“Should I guess?” was the first thing Josh said when I opened the front door.
“You’d probably get it right on the first try.”
“Boy troubles?”
“Self-inflicted.”
“Well, then. Good thing I brought this.” Josh held up a grocery bag, and I figured out why he’d taken much longer than I’d thought the drive required. “Ice cream.”
I wasn’t really hungry, but I could probably scarf down a Choco Taco, so I put the grocery bag on the table and went hunting for clean bowls and silverware. Josh had gotten me a Choco Taco because he knew me well, but since I had no self-control, I served myself a few scoops of fudge swirl ice cream, too.
Josh and I returned to my room, because I didn’t want Zoe walking in and finding me curled into a fetal ball on the floor. It was best to lose all composure when safely locked away behind a door. As I ate my ice cream, I told Josh everything, which wasn’t even that much. I really liked a guy. I’d stuck up for him when his ex came snooping around. And he left me alone for the ex.
“Has he texted you about it?” Josh asked.
“No.”
“That’s pretty shitty.”
“Yeah. He could at least apologize for ditching me. He could at least try to act like he cared about me at all.”
“Maybe his ex lured him into a back alley and murdered him.”
“Can you be serious? Please?”
Josh threw up his hands. “Okay, okay. Just exploring all the options. You made Peaches out to sound like a decent guy. Then again, I don’t really trust your definition of ‘decent’.”
“I don’t know why I do this,” I said, digging the butts of my palms into my eye sockets. “I envy you so bad.”
“Wait, why?”
“Because you’re always so cool!”
Josh stared at me, then started laughing. “Are you kidding me?”
“Not cool cool, idiot. You’re a fucking dork. I mean, like… you don’t lose your mind over guys. Have you ever been in love?”
“I thought I was in love with you.”
“You never told me you loved me.”
“I tell you I love you all the time.”
“Yeah, as in friend-love. But when we were dating, you never bared your heart to me. I don’t think you ever said ‘I love you’.”
“We were only together a few months.”
“I fall in love in, like, a week.”
“I think your problem is that you get so caught up in the fantasy that you ignore the reality.”
“I knew Peaches was flawed and that he was still hung up on his ex, and I fell for him anyway.”
“Are you in love with him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I didn’t know where the border was between extreme affection and love. I thought about him all the time. I wanted to touch him whenever we hung out. More than anything, I wanted him to feel as strongly about me as I did about him, and that was the part that wasn’t working out. I was playing my role perfectly, and Peaches was forgetting his lines.
“You also want to fix people. The more problems they have, the more you want them.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t bother to deny it. I was a sucker for a sob story, and Peaches’s was too good to resist: an orphan kicked out of foster care, who lived on the streets for six months before falling deeply in love with someone who broke his heart and (probably) cheated on him. He could have been forged in the furnaces of romance novels if he were more conventionally handsome. I dug his notched Roman nose and angular face, but he wasn’t going to be a Hollywood heartthrob. At least Peaches proved to me that I wasn’t as shallow as I thought; I could go for substance over appearance if I was desperate enough.
“You also can’t stand being single. So you latch onto whoever is most convenient and available.”
“That is not true.”
“When is the longest time you’ve been single?”
“Uh, now.”
“When did you break up with… whathisface.”
“Nathan, Josh. Oh my God, how can you not remember him? I broke up with him six months ago.”
“Right. You’ve been single six months. You’re a man starving in the desert at this point, and Peaches was a convenient target. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know. We have a lot in common. Even if I weren’t a bit… thirsty, I think we’d still get along and I’d want to fuck him.”
“You want to fuck everyone, Justin.”
That was true. I didn’t even bother to defend myself on that one. Even if a guy wasn’t my type and pissed me off, I’d be down for a quickie. I wasn’t sure if it was because of my crazy sex drive or if it was because I hated myself. Could be both.
“So… how do I fix it?”
“For starters, you can make the decision to cut Peaches out of your life and move on.”
“Okay…”
“As in, if he calls you, you ignore him, even if he leaves you a mopey voicemail about how he’s so sorry and if there’s anything he can do to make it up to you, he’ll do it.” Josh lifted his eyebrows, and I hated him for knowing me so well. “You always fall for that.”
“Sorry if I want to believe people at their word.”
Josh sighed. “I know, Justin. For someone who claims to hate everyone so much, you sure trust them way more than you should.”
