Friends Like Us Read Online Free Page B

eyes.
    And then our teeth bang together. And Ben laughs, a moist, nervous exhalation right into my mouth, and I’m leaning across a gear shift kissing my old friend, which, as it turns out, is sort of like kissing my grandmother, although to be fair I’ve never actually felt her tongue on mine, but there’s something similar about it, close and earthbound and familiar. But it’s Ben! So I soldier on, praying for transformation, bracing my suddenly heavy body so that I don’t collapse onto him, and I am struck by the sensation of a kiss in a way I never have been before, that it is two people trying to eat each other, one hot mouth inside the other. Then again, his lips are soft, his hand in my hair reassuring.
    “Can I ask you a question?” Ben says, when we’re finished.
    “Please.” His face is still next to mine. There is a stray eyelash on his cheek.
    “Did you eat pretzels today?”
    “What kind of a question is that?” I ask.
    “You taste … pretzel-y.” The rogue strand of hair has fallen in front of my eye. Ben gently places it back behind my ear.
    “Is that what you ask the girl you’ve just kissed after pining for her for twelve years?”
    “I didn’t pine for you.” He laughs. His breath is warm, close. “Okay, maybe I, you know, thought about you from time to time, but no, no pining.”
    “You pined!”
    “Just tell me if you had pretzels, and we can move on.” He shifts in his seat, his jacket rustling again, like wings.
    “No,” I say. “But I had a raw onion for lunch.”
    “Ah, that’s it.”
    “And some garlic bread, and clam chowder.”
    “Oh, Wendy,” Ben says, shaking his head and smiling. He reaches for the vent blowing on us and tips it away. Neither of us says anything for a minute, our silence punctuated by the hiss of the heater, the wind, the tinny plink of icy snow. The kiss, so clear to me just a moment ago as a misguided expression of sympathy, an intimate mistake, is beginning to transmute into a confused longing. I glance at Ben for a reading on the situation, but his brow is just slightly furrowed, his expression opaque. He pushes his hand through his hair. “So, that, uh, what we just did,” he starts.
    “It was …”
    “… weird.”
    “Yes!” I say. “I mean, I’m really, really glad—”
    He holds up both hands in front of himself, palms out, like a crossing guard. “Can we … do you think we could not talk about it?”
    I’m staring at his strange face, a place I used to know. “Uh-huh.”
    “Ever again,” he adds.
    My body is still awkwardly inclined toward Ben. I lean back quickly, readjust myself. “I didn’t really have a raw onion and clam chowder for lunch,” I say.
    Ben nods. “I could go for some soup.”
    I imagine him at our small, round kitchen table, Ben and me and Jane, the three of us, slurping big bowls of the matzo ball soup that Jane and I sometimes pick up from Nate’s Deli on Pinefield. “You should come over sometime,” I say. “You could meet my roommate.”
    Ben smiles at me and then looks down and mumbles something else about soup, or possibly he says that the evening has been super. “I’d like that,” he says. “A lot.” And maybe the heat in the car has finally kicked in, but for the first time all evening, I’m warm.

Chapter Three
    My eyes popped open at seven-thirty this morning, and I stared at the ceiling for forty-five minutes, considering everything with a mixture of relief and regret—half expecting Ben to call, the way he used to when we were in high school, early, filling me in on our plans for the day (The Reptile Festival! The Mustard Museum!). I know last night happened—I told Jane all about it when I got home—but maybe, in the ensuing hours, it has somehow transformed into a kind of dreamy symbolism, the closing of the book of my friendship with Ben instead of the opening of a new chapter. I wonder how long I’ll let myself think about him. I’m not that kind of girl.
    Jane