Fuck tiptoeing

"We kissed," you blurt. "And, I mean, sorry if you don't like knowing that, but this is reminding me how sick I am, of us all having secrets from each other! I'm done with it. You get nothing but truth and too much of it, from me now. And fuck it if having secrets exposed blows up everything, who cares anyway, if your whole deal is you're just done as friends! We're all headed our separate ways anyhow, probably. I mean, right? You are going to find some cute girl freshman year and slowly stop talking to me after she decides she doesn't like me, and have like a zillion adorable babies with her, and he—"

"—Bridge," Scott begins, but you wave him off because you're not done talking.

"He," you resume, "is going to do his dumb fucking white-knight thing and try to act like he never gave me the best kiss ever and then immediately decided it was a terrible mistake. So now I'm pretty worried he's going to pretend it never happened and break my heart acting fucking dumb about it, or make it super weird trying to avoid any future temptation and break my heart because what kind of friendship is going to survive that?" You pose the rhetorical more mournfully than you intended to, but it's seeming very unlikely any of you will even still talk by a few years from now, and that, well, that makes you kinda sad. "He's going to marry like some art student and they'll move to France and not think about children until they're weirdly too old so thank goodness they're adopting, and he'll talk to me like three times in that interval."

"—Bridge?"

"And I mean, don't get me wrong," you tell him. "if you'd come down the hill and kissed me instead, I would've loved that too. You're probably just as too noble for your own good as him, though! I have two guys," you lament, "who like me too much to fuck me, and then guys ad infinitum who don't like me nearly enough even just to help me get it over with so I don't have to go to college a virgin."

You jump when Dex sets his hands on your shoulders. "Shower's free now," he says, as you turn red and try to backtrack your memory through what-all you said just now and whether any of it was too bad.

Oh, well. "I don't even care how much of that you heard," you inform him, standing up and downing the rest of your drink. "I meant what I said. I'm sick of us all having secrets and lying to each other. And it really hurt my feelings how you acted about that kiss," you tell Dex. "I had about a split second where I thought maybe my first sex could be with somebody I actually care about and who gives a shit about me."

"Yeah, that surprised me. I thought you and Mike Senft..." he says after a second, taking a seat in the next deck chair over.

You make a face at him.. "Mike told Lacey I was intimidating, quote, not like in looks exactly, but, dot dot dot."

"Yeah, well, Mike smells like oven-made French fries," Dex returns immediately, as if he's had that line prepared for years.

It sort of stops you in your tracks as both you and Scott dissolve into hysterical laughter.

"I would have compared him to tater tots," Scott says, "but I think the reasoning is basically the same."

"Yeah," says Dex, at the same time that you shake your head and say, "Not at all!"

"They're not remotely the same thing," you argue, sitting back down on the edge of your chair. "Oven fries smell like the hard-fought failure of a dream, but tater tots I would actually just have sex with."

"I think her standards are a little unrealistically high, personally," Dex says to Scott, who laughs and grins so big at him that apparently Dex can't stand to look into a sun that bright. He looks away.

"My standards are: is the person of age and related to me by blood? Penalize their odds by half," you inform him, which makes both of them laugh and kind of groan at the same time. "Anyway," you add, enjoying the audience and how almost-normal the current vibe is. "Thank you both for your interest and support. Let's just declare it canon that whatever is the least fuckable potato product, Mike smells like that one. Okay?"

Both of them smile at you, even Dex, who usually would need more warmup time than this.

"In the spirit of honesty, then, I smoked about half of your joint without asking," Dex tells Scott.

Well, that certainly explains why he's being so mellow about all this. You wish it could have been his sober reaction, but on the other hand, you sort of like this chilled out, refreshingly not high-strung, version of your friend.

Scott meets Dex's eyes and seems to be looking for something in his expression, which, whatever weirdos. You can't tell if he found what he wanted, or not. "I don't mind," he says. "I brought it to share."

Dex nods. "Thanks. Hey, Birdie!" he says, quite unnecessarily since you're barely three feet from him, but whatever, at least they're not fighting. "I know you wanted to take a shower," he says, propping his feet up on the empty chair next to Scott, "but what if you stayed out here and did one of your stand-up things just like old times instead."

"Or, what if I did that after my shower, because I'm gross right now and I look dumb?"

"Good idea," says Scott, "we'll just take a break and reconvene in a little bit."

"Well, I didn't say I wouldn't do it," you say, annoyed at having to point that out. "I just, I dunno, wanted to be talked into it a little. I was trying not to have to say that."

"Right, just like I was trying not to have to say I wanted a few minutes alone to talk about some things," Scott says with faint exasperation, inclining his head toward Dex.

Oops. Missed that one.

"Right," you say hastily, shuffling comically backward toward the house. "Take all the time you need. Seriously. If it means you guys actually getting along okay then I'll stay in the bedroom till one of you comes to get me!"

"I don't think that's going to be necessary," Dex says. Scott is studying him, without speaking, as you close the sliding door, and then you don't exactly have any excuse to linger, other than the obvious temptation of eavesdropping. You needed to wash your hair today, anyway.