Yes, and Talia doesn't care. They move in together, in fact.

"You and Amy? She's totally insatiable! Lol," was Talia's AIM response to my heartfelt confession. In fact, the whole thing bothered her so little that she invited Amy to our housewarming party after graduation. Elizabeth and her boyfriend were there too, but that's not relevant at the moment.

I didn't see Rachel leave for Oxford, but I did take care of Talia when she drank herself stupid that night. I let her stay the night in my bed (I took the couch), and she just... never left.

It was a small place, near work. I'd landed an unpaid internship at a no name tech firm (you may have heard of it now; we did very well, later). The only perk to the gig was that one of the owners let me rent the room above his for $500 a month. I had to hustle tables everyday after work, but I was young and I liked the company.

I liked Talia's company more. At first, we bought a second, cheap twin bed and shared the bedroom. We were playing house. I would make coffee in the morning while she made breakfast. We'd talk late into the night.

Sometimes she would go out to a club, and stumble to bed in the wee hours of the morning. I didn't accompany her on these binges, because it was clear that she was working through some stuff and needed her space.

More than once, she came home with a girl, and I pretended to sleep while they fucked on the bed nearby. More than once, Talia walked in on me with my pants around my ankles, dick in hand. She'd blush and leave.

We had long talks, semi-nightly, when we'd stay up and solve all the problems of the universe. We even talked, half-joking, about what our kids would be like, if we had kids. What kind of house we'd buy. "Yeah, get us a big ol' minivan and I'll take the kids to soccer practice!" We howled with laughter.

Then, one night, we brushed our teeth, and Talia looked at me. Her eyes searched mine, and then she took my hand, and led me to her bed. We sold the other bed later that week. Talia stopped going out alone, and suddenly, we weren't just roommates anymore.

Late one night, I told her how I felt, that I wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. She answered, "Let's start right now."

Talia reached under the pillow and produced a ring. I started to tear up, and put the ring on her finger. "Will you...?"

"Duh."

Love hadn't come easy to us, but married life did.

The internship blossomed into a good job, and my signing bonus gave us the chance to look at something more permanent. We found a hip apartment near the best food district in town. Talia soon got a job at a gallery in the area. Married life treated her surprisingly well. Her confidence was through the roof, and her whole body glowed with creative energy. She converted a portion of our apartment over to studio space, and produced weird and frightening works, always smiling while she dashed the canvass with paint. Nothing ever sold, but that wasn't the point.

She made us plenty of new friends, who showed us all the coolest indie places to eat. But it felt like a pale shadow of the camaraderie we'd shared with our group in high school. By the time we got the second place, Amy had moved out of the city, Elizabeth too. All our best friends became statuses on a Facebook feed. We missed them more and more with the passage of time, even Rachel.