That Friend From College

June 2007

The iron slid confidently in Pete's hand as he moved it over the white shirt on the ironing board. He tugged at the hem to smooth out the wrinkles while continuing to move the iron across the material. He had his dress pants on already, standing in the hotel room in a white undershirt.

He ironed shirts almost every day for work, too lazy to iron them all at once when he did laundry, but it felt entirely different today. When he was ironing shirts for work, he didn't feel the nerves and anxiety that he did today. He wasn't usually worried about what he would say, the way he was today.

"Did you and Allison drive up here together?" His friend Josh asked him while trying to tie the knot of his tie.

"No," Pete set down the iron, lifting the shirt and shifting it to a new spot that still needed to be pressed. He has been thinking almost exclusively about her today, a nervous knot in his gut at the thought of seeing her.

"Have you seen her at all today?" Josh carefully tugged the knot into place. Josh was more his friend than Alli's, part of their extended group of friends.

"No," he focused on the shirt, perhaps overly so, going over spots that were already entirely smooth.

"Did she have to come out early or something? To take care of whatever... wedding things?" Josh didn't seem phased by Pete's curtness. He examined himself in the mirror, looking pleased, and switched his gaze back to Pete, who had shifted the shirt again and resumed ironing.

"Yeah, that's part of it, I guess," Pete didn't look up at his friend. "But we didn't really discuss coming up together. We actually..." he didn't know how to admit this to Josh, it was something he hadn't talked much about with friends who knew them both. "Haven't seen each other in a while."

"Oh," Josh sounded surprised. "You guys always used to drive down to PA together." Pete nodded. "You don't do that anymore?" Josh came around the ironing board, coming to stand in front of him, frowning. Pete shook his head. "Since when?" He shrugged, having a hard time admitting the length of time it's been since he'd last seen Alli.

"I haven't seen her in just about a year," he kept his head down, focused on the shirt.

"Shit, really?" Josh frowned. "What happened?"

Pete debated telling him everything. He kept it pretty close to the chest for the past year, especially around their mutual friends. He talked to his friends from home about it, needing an outlet to vent, and he knew that Alli had told Dotty and Leah. He set the iron down and lifted his shirt to examine it.

"I guess... we kinda fucked things up last year when we... slept together," he admitted, looking up at his friend. Josh's eyes were bugging out of his head.

"You what?!" Josh stood staring. He put on his shirt, looking away. "No, no, no man! You can't just leave it at that! I need details!" Josh demanded. "I mean, I'll be discreet and all, I won't go blabbing to everyone about this, but I need to know. What the hell happened?!"

"Last year, on one of our trips out to PA, we got kinda... I don't know... extra friendly, I guess, on the way back home. Things got a bit heated. Her folks weren't home and I came in and it just happened. We had sex." He finished buttoning his shirt and tucked it into his pants, buckling his belt.

"Was it like super awkward?" Josh stood next to the mirror, looking at him.

"The sex? No. That was fantastic," Pete sighed, picking up his tie and arranging it at his collar. "But afterward, I guess that got weird. She had some regrets about what happened. She'd never just slept with anyone like that." He tied the knot of his tie, pulling it up.

"Yeah, I can believe that," Josh nodded, stuffing his hands into his pockets. "She'd been with Murph for most of college. I can totally see her freaking out about a random hook-up."

"I didn't really want it to be a random hook up," Pete checked the time. They could head out now, or they could hang around the room for another ten, fifteen minutes.

"So you haven't seen each other since you had sex?" Josh clarified, checking his pockets for his phone, wallet, and keys.

"Nope," Pete confirmed the sad truth. This would be the first time that he'd see her since that night. He actually brought the travel mug back for her, the one she lent him, filled with coffee for the drive home. He wasn't going to bring it to the wedding of course, but he thought that perhaps there would be some opportunity to return it to her. She was staying at the same hotel after all.

"But you guys still talk, right?" Josh paused before opening up the door of their shared hotel room.

"Yeah, online," Pete checked his own pockets before stuffing his hands in them and lifting his shoulders, slightly. "We chat on instant messenger all the time, but... we haven't hung out since then."

