourd with the loose leaves of tea, and I get a fluttery feeling in my stomach just watching her. Her eyes focus on the task she’s doing and I can’t help but think about how beautiful she looks right now.
The thing about Sky is that I almost never see her dress up. She’s a true hipster, who prefers loose but stylish clothing she mostly gets from the secondhand store, I think.
I still remember quite vividly the night we went skinny dipping under the full moon when we were in Argentina, on a field trip with the study abroad program to Bariloche, a coastal town in Southern Argentina. A few of us on the program had had a few beers and were going for a late night walk along the Atlantic Ocean when someone said, ‘let’s go skinny dipping!’
So we did. I was the first in the water naked, and the first out. Seeing Skylar that night, under the moon and the stars, I was blown away by the gorgeous body she’d been hiding ever since I met her. It was a moonlit, drunken night, so I didn’t get as good of a view as maybe I would have liked.
Right now, she’s got on a pleated skirt that goes well past her knees and a black Mac Miller t-shirt. Her beauty is so understated all the time, sometimes it makes me wonder if she’s actually trying not to look pretty.
“Here you go,” she says, handing me the maté gourd. I take a drink of the sweet tea—she added sweetener—and hand it back to her so she can pour some for herself.
“So, I’m here. Let’s chat. What’s going on, Sky?”
“Like I said, boundaries.”
“Look, if this is about the kiss, I wanted to discuss it beforehand, but Jennifer was starting to get suspicious of us.”
“It is about the kiss. Kind of.”
I lean in. “Oh? What about it?” I try to play it off like I’ve not been replaying that kiss—and the way her body felt when I touched her—over and over this week.
“We crossed a line, and it got me thinking,” she says.
“You’re mad about the kiss? Shit, I’m sorry. I should have planned this out better. I know we talked about open communication throughout this and we should’ve broached this earlier. But we needed to do something drastic. You’re the one who pointed out Jennifer’s going to have a bloodhound nose during Operation Romper.”
Skylar continues calmly, “Luke, I’m not mad.”
She hands me the maté and I sip it nervously. “Oh. You’re not? So what’s up?”
“I was thinking. We’re doing this crazy fake relationship thing for the next few months. So we can’t date anyone else because of Jennifer and her fucking bloodhound nose, right?”
“Right. I mean, I’m not going to see anyone while we’re fake dating. Were you planning on it?”
“No, of course not.” She bites her lower lip and brings her blue eyes to mine. “That kiss really got to me, though. It reminded me what I’ve been missing.”
“Fuck, you want to call it off, don’t you?” I run my hand over my face and through my hair. Did I cross the line? Did she not like it? Is our friendship in jeopardy?
My stomach feels like I’m digesting a brick, and I clench my fists as I look over at Skylar’s whiteboard. She’s erased our original brainstorming session where we came up with Operation Romper, except for one part. I stare at the circled phrase at the bottom, which still holds true. Save Ryan’s Life.
“I’m sad, but I get it,” I continue. “You’re sacrificing half of your senior year just to follow through with this insane plan which may or may not work. And you want to be able to just date around. Makes sense.”
“No, I’m not backing out,” she says and chews on her lower lip. “Far from it.”