Make Me Read Free Page A

actually mean to part when he pulled me in.
    Now I’m practically kissing his left pec, and, oh, that muscle is so damned heavy. It’s so solid. I think I might be wet between my legs, over nothing more than some brief hugs and a generous compliment.
    ‘Doesn’t she look good, Bran?’ he asks, but he’s talking out of his ass. I’m wearing jeans and my hair’s all loosely pulled back in a way that suggests I’m about to wash my face, and both things look singularly incongruous in a place like this. I need a cocktail dress, I need high heels, I need Prada.
    I need some goddamn steel plating.
    ‘Yeah,’ Brandon replies, but he seems about as convinced as I am. There’s this expression on his face that I don’t recognise – a sort of uncomfortable, half-pained look – and it gets tighter and more intense as this goes on.
    By the time we’ve gotten around to talking about tonight, he’s almost beside himself – though I’ve no idea why. Is he really this bothered by how I look, five years later? I feel like telling him: people age, you know. And also, sometimes they just want to wear their comfortable trainers and an old jersey. Not everyone can be as awesome and Calvin Klein as you, jockstrap.
    All of which is a little unkind, I know, but sue me. I’m caught in a mahogany cage, and I’m vulnerable.
    ‘So, are you staying in town?’ Tyler asks, and of course he does so at exactly the wrong time. It’s just after I’ve noticed that Brandon seems overpoweringly eager to get away, and right before he makes this sound:
hurk
.
    So I don’t think I can be blamed for my response, exactly. ‘Oh … no. No, I just thought I’d … you know, stop in and say congratulations. I mean, I have this hair appointment, and I’ve got to call at the dry cleaner’s before it closes, so …’
    There’s no hair appointment. And I’ll be perfectly honest, I don’t even own any clothes that need dry cleaning.
    ‘I should probably just get going.’
    Of course I think of the note I left for them both the moment I’ve said it. The similarities are uncanny, they really are – the same awkward excuses about having to do something that doesn’t exist, the same vague end to it. I mean, could I have crammed more non-specific hedging in there? All I need are some
littles
and
maybes
to go with those
reallys
and
justs
, and we’re right back to where we left off.
    It’s like it hasn’t been five years, at all. It’s been five seconds.
    ‘Seriously? You’re going to skip the party?’
    Such an elegant choice of words from him, truly.
Skip
instead of anything less loaded, like
not able to make
or maybe even
miss
. Skip suggests I’m running out on them; that I’m a flake who can’t hold my shit together – and I’m pretty sure he knows that.
    The years have only made him stronger, smoother, better. I bet he could talk Mother Teresa into a gangbang with very little effort at all. Despite the fact that she’s been dead for God knows how long.
    ‘Well, I’m really not dressed for a –’ I start, but he anticipates that, too. He anticipates it before I’ve even finished talking, and he does it in a way that makes me simultaneously angry and ready to faint on a chaise longue.
    ‘Here, take my credit card. Get yourself something,’ he says, just like that. As though he’s James Bond or Aristotle Onassis or some other smooth sort of character that I can’t even think of, because seriously no one is like this. And it’s not just me that thinks so because once the offer is made Brandon gives him such a look.
    I think he actually starts to tell him
don’t
, too, but after another shared and silent exchange that I’m not a part of, Brandon glances away, defeated. And all of Tyler’s three-hundred-watt attention is back on me again.
    ‘Of course, I think you look fine as you are,’ he says, and I wonder if it’s in response to that expression of Brandon’s. Like maybe he was teasing me and Brandon knew it, and