Making A Very Long Story Merely Long

Written by Anonymous

Relaxing after a long day of work, she flopped down onto her bed, perusing the internet on her laptop as she did every evening. She stumbled on a blog called WTF is up with my love life?!  The blog tagged and described the men in a woman’s life as her Gaggle: The Hot Sex Prospect, The Boyfriend Prospect, etc. As she read the description of The Unavailable Guy she could feel her gut tightening.

“You both know that he is unavailable, which makes him less threatening than other guys and enables you to let your guard down more than you would with a viable romantic prospect. Because your relationship with The Unavailable Guy isn’t going anywhere, you don’t have to overanalyze your interactions and can continue to push the boundaries of your friendship into territory that never feels unsafe… So you allow yourself to get closer to The Unavailable Guy, rationalizing that he is the one in the relationship and thus responsible for pulling in the reins if your friendship crosses into dangerous territory.”

What the fuck indeed.

  .               .               .

D had been coming over Thursdays after late nights at work since he lived too far away to commute comfortably. When he originally started coming over they watched movies on the couch, stayed up talking til two in the morning until their eyes burned with exhaustion and she would stumble to her room while he slept on the couch. The more time she spent with him, the harder it was to keep him from her thoughts. They were dangerous fantasies. Ones that she knew she should never indulge.

When her roommate moved out, she took the couch with her. Now the only comfortable place to watch their movies was on the bed.

At some point he rested his big hand on her leg. Her heart started to pound with just this small amount of touch from him. She snuggled against him, her small frame molded to his warm body. Her mind barely paid attention to the movie as one thought after the other ran through her mind about what she was doing. When it was time to go to bed, she set him up on the floor in the living room. The following week was a similar setup: They watched movies on the bed. When they decided to go to sleep, as he made hesitant noises getting up she said, “You know, you don’t have to sleep on the floor,” the words flew out of her mouth before she could stop herself.

“You mean I can stay up here?” he asked, pointing at her bed.

She nodded. She was tipsy and perhaps that was her excuse for lowered inhibitions. She finally gave in to desire. She released her grip on the reins, while silencing her conscience with an elbow to the gut.

So, he slept in her bed. Nothing happened that night. She may have accidentally kicked him during the night, but that’s it. Did I mention that D was married and had a second child on the way?

The next morning on their drive back to work:

“So, did you sleep well?” she asked him.

“Mostly okay. I had some trouble falling asleep. I was hyper-aware that you were in the bed with me.”

“Believe me, the hyper-awareness was mutual.”

“And I wanted to throw my arm over you and get all cuddly. You probably wouldn’t have minded, but going down that path, things might get kind of murky.”

She didn’t answer with actual words, just some sort of noncommittal muttering and shrugging of shoulders. It was the first time he had said anything that intimated that something might be transpiring between the two of them, whatever “it” might be.

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