The things I love about my best friend, Kiera, are her Disney nose, take-me eyes and delicate, tattooed shoulders. But I’m especially attracted to how her lascivious mouth opens wide with her big and brash laughs, as if she were onstage entertaining an audience of assholes just like her.
Right now we’re at cocktail hour in our favorite bar. As usual, she’s backstabbing our friends. (The names used below are pseudonyms.)
“Remember that guy Sami’s been fucking?”
“The married guy?” I ask.
“Yeah. She’s stalking him now.”
“No way!”
“Yes way,” Keira says. “She went to his house and sliced his tires.”
“My God.”
“She’s a four-Michelin-star stalker.”
Everyone in our circle of friends knows they can’t trust Kiera. And yet I love her. I can’t help it.
Kiera’s an asshole—but she’s my asshole.
Yes, I’m in Therapy
I tell my therapist, Joel, I want to be around Kiera’s cruel heart all the time.
“What is it about her?” he asks.
“I guess I’m into her beauty, her badness, her authenticity,” I answer. “I love that she’s dainty-looking on the outside, but she’s the world’s angriest fuck on the inside.”
“I just want to kiss her and rip her clothes off and make her orgasmically happy,” I add.
Joel stays quiet, reading my excited body language.
“I love Kiera for the same reason we all fall in love with bad people. They’re not boring.”
So What Am I Going To Do About It?
Well right now, I’m drinking with Kiera again. And at the end of tonight’s cocktails and backstabbing, I ask her, “What are you going to do the rest of the night?”
“Go home. Watch porn. Cry myself to sleep. Same old, same old.”
We laugh. We hug. We go.
In my car, I daydream she falls for me. When I get home, she phones unexpectedly.
“I need to ask you something,” she says.
“OK.”
“Why haven’t you tried to fuck me?”
I pause first to gather my gin-soaked thoughts. Then I tell the truth. Like an idiot, I always tell the truth.
“Because I don’t want to fuck up our friendship. I mean, I’d love to fuck you. You’re the sexiest woman in the world. But if it didn’t work, I’d lose my best friend.”
Kiera’s a spoiled brat. She wants everything. And now that I’ve accidentally made myself unattainable by putting her in the friend zone, she wants me.
“Fuck that. I think it’s time you come over, and we fuck,” she says brazenly. “We always knew this was going to happen.”
“We did?”
My Heart Races
This is it—it’s happening! I just know that once we have sex, she’ll realize I’m the greatest lover in the world, and she can’t live without me. So I don’t hesitate.
“I’ll be there in 20 minutes.”
She laughs awkwardly and says, “OK.”
“OK,” I echo back and hang up.
I drive to her place. She let me inside. I take her by the hand, and I guide her to her messy bed.
“I’m nervous,” she says.
“I’m not,” I reply.
I kiss her and caress her shoulders that I’ve been coveting for months.
“I’m not nervous anymore,” she says, almost in a whisper.
“Good.”
Her kisses are candy. Her skin’s divinity. I know what she wants and how she wants it, because she’s been revealing her secrets to me all along. So I give it to her, every raw and nuanced intimacy. The night’s a blur of revelations and fingertips and tastes. She arches the way I imagined she would. For a moment, everything is perfect.
But then comes surprise: It never feels wrong to me, but it never feels right.
Have We Stayed in the Friend Zone Too Long?
Do I respect her so much as a buddy that I feel self-conscious about pulling her hair and tossing her about on her California king?
It’s not just me who’s feeling this. Kiera also seems … off. In this moment, we’re not quite friends, not quite lovers. After three hours of getting to know each other’s bodies, Kiera falls asleep against me while I gently massage her scalp.
In half-darkness, I survey her room. Piles of clothes on the floor. Empty drinking glasses on the side table.
It feels foreign to me, like a city I only ever dreamed of. But now that I’m here in the dream …
I don’t know.
