Cross Purposes

A realization.

I don’t know exactly how it happened.

I do know exactly when.

It was a cold evening in January, the dark outside like a black wool blanket, heavy and opaque. It was a perfect night to nestle into the couch with a warm afghan, a hot toddy, and a good book, with a single lamp just barely illuminating the middle of the room and throwing fuzzy shadows across the wall. The book was good, interesting and involving; the kind that makes you think of more ideas than are contained in the passages inside and leaves you miles from where you started. That night, all the ideas racing through my head were just too much for me to handle alone. I needed to share them with someone. So I thought, “I’ll have to tell him about this tomorrow.”

And that’s when it happened.

The minute his name passed through my mind, the minute his face flashed through my head, my insides tried to leave my body.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t had this same thought a thousand times before, this “there’s something I have to tell him about” notion. It was just my reaction to the thought that was so startling. It took me totally by surprise. It came out of the blue. It was totally unexpected.

It was, I knew, the feeling of being in love.

Love.

I was in love.

And I finally knew it.

I held my breath to try and stop all sensation in my body. Just a basic leveling off; stop the brain and stop the brawn. And when things started to quiet down, I thought his name again. And again the physical betrayed the psychological. My stomach took a roller coaster drop. My chest tightened and my lungs couldn’t hold any air. My thoughts became a swirl of textures and colors. All I wanted was to be next to him. Now. To have my body wrapped in his arms. To have his hands anchored in my hair. To have his lips tugging at mine. To pull that dark night blanket around the two of us and fill that cocoon with our own blazing heat.

It was, to put it mildly, a pretty extreme reaction.

Or so I thought at the time.

I have since become accustomed to it.

And I suppose it really isn’t quite truthful to say my reaction was a complete and total surprise. I’d had hints in the past. It’s just that I wasn’t paying attention to them.

Or maybe I was ignoring them. It’s hard to say.

I had looked at him before. Noted the burnished highlights in his hair. Measured the width of his shoulders. Felt the grace of his hands. Admired the power in his legs. I’d taken a secret pleasure in the nicknames he made up for me. Names no one had ever used to describe me before. Names that told me he saw me as no one else did. Those names identified me as bound to him, and that made me happy. Proud to be associated with him. Pleased to have our names always spoken together. To know I was special to him. And to know others recognized it.

Of course, as soon as I could breathe and think again, the next sentence to ram through my brain was, “What now?”

I mean, you don’t just go up to someone and say “I’m in love with you.” That would be insanity. Especially under the circumstances. We work together, for god’s sake! We share office space! For all I knew, it could simply be the proximity of our desks and the unusual amount of time we spend together that was clouding my thought processes and muddying my hormones. Or at least I was pretty sure that was how he’d interpret the whole thing.

I certainly hadn’t seen any overt signs from him that he was interested and in pursuit, so to speak. Oh, we spent hours spilling our guts to each other. Talking of the past and of the future. Intimate and personal conversations that don’t transpire between just any two people. And we definitely had our share of teasing and titillating moments, throwing innuendo and double entendre around with wild abandon and little concern for who overheard. But I had the sense this was just a special camaraderie to him. Something wonderful and marvelous, but just a camaraderie. I felt the camaraderie, too, and treasured it as he did. But somewhere along the line it had become more. Much more.

So what to do.

Live a little, every time I see him. Die a little, every time I see him. Hint a lot.

Wonder why the person who seems so perfect for me, doesn’t see me as so perfect for him. Wait for time to either wound all heels or heal all wounds.

Love him ’til I die.

I don’t know exactly how it happened.

I just know exactly when.

* * * * * * *

Talk about unexpected.

It was probably one of the scariest, most terrific, most natural things to ever happen to me.

At least I think so.

It happened one night when we’d gone out to see some movie that promised to be either extremely fantastic or extremely boring, depending upon which one of us you asked. We were sitting in the front row of the balcony so we could put our feet up (there aren’t too many movie balconies left anymore, which he thinks is just fine ’cause it keeps kids from throwing stuff over the railing but which I think stinks), and all of a sudden he hands me this present.

All wrapped and everything. Really took me by surprise.

So I ask him what’s this for, and he says nothing, it’s not anything fancy or anything, he just thought of me when he saw it. Which kind of choked me up, since not too many people give you something for nothing once you stop being a kid. So I open it, and it’s this pad of notepaper with a picture of a pretty worn-out old teddy bear at the top, the kind where there’s a cross where one eye should be and one of the ears is all chewed up, and it says “Old Friends Are The Best Friends.”

And that’s when it happened.

All of a sudden I had the most incredible urge to throw myself on him, straddle his lap, and plant the biggest, wettest, juiciest kiss I could muster on his lips.

In front of everybody.

And since I would be straddling his lap anyway for the kiss, to just go on and do a little dry thrusting. If you catch my drift.

Pretty intense, huh?

I was pretty blown away by the picture in my mind. And that’s where the scary part comes in. I wasn’t scared by the actual fantasy, mind you, I was scared by the suddenness of the whole thing. Okay, it’s not like I hadn’t done a little fantasizing in my head over the years. Fantasies are just little movies that play in your head and what someone else doesn’t know won’t hurt him, right? And to be honest, I’d had a few fantasies about him, on and off, whenever the mood struck. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just that this time it wasn’t so much a fantasy as an impulse to actually do it. I really wanted to do it!

And it was all I could do not to!

And that’s where the terrific part comes in. I’d sort of had it in my head that maybe I’d never feel that strongly about anyone ever again. That lust side of love. The passion part. All right, the sex. I really believed I’d used up my ration and was all prepared to settle for comfort and convenience and that companionship bullcrap.

But that’s where the natural part comes in.

See, I’ve always had this idea that, well, love at first sight and body chemistry and fitting together are great, but the best kind of love comes from having a friend first and then discovering there’s more to it. And that’s what this was. Best friend love that had suddenly turned into being in love. Being comfortable and then being uncomfortable and then having it all.

Well, having it all if the other person wants it, too.

I haven’t said anything to him yet. I’m not sure I ever will. It’s not the rejection I’m afraid of (okay, so being rejected is holding me back a little), but it’s losing what we’ve already got. He’s my best friend! The best friend I’ve got, and ever had, and ever will have! I couldn’t stand it if he started treating me different ’cause he didn’t want me and I wanted him and it made us all afraid of each other all the time and, well, you get the picture. It would just mess things up really bad.

And right now I’d rather keep what I’ve got than risk ending up with nothing.

I know, “no pain, no gain,” “it’s better to have loved and lost,” etc.

But I can live with what I’ve got now.

I couldn’t live with losing it all.

Still–

Talk about unexpected.