How to Date the Guy You Hate by Julie Kriss Page 0,63

wedding, and I was at Zoot Bar, leaning against the bar, staring fruitlessly at my phone. My phone with the number that Charlotte no longer had. “I do not have woman problems,” I said.

“Yes, you do.” Edie was pulling glasses from the dishwasher and lining them up. “You’ve been in a mood ever since you got back from that trip.”

I frowned at her. “What mood?”

“A quiet one. Did the cute girl dump you?”

“Not exactly,” I said, before I remembered I wasn’t admitting there was a cute girl. “Things have just been complicated. I think.”

“What does that mean?”

I wished to fuck I knew. Ever since we’d come back from Cape Cod, things had been weird between Megan and me. We’d talked a few times. Texted. Hung out once, when we watched an X-Men movie on her couch. But she’d dialed back, keeping something behind her fences, and so had I. I felt fucked up and a little guarded around her, as if I needed to take things slower. And she seemed to agree.

She didn’t seem to be mad anymore over what had happened at Cape Cod. We didn’t talk about it. We didn’t talk about the sex, or the fighting, or the feelings. We didn’t talk about her asshole relatives—none of whom had contacted her since the wedding—or the way we had almost self-destructed. There just didn’t seem any point.

But we did talk. About what happened in our days. About the fact that she was closer to her father than before, because she had a new appreciation of how he’d raised her. About my going back to school. About her health stuff, and the test results she didn’t have yet. About everything and nothing.

It was weird, and yet it wasn’t.

It felt a little bit like we were friends.

Except I’d had female friends before. I liked women and found them easy to talk to—I grew up with a sister and a single mother, after all. I was talking to a female friend right this minute. And as smart and sexy as Edie was, I had no desire to watch her every second we were together, no need to make her laugh and kiss her senseless and pull her clothes off and make her come until she couldn’t breathe, all at the same time.

I felt all of that with Megan. But we weren’t having sex.

So, friends. But not friends.

As usual, Megan and I were doing things backwards. We were now doing the slightly awkward friends-not friends thing after the breakup and the arguing and the sex and the most intense experience I’d ever had with another person, followed by rejection. It was all out of order, and we still didn’t know what we were doing. It was still making me crazy.

Her words from that day still stung. Okay, fine, it had hurt. Maybe more than I’d realized. I felt strangely bruised—not just my ego, but everything. I hadn’t had a plan going into that crazy wedding, but it had seemed for a few short days, at least to me, like something could happen. Something good. Something that could even work.

But maybe, after four years with Charlotte, I didn’t know what that looked like. Or how to navigate it without fucking up. I did know that I didn’t feel like being used for sex anymore. It had been fun, and I’d agreed to it, but after that day in her bedroom it didn’t seem right somehow, no matter how my dick disagreed. I was still trying to figure out the fact that in a dispute between my dick and my brain, my brain had actually won. That had never happened before.

I’d kissed Megan that night on her couch, though, after we watched a movie. My dick still had that much say.

“You know,” Edie said, “you haven’t kicked anyone’s ass since the trip.”

I shrugged. The bar was filling up, and I could see Shark making his way toward me, probably to send me back to Puke Patrol. “I’ve been tired.” Tired, and not really angry anymore.

“I thought the bank fired you,” Edie said, glancing at a guy who was motioning to her for a drink and looking away again. Edie didn’t take any shit.

“They did,” I said. “I’m doing other stuff during the day.”

“Like what?”

“Shouldn’t you get that guy a drink?”

She gave me a knowing look. “Fine,” she said. “Just call your cute girl, okay? Then go to her place and bang her senseless. Your celibate moping is cute, but it’s making me sad.”

She moved