“She’s perpetually an orphan,” you tell me.

“But, you don’t have family around either, Beck,” I try.

“I know,” you say and you pick at a popover. “But I left home. It’s natural. Her family left her. It’s sick. They literally all moved to San Francisco the second we graduated.”

I’m not surprised and you move on to bitching about Blythe and I listen and I nod and I listen and I nod and I eat a fucking popover and you go in the bathroom and e-mail Peach:

I just have to say, Joe is an insanely good listener. Don’t lose faith in people!

Peach writes back a lot, suspiciously fast:

That’s so sweet! Don’t be hard on him, Beck. He sounds like he has potential. I was telling my yoga teacher about your Joseph and she compared him to Good Will Hunting. Is he any good at math? Anyway have fun at lunch! I hope you took him somewhere nice! You are a doll for checking in and please rest assured, my faith in humanity is completely restored. I love being single. We are too young to be tied down, for sure. Have fun with Joseph! I bet he’s learning so much from you and that’s awesome!

You come back to the table and ask me if I liked math when I was little. I tell you no and when I ask you why you are asking me about math, you shake it off and go back to bitching about Blythe. We get more coffee and I’d like this all so much more if it was happening after we sealed the deal. I can’t kiss you good-bye in the middle of the day and what if this is your way of putting me in the friend zone? Is there a friend zone or is that a myth? Does the smart chick end up with Good Will Hunting? I can’t remember.

When we part ways outside of Sarabeth’s, we hug like cousins and you’re not as close to me as you were the night we almost built the bed together.

“This was fun,” you say.

“What are you up to later?”

“Girls’ night.”

“But you had cupcakes with the girls last night.”

You caught me and you’re cute. “Joe, have you been stalking my Twitter?”

“A little,” I say and maybe I could kiss you. It is kind of cloudy, like fall in Hannah.

“Well, the thing is, last night was Peach night and tonight is Lynn and Chana night.”

“Maybe tomorrow night?” I say and begging you is the opposite of kissing you. I should have let it go.

“I really have to write tomorrow night, but we could get together earlier. Lunch?”

I agree to lunch and you’re gone and it’s a long walk to the shop and I’d like to hate Tucker Max and Maxim magazine and Tom Cruise’s character in Magnolia and think that women aren’t as simple as they’d all have you believe. But right now, I almost have to steal a move from the Frank T.J. Mackey playbook Seduce and Destroy because I am screwing up. Not fucking you that night I built your bed, not, at the very least, trying to fuck you was clearly a mistake. I am screwing this up, and it’s the greatest mistake of my adult life. I didn’t even kiss you after I listened to you overanalyze your life for five hours. I suck, royally, and you might think I’m putting you in the friend zone.

And it’s the worst kind of domino effect because we do have lunch the next day at some new place you say “is supposed to be as yummy as Sarabeth’s.” Again I don’t kiss you afterward and what do you want the day after that? You want brunch. What’s the only thing more sexless than lunch? Brunch, a meal invented by rich white chicks to rationalize day drinking and bingeing on French toast. And you don’t even drink when we get brunch and pretty soon we’re going to places where they don’t even have waiters. You’re into this fucking deli where you stand in line with nine-to-fivers who read Stephen King on their iPads while they wait for their turn to order their sexless green salads, fucking beans and dressings and scallions and onions (Red or white? Grilled or raw?), for fuck’s sake people, it’s a SALAD. Stop overthinking it.

You’re not on the outs with Peach but you’re not under her spell the way you were and I get it now that you like her because she’s obsessed with you. Lynn and Chana love you, but they don’t think your shit smells like roses. You like to be rocked and lullabied and sedated and our conversations about your short stories and your classmates always end with me telling you how special you are, how talented, how jealous they all are, how clearly better than them you are and you get taller as the clear disposable plastic salad bowl gets emptier and I mean it when I say it and you’re lucky that what you want to hear is what I actually think:

“Beck, you’re really talented. If you weren’t they’d all just shrug.”

“Sometimes the best writers get hated before they get loved. Look at Nabokov.”

“I’m not competing with you, so I’m comfortable telling you I think you got it.”

And you do. When I lie on my couch listening to you go on about Blythe, I feel like I’m living inside of you, through you. I know what it’s like to be you and you’re right. Blythe does hate you. But hate suits you, inspires you. You rage, “She’s a little ball of anger and antidepressants who doesn’t speak to her mother, her sister, her father, his wife, or her roommate or her fucking cat or any of the many guys she fucked last week.” You break, you breathe. “I mean, Blythe calls herself a performance artist—a prostitute is what we call that in the real world. She has a webcam service that she calls art.”

“In other words she’s a ho.”

“Thank you, Joe.”

“You’re welcome, Beck.”

You go on. “And she hates me for being from Nantucket and liking poetry.”

“So fuck her, then.”

I try to help you move on, but you don’t know why she hates you and it’s all you want to talk about.

Every.

Fucking.

Night.

And it would be easier if these talks were happening on a park bench or your stoop or your sofa or your bed that I assembled but they’re happening over the phone. And I can’t smell you over the phone and I feel like a 1-900-Build-Me-Up hotline you call to feel good about yourself. You don’t treat me like I’m your guy; you go to drinks with people from school and call me after the drinks and you don’t act like there’s anything weird about the fact that you didn’t invite me to go along. I’m your phone bitch and I don’t like it. You don’t want to know about my day. You always ask me in the polite obligatory way.

“So how was the shop?”

“You know, shop’s the shop. It was okay.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

And then I wait for you to want to know more about me and my day but I always cave and say, “So about you? How was school?”

But I can’t do it anymore. It’s time to save us and it’s my job to keep us afloat.

“Hey, Beck.”

“Yeah?”

“Let’s go out?”

“Oh, I’m in my pajamas and I have class.”

“No, no. Let me take you out next week.”

There’s a pause and you forgot how much you want to fuck me and you’re trying to live by Peach Laws: no guys, just stories, but you do want me or you would have made an excuse by now.

“Well, when did you want to get together?”

“Friday night,” I say. “No parties. I want to take you out.”

I can hear you smiling somehow and you say yes and then you say yes again and it’s okay for me to tell you that I read your story “Dust Bunnies” about the summer you worked as a maid. It’s okay for me to tell you my favorite parts—of course I liked it when the daddy of the house tried to get with you in the laundry room.

“Oh, you know that’s not me in the story.”

“But you told me you worked as a maid one summer.”

“True, but I didn’t throw myself at the men in the house,” you say and no wonder Blythe resents you. You are not a stalker and Benji will always be wrong, but you do covet, innocently, only because you’re not comfortable in your skin, not yet, but I’m going to help you. You continue, “Joe, I can’t say it enough, the level to which I would never have gotten myself into that situation. It’s fiction.”