isn’t that sad, is it?” he asks, leaning back on his elbows. His sweater rides up the slightest bit, showing off those much-praised abs. I can’t even imagine being that comfortable with my body, but he’s so casual about it. “Chloe doesn’t seem very sad.”
I pull out my desk chair and sit down. “I know she’s always listening to upbeat music from the seventies and putting sprinkles on lattes and knitting striped scarves, but her life is hard. Her dad has early-onset Alzheimer’s and her mom split a long time ago, so she’s in charge of him. Whenever she’s not working, she’s usually at his assisted-living place. That’s where all her money goes, and that’s why she’s still going to school.”
“I didn’t know that,” Drew says. “I wasn’t trying to be a jerk.”
I shrug. “How would you know? She doesn’t like to talk about it.”
“Now that,” Drew says, “I can understand.”
I look at him reclining on my bed and he looks at me and there’s a moment, a slightly too-long moment, where we’re just looking at each other. And then he says, “Hey, I’m sorry I made fun of romantic comedies.”
Our argument at Nick’s flashes through my mind, and I flush with embarrassment. “No, it’s okay. I shouldn’t have yelled at you. I was just upset because I was on the world’s worst date with the world’s stinkiest man.”
Drew sits up and shakes his head. “I was being an asshole. Like, I thought we were . . .” He gestures back and forth between us. “Bantering or whatever. I didn’t realize how important they were to you. I didn’t know you were taking it personally.”
“Yeah, well. Imagine if someone was making fun of Frasier to you.”
Drew makes a fist. “I swear to God, if anyone said even one ill word about David Hyde Pierce . . .”
He stands up then, takes a step toward me. “You thought I was a jerk, didn’t you?”
I consider lying, but Drew’s being honest with me, so instead I nod. “Yeah. I really hated you.”
He laughs. “Wow. That was . . . candid. I like it. Why did you hate me?”
I stand up and roll my eyes. “Come on, dude. You made fun of my job. You made fun of romantic comedies. Coffee Girl.”
“What about Coffee Girl?” Drew asks, taking another step closer.
“You gave me an embarrassing nickname in front of other people, like I didn’t have a job or dreams or a name. Like I was just some lowly employee who exists only to get coffee.”
Drew snort-laughs, but when he sees the look in my eyes, he sobers up. “Wait, you really don’t like the nickname?”
I shake my head. “No!”
“I thought it was our fun inside joke, since you spilled coffee on me.”
I shake my head again. “Uh, maybe if you’re trying to establish a fun inside joke with someone else, you should first determine if the other person finds what you’re saying a) fun and b) a joke.”
“I won’t call you that anymore, but I wasn’t trying to make you feel bad. I told you, Annie,” he says, taking another step toward me, and my name on his lips still sounds like a lovely foreign word. “Not taking things seriously is the Danforth way. We mock those we like.”
“Like pulling a girl’s pigtails when you have a crush on her?” I ask, and then I try to laugh but it comes out as a squeak. Drew is very close to me now, and my body is at war; part of me wants to run away from him, from this moment, but my eyes can’t look away from his.
He smiles, then reaches out, grabs one of my unruly curls, and pulls on it oh-so-gently.
This can’t be real. It can’t. This is a weird dream, and any minute now Uncle Don is going to burst through the door but he’s going to look like RuPaul and he’s going to tell me that I forgot to do homework for my ninth-grade math class. And then I’ll wake up and tell Chloe about this at Nick’s, and she’ll say, “Wow, what’s going on in your subconscious, anyway?”
“What are you doing?” Drew asks, looking at my arm.
“Pinching myself,” I say. I pinch myself harder, but I’m not waking up.
Drew laughs, a tiny little sound. He takes another step toward me, so now there’s really and truly no space between us. His chest is against mine, and I’m once again in a situation where I realize how tall he