"Wow, that's just crazy." Josh checked that the door was locked behind them before they headed down the hall towards the elevators. "You guys were pretty tight."

All Pete could do was nod in response. Yeah, they had been pretty close before that night and he had really hoped that they would be even closer after it. On the drive home that night he was trying to work out when they might see each other again and where they would meet up. He considered how his parents would react if he had a girl stay over, in his room. He had been 23, after all, not exactly a kid. But he also had a couple of much younger siblings, a sixteen-year-old brother, and a thirteen-year-old sister, and his parents constantly fed him the line about the kind of example he was setting for them. All of that became kind of a moot point though when he talked to Alli the following night online and she said that she thought it was a huge mistake.

They milled about with some of their other friends before finding seats on the bride's side. The knot in Pete's stomach seemed to be tightening at the prospect of seeing her. He wanted to see her and talk to her and at the same time, he hated that it was this way, after so much time had passed.

Faces turned as the music started and the wedding party began walking down the aisle. The bridesmaids wore deep blue dresses holding bouquets of white flowers, their arms hooked on the elbows of the groomsmen until they reached the front of the ceremony space and split in different directions. And there she was. His eyes were glued to her.

Alli's dark hair seemed to be longer now than she's ever worn it before, touching her bare shoulders. Strands from the front were pulled back, away from her face, in some fancy twist or braid until they connected in the back with small, white flowers. The dress looked stunning on her, the halter top definitely emphasizing her cleavage in a very flattering way and he had to pull his eyes away from it quickly. Somehow, the blue of the dress made her eyes seem even bluer than they usually were and he couldn't take his eyes off them, even as she took her place at the front and everyone stood for Dotty at the top of the aisle. Josh nudged him in the shoulder and he stood up too, prying his eyes away from Alli.

Of course Dotty was a beautiful bride, but once she made her way to the altar and handed her flowers over to Alli, his eyes were back on her. He didn't remember looking at her this way before, she was just one of the group of friends, as were Dotty and Leah and a few other girls as well. But now he knew what was under that dress, and how amazing it felt to touch her, and how tight she was when he was inside her. Fuck. He needed to get his brain under control. He didn't need to be sitting there, at a friend's wedding, with a hardon.

Pete looked around for Alli at the cocktail hour, but none of the wedding party seemed to be there. Someone else said that they were off taking photos. He wasn't sure whether he was relieved or upset about the fact that it would now be even longer before he got to talk to her. Josh suggested he have more to drink, that it would help him calm his nerves and Pete decided it wouldn't hurt.

"Well, apparently this is the table for all the single friends of the bride and groom," a woman with perfectly curled, blond spirals down her back announced when Pete and Josh arrived at their assigned table for the reception.

"Yeah, I guess so," Josh agreed, smiling at her.

"Danielle," she stood, reaching a hand out to each of them in an introduction. They each shook it, introducing themselves too.

Josh hooked a finger calling Pete over to the opposite side of the table, directing Pete to a chair where he wanted him to sit. Pete pulled out the chair and once he was sitting, he noticed the little name card next to him with Allison's name, her purse sitting in the seat, and note cards tucked underneath the edge of the plate. Alli had already claimed her seat and Josh just planted him right next to her. This was either the best or the worst idea ever.

Danielle seemed to make small talk with everyone as the others came to sit at the table with them. She was a friend of Dotty's from work, she explained, wanting to know how everyone else knew the bride and groom. Pete found it difficult to focus on the conversation, thinking instead about what he was going to say to Alli. Josh shoved him hard in the side getting his attention and then nodded towards the blond. She was smiling at him.

"Peter, I was asking about what you do," she repeated for him. He stared at her blankly. "For work," she clarified.

"Umm, mortgages," he ran a hand through his hair. "I work for a mortgage lender, processing loans." It was far from exciting.

"Oh, that's very interesting," Danielle smiled back at him. He wanted to respond with a flat-out 'no, it's not,' but held his tongue.

The music started up then and the DJ announced the wedding party. There she was again, occupying his complete attention. The families entered, followed by the bride and groom, and everyone crowded around the dance floor for the first dance. Pete stood back, hands in pockets, watching Alli instead of the bride.

