Secret 1: The Best Friend
We had sex. It isn't the same anymore.
She has this thing – this obscenely stupid thing – where she chews the sides of her fingernails. She only does it when she’s nervous. It’s one of those sensory ick things - it has always pissed me off. I’ve had to leave the room, before. We’ll be watching television and I’ll ask her to reach across the table for something just to make her stop. She’ll look at me with this odd expression, like I’ve interrupted her in the middle of an important phone call. Really? Now?
She hasn’t it done it once since that night. She hasn’t watched television with me since then, either. I want to send a message that says ‘Just sit there and chew your fingernails to tissue paper and let me watch you, uninterrupted. I’ll never ask you to stop again’. But I won’t do that. We don’t text much anymore either.
We met on a bus when we were twenty-two – one of those end-of-the-festival transport buses, where you cram onto coaches at midnight covered in mud and beer, and still watching colours bend in your periphery because the mushrooms haven’t worn off. I don’t know how we became friends. Maybe the old way – a funny conversation, then some social media follows, a chance meeting at a university party or two, then I got enveloped into her broader friendship group. She was dating someone, I was dating someone: we had the perfect platonic setup. When we became housemates, the intimacy was incidental, easy. We’d stay up with a cup of tea. I’d teach her how to shot whiskey and roast a chicken without poisoning anyone, and she’d teach me how to fold a fitted sheet and roll a perfect cigarette. We had dinner parties and rat fiascos and accidental seances. We had those laughing fits where one of you wets yourself and you realise you’re bonded by piss for life. It was easy, to become best friends. We were butter on bread.
We kept dating other people. She liked tall, lanky men with a limp entrepreneurial drive or a desire to be a music writer one day. I couldn’t fit into the baggy shirt silhouette, so I loathed these men, and was a very good ally during breakups. Personally, I preferred women with what she would call ‘insincerely effortless surf chill’. Mermaid-haired, skateboarding, mid-riff-showing eco-hippies. In contrast, she wore high-necked black vintage, hated the beach, and chewed her fingernails. We were the last people either of us would date, and therefore safe in the impossibility of a mutual attraction, even if ‘my kind of girl’ kept leaving me for men with ponytails and nose rings, and she kept dumping ‘her kind of guy’ because he didn’t know how to do a tax return.
It always felt absurd that she hadn’t been beheld by someone who could understand her. It never occurred to me that she already was.
It happened after she had moved out of the share-house to be closer to work. We were at a festival, tipsy on the thrill of a holiday, and ended up sharing a dome tent at 2am. Her arm passed around my waist and held on, as if that’s what we always did. I turned to say something, to laugh about it, and I just kissed her, instead. It was easy. Butter on bread. She grabbed my face with one hand, eyes kaleidoscopic. The other hand crept to her mouth, a fingernail ready to be chewed.
“I don’t want to mess up what we’ve got.”
“Neither.”
“You promise we’ll stay friends?”
“I promise. You and me, nothing fucking it up.”
It is a very odd thing, to have sex with your best friend. The safe suddenly becomes distinctly dangerous. Can you be ugly in front of them? Can you fart or joke or complain? We were shy, suddenly, but not performative. It was romantic, but there was no confession of secret love. We communicated with desperate, familiar touch instead. The way she gripped my hair in her hand, like she’d been waiting to do it for years. The way I stared at her, reached for her, experienced her body as a once-in-a-decade cosmic phenomenon, after looking at the night sky all my life.
The next morning, I woke up inside the tent hit with that iconic smell of hot canvas and sweat. She wasn’t in there, she’d already half packed her car and was sharing a cigarette with another mate. She greeted me normally, without a hint of coyness. No-one else with us noticed or guessed.
It’s been a few months now. We are still friends, on paper. Same group outings, same group chats. She has been going on dates with a music writer, I think. I’m torn – I want to know everything, I want to read every text message like I used to, but the thought of her with anyone else makes my guts turn over. I scroll through Hinge like it’s Facebook Marketplace, trying to find a second-hand replica of the thing I tried on once and couldn’t afford.
Every time my phone goes off, I bite my nails.