Best Friends Forever Read Free

when you were the potential fol ow-up act.
    He was nice, I thought, as Matthew expounded enthusiastical y on the hike he’d taken just last weekend with the Sierra Club.
    “I go out with them a few times a month,” he volunteered. “Maybe you could join me?”
    My first thought was that he was kidding
    —me, hike? Where, from the Cinnabon to the Ben & Jerry’s? I stil had to remind myself that I was now more or less normal-sized, and that Matthew had never seen me in my previous incarnation. “Sure. That sounds like fun.” A hike in the woods. I let myself picture it: a red fleece pul over, a hat that matched my mittens, the thermos ful of hot coffee that I’d bring.
    We’d sit side by side on a blanket in the leaves and watch as a stream burbled by.
    Our entrees arrived. My fish was mealy at the edges, translucent in the center, tasting as dead as if it had never been alive. I managed two bites while Matthew told the story of how his col eague, a middle-aged middle manager named Fred, had suddenly taken it into his head to get his eyes done.
    “He came into the office and he looked
    —Wel , one of the secretaries said he looked like a squirrel with something jammed up his…” He paused. A dimple flashed in his cheek. “Like a startled squirrel. Like his eyes were trying to jump right out of his head, and I heard that when his granddaughter saw him for the first time she started crying.” He chuckled. I smiled. Love me, I thought, and sipped my wine and trailed one manicured thumbnail delicately along the edge of my blouse, beneath which my breasts swel ed, clad in itchy lace, helped along by heavy-duty under-wire. Matthew leaned across the table, with his tie dangling dangerously close to the puddle of beef blood on his plate. “You’re a real y of beef blood on his plate.
    “You’re a real y unique person,” he said.
    I smiled, shoving my doubts about the syntax of “real y unique” to the back of my mind.
    “I feel so comfortable with you. Like I could tel you anything,” he continued.
    I kept smiling as he gazed at me. He had nice eyes behind the glasses. Kind eyes.
    Maybe I could talk him into shaving the mustache. I could see us together, on a slope covered with fal en leaves, my mittened hands around a cup, the coffeescented steam curling in the air. Please stop
    talking, I begged him telepathical y. Every
    time you open your mouth, you are
    jeopardizing our beautiful life together. Sadly, Matthew didn’t get the message.
    “Six months ago,” he began, with his eyes locked on mine, “I woke up with a bright light shining through my bedroom windows. I looked up and saw an enormous green disc hovering above my home.”
    “Ha!” I laughed. “Ha ha ha!” I laughed until I realized he wasn’t laughing…which meant that he wasn’t kidding.
    “I have reason to believe,” he continued, and then paused, lips parted beneath his mustache, “that I was abducted by aliens that night.” He was so close that I could feel his beefy breath on my face. “That I was probed. ”
    “Dessert?” asked the waiter, sliding menus in front of us.
    I managed to shake my head no. I couldn’t speak. I was single, true. I was desperate, also true. I had slept with only one man at the shameful y advanced age of thirty-three. I’d never heard the words “I love you” from someone who wasn’t a parent. But stil , I was not going home with a guy who claimed to have been violated by space aliens. A girl has her limits.
    When the check came, Matthew slipped a credit card into the leather folder and looked at me rueful y. “I guess I shouldn’t talk about the alien abduction on first dates.”
    I adjusted my neckline. “Probably not. I usual y wait until the third date to talk about my tail.”
    “You have a tail?” Now he was the one who couldn’t tel if I was kidding.
    “A smal one.”
    “You’re
    funny,”
    he’d
    said.
    There
    was
    a
    kind
    of drowning desperation in his voice, a tone I knew wel