****

"Did you see him yet?" Dotty smoothed out the bodice of her gown while Allison carefully removed the veil out of her hairdo.

"Just kind of a glance, during the ceremony, while scanning over the guests in general." Dotty didn't need to know that her breath caught just at the glimpse of his face and that hair that she still wanted to sink her hands into. He seemed to have only gotten more attractive over the past year.

"Alli, you have to talk to him today, and then take him up to your room and screw his brains out. All. Night. Long." Dotty told her. She had been a big supporter of that whole hook-up from the very moment Allison told her about it. She thought they were perfect for each other and scolded Alli for freaking out afterward.

Allison couldn't help it, it was just the way her brain worked. She overanalyzed things and psyched herself out. After Pete left that night, she laid in bed scrutinizing everything that they had said to each other that night and everything that happened between the two of them. She replayed in her head the way he said 'something a little bit more' in the car and convinced herself that he barely even liked her. It was just that shirt at the bar the night before, she told herself, he was just into her boobs, and they couldn't have a relationship based on him enjoying the way her breasts looked in a certain top. He wasn't interested in dating her, she thought, if he had wanted that, they wouldn't have jumped right to sex that night, he would have been more patient because he would know he'd be seeing her again. But he wasn't, because he had no intentions of doing this again, she determined. Gradually, during her night of overthinking, she also came to the conclusion that she had done everything embarrassingly wrong and that she was bad at sex. She just let him do all the work and maybe he escalated it to sex cause she was so terrible at the handjob!

By the time he signed on to instant messenger that evening she had this spiel prepared to tell him how it was a huge mistake and they shouldn't have slept together. She was embarrassed, she was afraid of what he was going to say, and she just beat him to what she assumed would be a letdown. And then the idea of seeing him in person after that humiliation seemed unsettling. So she made up excuses not to. A few months later, as it was starting to feel like maybe they were back to where they had been pre-sex, Pete started seeing someone else. It felt like a huge blow to Alli.

"You told him that sleeping with you was a mistake!" Dotty reminded her when Allison drove down to PA to go wedding gown shopping with her that fall. "You didn't want anything with him! He has every right to date someone else."

"Yes, I told him that it was a mistake, but no, it's not that I don't want anything with him! He's just better off with someone who is... not me." Allison sat on the floor of the dressing room while the salesgirl zipped Dotty into a dress, with her mom and grandma waiting outside the dressing room.

"That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard!" Dotty pushed up the strapless dress, wiggling around to make her breasts sit in the right places. "You have one of two choices, Alli. You can either tell him that you were wrong, that it wasn't a mistake and you actually want him. Or you can be happy for Pete that he's dating someone he likes." The salesgirl seemed to smirk as she looked down at her.

She chose the latter. They stayed in touch, but she was too chickenshit to spend time with him in person. Especially after he had been back in PA with his new girlfriend and someone had shown her a photo of them together. She looked really pretty and very confident and Allison convinced herself that she must also be excellent in bed.

Allison moved on to buttoning up the bustle on Dotty's dress with Leah kneeling next to her to help out.

"I promise to talk to him," she told her friend, "But the other stuff is probably not going to happen."

"God, Alli, grow some balls," Dotty looked down at her on the floor of the bridal suite. "You waited out that whole relationship he was in, he's single again, you need to jump on that."

"I'm with her," Leah chimed in. "You and Pete would make a really cute couple."

"I don't even know who this Pete guy is, but I say you need to jump on that either way," Dotty's cousin Elise told her, sipping from her glass of vodka and cranberry juice. "Weddings are for getting laid."

That ended up being the phrase that played over in her head as Allison walked back to the seat where she left her purse, only to realize that Pete was in the chair right next to hers. She sucked in a huge breath and pasted a nervous smile onto her face.

"Hey," she pulled out the chair, lifting her purse to get into the seat.

"Hey," Pete smiled up at her, a sparkle seemed to play in his eyes. For a moment it felt like they were alone, like they were right back in the car last year when everything seemed to gel.

"Hey Alli," Josh smiled at her, sitting on the other side of Pete.

"Hey," she blushed, the illusion that this was anything intimate broken.

"It's been forever since I saw you last," Josh was saying to her. "What have you been up to?"

