The phone rang again. Kathleen answered and it was Nathan, calling for Colleen. "I'm sorry, Nathan, for some reason she doesn't want to talk to you. I don't know what's going on with her." For three days Nathan had called, emailed, always with the same result. His last email said, "I'm so sorry, Colleen. I promise it will never happen again."
Colleen and Nathan had been best friends since they were three years old, ever since the Bakers had moved next door to the Quinns in an older, quiet neighborhood in the small city in Illinois where they lived. They had virtually been joined at the hip ever since.
The Quinn family consists of Mark, 44, Mary, 42, and their three children. Kathleen, 22, was a senior at the nearby university. Robert, "Rob", was 20, had just finished his last year at the community college, and was about to transfer to the university. Colleen, 18, a senior in high school, was the odd duck of the family.
They were on summer hiatus. All three of them had summer jobs. Kathleen was teaching summer school in the city. Colleen was tutoring students who were having difficulty in school, and Rob worked for a landscaping contractor. Mark and Mary had taken a long overdue vacation in Aruba, leaving the young people home by themselves. Kathleen was de facto in charge of the household.
Colleen was a genius who mainly kept to herself in the converted attic loft that was her room. She kept to herself except for her best friend Nathan, who spent as much time at Colleen's house as he did at his own. When they weren't at the Quinn house, they were at Nathan's. Even her family didn't know what went on in her mind.
A tomboy as a child, she was always skinny as a rail, wearing tee shirts under her clothes until she was fourteen and her mother bought her a bra and insisted that she wear it. It was a padded A cup that she didn't begin to fill up. A late bloomer, at seventeen she began to fill out. She gained weight, her hips rounded, and her butt became a pair of beautifully rounded globes. Her breasts grew until she overflowed a C cup. She wore her hair tied up on her head with a variety of scrunchies, combs or pins. She wore thick glasses with huge frames that hid her beautiful blue eyes. She had never worn makeup, not even a hint of lip gloss. Colleen had always worn shapeless, baggy clothing that concealed her figure, and she continued to do so, even with her new body.
Colleen and Nathan were the nerds, the geeks at school that all the kids made fun of. They shrugged it off, content with each other's company. They ate lunch together, always at the end of a table with no one else around. Nathan's clothes were as non-conforming as Colleens. He wore baggy cords when the other boys all wore Levi's. He had a pocket protector and carried a briefcase instead of wearing a backpack. His shirttails always hung out of his pants and his socks would never stay up. His shoulder length hair was always unkempt. He wore John Lennon type granny glasses.
Nathan and Colleen did everything together. They walked to and from school with each other, took the same classes. They always made fun of the popular kids, but only between themselves. They couldn't understand the swaggering jocks or the brainless cheerleader types that wore too much makeup and flaunted their bodies in too-tight clothes.
Their friendship was purely platonic. They never touched each other. Neither of them had ever dated; both of them said they were "holding out" until just the right person came along
The phone rang again and Kathleen gave Nathan the same story. Tiring of this, she marched up to Colleen's room to get to the bottom of it. She knocked on Colleen's bedroom door in the loft and walked in without being invited. "All right, what's going on between you and Nathan?"
Colleen sniffled and the tears began to flow. "N-Nathan kissed me she stuttered. "And I k-kissed him back. Then I ran away and hid from him."
"What's the matter with that?" Kathleen asked. "You've been best friends all your lives."
"Th- that's the problem," Colleen wailed. "I don't want to lose the friendship."
"I don't understand. How can a kiss ruin a friendship?"
"W-well, if you get romantically involved with someone and you break up, you end up hating each other. It happens all the time at school."
"You'll never lose your friendship with Nathan. God, I wish Tray and I were that kind of friends." Kathleen spoke of her fiancée, Tremont Belknap Covington the Third, of the banking Covington family. They called him Tray, after the Roman numeral behind his name. He was an investment banker in the family firm, played polo, and was devilishly good looking. He had the reputations as having been quite the playboy until he became engaged to Kathleen. He still had secret trysts on the side.
"How do you really feel about Nathan," Kathleen asked.
"I-I've been in love with him since the seventh grade."
"Does Nathan know this," she asked.
"God no," Colleen wailed, "I could never tell him that." And a fresh round of tears streaked down her face.
"How do you know he doesn't feel the same way about you?"
That stopped Colleen dead in her tracks. "I-I don't know," she said nervously.
Kathleen held her sister in her arms until she quit shaking and the tears subsided. "You need to go talk to Nathan and fix this."
"You think so?" Colleen asked.
"Yes, I do, and the sooner the better."
Colleen did some of the deep breathing exercises that she learned in yoga class until she had calmed down and then washed the tear stains off her face. Summoning up all the courage she could muster, she went downstairs and out into the yard. She pushed open the gate that separated the Quinn and Baker properties and stood for a moment in front of the converted garage that was Nathan's room.
They had never knocked on doors before, but this time she did before pushing the door open and entering the room. The entire garage was a giant music studio. An ebony concert grand piano took up one whole corner and the rest of the room contained a wall full of guitars and other stringed instruments, a stand with four saxophones, several clarinets, and an elaborate drum kit.
Trumpets and assorted brass instruments lay on several shelves. Nathan could play them all. There were microphones and a sophisticated recording studio. Nathan's bedroom was in a loft over the studio.
This was where the kiss happened. They were recording a duet, "Together Again" from a Kenny Rogers and Dotty West album. Their faces were an inch apart as they sang into the mike. As soon as the last notes were finished, Nathan kissed her on the lips. Startled, she returned the kiss, then gasped and fled from the room. She hadn't seen or talked to him since.
Nathan didn't hear her come in. He was playing a plaintive blues number on the piano that she couldn't identify. His head was bent down until it almost touched the keyboard. When he had finished the song he looked up and jumped when he saw her standing there. He leapt to his feet and walked over to her. "Colleen, I'm so sorry that happened. I don't know what got into me, but I promise it will never happen again."
"Sit down, Nathan. We need to talk." Wringing his hands, he sat on the couch, leaving at least three feet of space between them. She took a deep breath and began. "First of all," she said, "I want you to kiss me. And I want to kiss you, but I'm so afraid it would jeopardize our friendship and I couldn't bear it if that happened."
"That could never happen, Colleen. I care for you too much." As he spoke, the tears welled up in his eyes.
"What do you mean when you say you care for me?"
"Well," he took a deep breath. "I guess it means I love you". He looked stunned as the words came out of his mouth.
"You love me, or you're in love with me?" Colleen asked quietly.
