MORE THAN FRIENDS

One

Xavier

At what point do you decide that you’re no longer friends with someone? It’s something that I’ve always wondered about. It’s something I don’t have the answer to… yet. Might have to f**k around and find out.

I welcome the inevitable high from the nicotine rush. The gentle hum of warmth travels through my throat and then successively to my lungs. It’s not air that they take in, but it’s soothing nonetheless, satisfying in a way, as if I was being enveloped nice and snug by a warm blanket of smoke. Maybe the cigarettes help and maybe they don’t. They held a significant place between my lips still. The feeling of lightheadedness seeps into my nerves, and it doesn’t really help that I’d been drinking from the very moment I’d arrived.. The haziness clouds my mind from making any rational decisions or saying anything that actually makes sense at all.

I have a lot on my mind right now. Multiple assignments due, group projects, work, a persistent ex girlfriend… and Aaliyah doesn’t make it any easier for me at all. Suffering from heartbreak, hurting from fresh wounds, she wanted to… no, needed to forget. Or at least try to. Now she isn’t one to bawl her eyes out, but she will party and dance the night away with other drunk college boys and get wasted; my only task being lurking in the vicinity of the party and getting a passed out Aaliyah home safely because I’m supposed to, right? However, it always ends up quite differently than originally planned.

I’m not a fan of parties, much less loud ones. If there’s any reason I’m here it’s because Aaliyah had dragged me here and I, in return, dragged Adrian so that I wouldn’t be pathetically alone by myself sulking in some pathetic corner. Besides, he owes me.

“And just like that, we’re even.”

If there’s anything I regret about bringing Adrian along as my ‘plus one’, and I never regret my decisions… ever… it’s that he can’t for the life of me stop nagging me. He’d chase me to the ends of the earth if he needed to. I’m not a chainsmoker by any means; only when I want to feel a sense of belonging in my own company, but surely my good friend Adrian hadn’t read the signs.

“Are you okay with it?”

Pensively, I take a long drag from my cigarette, then release the translucent whirls of smoke through partially parted lips, much to Adrian’s disgust, of course.

‘Am I okay with it?’

Of course not.

He’s a good friend… my best friend, but he needs to stop being so nosy sometimes, even though… even though he means well, sometimes it’s a little…

“Okay with what?”

Nothing wrong with playing a little dumb sometimes. I shrug, stubbing the cigarette butt out with the sole of my shoe. The embers die out eventually.

“Aaliyah.”

‘I know, you dumbass.’

“Yeah? What about her?”

Although I feigned indifference, Adrian knew full well that my attention hadn’t strayed away from him or the topic at hand and, because of that reason, I’d already formulated ahead what he was about to say to me, silently stringing the words together in my head. Of course, my lips never did practice discretion or what else would explain Adrian’s creased brows, foul scowl and frustration? I was thinking out loud, through my lips, apparently. By that point, he already knew that the conversation had died. His countenance scrunches up in utter distaste when I pull out another cigarette and proceed to light it up. I never can converse about serious matters— or even those of the least importance, without nursing a drink in hand or without a cigarette tucked in between my fingers, so he lets me be and bids me farewell by giving me a friendly pat on the back and walking out of the balcony. There was really nothing but fresh air there, and he probably couldn’t see why he should continue to keep me company any longer and by risking his health also… I’d assumed.

“Fine, I’m talking to her.” I said finally, as if obliged to do so— to put his mind at ease, rather, to which he acknowledged with a wave.

For now, I’m simply relieved that I’d gotten that i***t to shut up at the very least, even though it was only because he’d willingly departed, owing to not wanting to contract passive cancer from inhaling secondhand smoke., but I don’t want to think about it either. With Aaliyah in question, I’ve been more passive-aggressive than anything. And just like that, I’m alone by myself again in my very own cloud of smoke, while I tend to the nth cigarette of the night that was still young— and wild, for good measure, veiled from reality, but for how much longer?

It’s no secret that I jinx myself often.

Just when I was done being a little more affectionate than I should have been to my darling cigarette, I’d been driven up against the wall, with someone else’s index pressed against my lips as if they didn’t want me to make a single sound. It was dark, and I couldn’t make out who it was, but this perfume wafting up to my nostrils… smelled familiar.

“Shhh…” She shushed me.

‘She?’

“Rosie?”

It was a wild breathless guess… well, not really—

She simply chuckled, and I was too much of an i***t to show any form of resistance whatsoever, giving her the green light to place a kiss on my cheek, which she did, and do whatever else it was that she wanted to do. Her plush red lips lingered on the flush of my apple too long to be considered casual. The flat of her palm rested on my torso, as she felt my toned abdomen beneath the thin fabric of the shirt that I was wearing. She traced the taut lines ever curiously with her fingertips, fumbling even with the buttons along the trail that her fingertips descended on. I exhaled slowly, my chest rose and dropped erratically. I didn’t want her to be aware of how f*****g hard my heart was beating against my ribcage.

It took a while for me to fully grasp the predicament that I’d found myself caught in.

“Took you long enough.”

My vision blurred, my arms were clasped around Rosie’s petite waist, they moved on their own accord even though the alcohol hadn’t sunken in yet, not that I was ever affected by it to begin with. I’d like to think that I've had too much to drink, but I don't… well, not ‘enough’ to make me drunk off my ass anyway. She seemed oddly calm and it made me anxious. Her giggles are the only thing that my mind can register, ringing in my ears as though I were hallucinating. It’s the stress, I just know it is, but she seems too real to be a figment of what my tired mind can weave.

Perhaps I’ve missed her.

I want to think of this encounter as nothing more than a coincidence, but my actions betrayed me.

I drew her in impossibly closer and by the looks of it she didn’t seem to mind it in the slightest. After all, it was her lips that moved over mine first, brushing lightly over my quivering mouth.

‘You’re not thinking straight…. Let her go… let her go…’

But I can’t seem to be able to.

“Ro…sie…” I mumbled against her lips, tentatively moving my own against her push pair.

“Mmm… I missed you…”

“You do?”

How is it that I’d managed to turn every other girl down that evening, but I simply could not bring myself to push Rosie away. My heart ached with longing. I fought the urge to give in but watched my restraints crumble away the longer that she stayed in my arms. I missed her just as much. I was just afraid to admit to it. Or maybe I was touch starved. I was in so much denial even with her in my arms. Was I this weak? Come on, Xavier, you’re better than that. What would she think? What my friends think? What would Aaliyah think?

“Xavier?”

Aaliyah… it’s Aaliyah. She’s by the door… I could tell from where I was.

“Xavier…?” Aaliyah calls out to me again, sweetly. And my arms that were wound around Rosie’s waist only moments ago loosened until they dropped to my sides. Perhaps I had seemed so desperately touch starved and yet so awfully helpless at the same time that Aaliyah had to come to my aid. Whether or not I was relieved. I couldn’t tell. Reluctantly, Rosie pulls away but not before she whispers a little something into my ear, leaving me thoroughly flustered. "Call me." she said. "I miss you… I need you, Xavier… I’ve been so lonely these days… please?"

A smirk paints the curves of Aaliyah’s lips after Rosie had left us to ourselves and I almost tell her to shut it out of impulse. Almost.