Salads were served and they spent a bunch of time catching up until Allison was called to deliver her maid-of-honor speech. It wasn't until after dinner was served and eaten that Allison found herself alone with Peter. Josh had gotten up to talk to some other friends and their table had mostly emptied. There was a silence between them and Allison struggled to think of what to say. He looked so good and there was that urge again to run her hands through his hair. He had it cut a bit shorter now than the last time she saw him, but there was still enough length to tangle in her fingers.

"I'm sorry to hear that you and Sarah broke up," she blurted out and immediately felt her face heating up. Pete frowned.

"It's fine. It wasn't anything too serious."

"I'm a dumbass," she set her face down in her hands, her elbows resting on the table. Pete's hand landed gently on her back, rubbing it.

"You're too hard on yourself. It's fine." She loved the feeling of his touch. Why did she ever turn him away?

"I don't mean just now," she turned her face to look at him. He seemed to be examining hers in great depth, his eyes moving between hers. There was some sort of tension between them, everything that they weren't saying hanging in the air.

"Do you wanna dance?" Pete's question caught her off guard as her mind raced with what she should say next.

She nodded and Pete held out his hand to her. Crash, the Dave Matthew's Band song, was playing and he wrapped his arms around her waist, holding her close. She was closer to eye level with him than the last time she had been in Pete's arms. He noticed it too.

"Those are some serious heels you are wearing," he smiled at her. His smile still had the effect of making her want to melt. Her fingers reached up to touch the hair on the back of his neck which seemed to extend the smile across his face. By the end of the song, she didn't want to pull out of his arms.

"I was such an asshole," she told him as the song changed to Goldfinger's Superman and people started jumping around.

"Let's get some drinks," Pete said, taking her hand and leading her off towards the bar. "Whiskey sour?" He asked her when they reached the bartender. She nodded, feeling touched at the fact that Pete remembered what she drank despite not having seen her in a year. He got himself a jack and coke, then nodded towards the door that led out into the garden out back. There were a few people out there smoking, but nobody they knew. Pete led her over to the fountain and sat down on the stone edge. She sat next to him, leaving a couple of inches of space between them. The night was hot and humid with barely a breeze in the air, but it was significantly quieter and more peaceful outside.

"Do you remember what I said to you in the car that night?" His eyes were on hers as if willing her to remember.

"I don't know. Which part?" Her brow furrowed. She remembered the things he said, but there were just so many.

"I told you that you are allowed to tell me 'fuck off, Pete!' and that I wouldn't hold it against you," he gave her a small smile. "Do I wish that you had told me that in the car, before anything happened? Yeah, for sure. But I get it. You're not an asshole, you're allowed to say no to people. You don't have to be attracted to someone just because they are attracted to you." She couldn't believe what he was saying. Pete sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "I could tell that you weren't really into it, that you didn't want to... sleep with me, and I was a jerk for accepting your half-hearted 'no, it's fine, I want to.' I shouldn't have. Because I knew better. 'Cause, we're friends and I know how you get."

"How do I get?" She interjected.

"You freak out about things, you get flustered. And then you do what you think people want you to do, instead of what YOU want to do. You're a people pleaser." Allison bit her lip, thinking about Pete's assessment of her and of the situation. Ok, he may be right about her freaking out and getting flustered but the other stuff, about how she wasn't attracted to him, couldn't be further from the truth.

"I didn't want to tell you to fuck off. I spent the last half hour of the drive trying to figure out how to ask you to come in. I definitely wanted you there." She explained. Pete loosened his tie, thinking.

"You wanted me there, but..." he left it open, waiting for her to fill it in. She took a long sip of her drink, trying to load up on some liquid courage. She felt embarrassed already, before she even said the words out loud.

"I've never just had sex with someone like that," her voice was softer, quieter than it had been. "I've never gone from holding hands for the first time to... full-on naked sex all in a span of an hour. Yeah, I freaked out afterward. I was trying to come up with explanations for why it happened and..." she took a deep breath, "the only thing I could come up with is that it was a mistake, that it shouldn't have." She shrugged, biting her lip again, not wanting to let herself continue rambling about her feelings of inadequacy in bed and she couldn't please him with a hand job.