“Yeah…” I let out a long breath. “Why can’t I find a guy I can trust?”
“Because you pick up guys at bars and Grindr?”
“Where else am I supposed to go to pick up guys? Church?”
Josh laughed, flopping down on my bed and stretching his arms behind his head. “Maybe I should be your matchmaker. I could probably find you someone chill.”
“Sure, yenta.”
“The Yiddish word for ‘matchmaker’ isn’t yenta, it’s shadchan.”
“How the fuck does your goy-ass know shit like that?”
Josh snorted. “I lived in a very Jewish part of Pittsburgh. Everyone in my school was Jewish, and they taught me things.”
I crawled up onto the other side of the bed, lying down beside Josh and reaching for my phone. “So… wanna start on that matchmaking business, shadchan? Find me a man on Grindr.”
“To date?”
“Sure.”
Josh took my phone and began swiping through the options, his expression unreadable. He then snorted and showed me a picture of someone’s unimpressive pasty torso.
“Hot,” Josh said. “Tells you a lot about a man.”
“There are some decent profiles.”
“What’s yours?”
I shrugged. “Just my dumb face and a list of the things I like.”
Josh had already clicked onto it without my permission. “A selfie. Nice.”
“Shut up. Am I supposed to put up my yearbook picture?”
“If it were me, I’d put up my sixth grade picture, when I was super fat and awkward and had braces. If a man could love that…”
The next twenty minutes consisted of Josh and I arguing over my profile on Grinder, and then the profiles of others. Josh had high standards for someone who never managed to get any dates. I wish I could hold such standards, but I’d slept with all Grindr types—the headless torso, the bro with his arm around a scantily clad woman, the “no drama” drama queen, the guy who used a ten-year-old picture, the guy who claimed to dislike queens and somehow ended up sending his dick pic to one repeatedly. The only guy I didn’t bother with was the guy who explicitly said “no blacks”, because if you weren’t smart enough to be racist on the down-low, you weren’t smart enough to put a condom on reliably.
“You sleep with every guy you go on a date with?” Josh asked.
“If he’s okay,” I replied. “What, am I supposed to save myself for marriage?”
“Waiting to make sure he’s not a douchecanoe might help.”
“But—”
“I’m not saying this because sex is special or whatever, but fucking douchebags doesn’t help your inability to keep a distance. The more you fuck them, the more you like them. That’s your issue. You should make a note to just fuck good guys.”
“I can’t tell good ones from bad ones.”
Josh rubbed his forehead with a sigh of exhaustion. “You ever consider therapy?”
“I did that shit years ago, Josh.”
“Not because you wanted to.”
“I kind of wanted to.” When forced into a psych ward, therapy was probably the least awful part.
“I just think… like…” Josh glanced at me, as if afraid of my reaction. When I said nothing, he rolled onto his side to face me. “You’ve got a lot of things to work through, you know? Your step-dad, your addiction, and your notorious ex all contribute to the way you are, and maybe if you could work through all of it…”
“I have worked through it.” I paused. “Mostly. I’m not snorting coke anymore, am I?”
“You can still have other issues outside of coke addiction.”
“That’s what alcohol is for.”
“I’m serious, Justin.”
“Since when are you serious?” I asked Josh. He gave me a perturbed looked, which aggravated me. Josh had a tendency to sound like my mother, and while it was sometimes a good thing—my mom was my saving grace a few times in my life—right now I didn’t need it. “I wanted dating advice, not life advice.”
“They are the same thing.”
“When do I get to tell you how to live your life? I don’t see you dating any real catches.”
“I don’t call you in a miserable funk about it, do I?”
He had me there. Josh was often my lifeline, but I was never his. Josh had some insecurities, sure, but he always had his shit together. When you had parents who supported you and siblings that liked you, a lot of problems felt solvable.
“Sorry to be a burden.”
“You’re not, Justin.” Josh sat up, running a hand through his light brown hair and making it stick up in the front. “I want you to be happy.”
“I am. Just not right now.”
“Okay, but promise me something.”
“Okay.”
“If Peaches calls or texts you, either ignore him or tell him to leave you alone. Can you do that?”
I bit my lip, because Josh and I both understood the likelihood of me breaking a promise like that. I wanted to be optimistic, so I nodded. “Promise.”
Josh didn’t look like he believed me, but he didn’t push, because you only stayed my friend this long if you had a copious capacity for forgiveness.
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