Just Remember to Breathe (Thompson Sisters)

bed, curling around one of my pillow.
    She looked at me, then said, “Okay, so … I think Joel may be coming around.”
    I rolled my eyes. “Oh come on, Kelly. He just wants to be out there, getting laid.”
    “You don’t know that.”
    “What makes you think differently?”
    She leaned back, her back against the wall, her legs hanging off the side of her bed. It looked extremely uncomfortable.
    “Well,” she replied. “I told you he asked me out on Friday. I turned him down again. So he sends me a poem.”
    “Oh, no, he didn’t.”
    She nodded, grinning. “It was awful. But really sweet, too.”
    “I didn’t know he wrote poetry.”
    “Well… don’t tell him I said this, but he really shouldn’t.”
    I burst out laughing.
    “So… this morning I was in Doctor Abernathy’s office.” Kelly was also on work-study, and spent two mornings a week as a receptionist at Columbia University Medical Center. “And a courier comes in. With a bouquet of hollyhock.”
    “A bouquet of what? ”
    “Come on, Alex. It’s only my favorite flower. Point is, he remembered. He didn’t send me a dozen roses, which would be nice, but unoriginal. Instead, he sent me something he knew I would love.”
    “Okay, that’s really sweet, I’ll admit it.”
    “Okay, so he wants to go out Saturday. And I really want to. But… not alone. Not the first time. I need my best friend along.”
    “Won’t that be awkward?”
    “Not if you bring a date.”
    “Um… no.”
    “ Alex! Come on!”
    “Seriously, no. There’s no one I’m even remotely interested in dating.”
    Now she rolled her eyes. “Oh yeah, right. I see. Let me think. I’m trying to think of a guy you can ask.”
    “Good luck with that,” I replied.
    “Oh, I know,” she said, her voice sarcastic. “Let me think… I bet there’s someone you see every other day at work-study. And spend hours with. And then on the other days you get up at a nightmare hour to go running with. Eww. Seriously.”
    “Kelly, stop. It’s not like that.”
    She sat up straight and threw a pillow at me. “Come on, Alex! You’re my friend. I need you on this. And it’s not like you don’t spend six days a week with him anyway!”
    “Yeah, but those aren’t dates!”
    I was telling the truth. Even though he hadn’t asked me to come again, I’d been showing up at six a.m. every other day. We ran together, sometimes in silence. This morning, in fact, we’d gone almost three miles. To be honest, I was secretly pleased I’d been able to keep up. And at least once or twice a week we had breakfast. Or coffee, after leaving the rare manuscripts library. But we weren’t dating. And, by and large, we’d avoided the kind of talk that had gotten us into trouble a couple weeks ago. We were following the rules, and it was working, and I didn’t want to ruin it.
    I held my breath, thinking, hard. I really didn’t want to ruin it.
    I swallowed, then said, “All right. But it won’t be a date.”
    “Whatever, Alex.”
    I smiled at Kelly.
    She said, “Thanks.”
    “Don’t be surprised if he turns me down.”
    “I don’t understand either one of you.”
    I sighed. “I don’t either.”

    Flowers from Afghanistan (Dylan)

    Bad idea, I thought. Really bad idea. First of all, it was a Saturday night, and I was walking to Alex’s dorm room to meet her and pick her up for our non-date. Or our non-date date? Undate? Whatever. We were going to a bar, where people would be drinking, and loud, and obnoxious, and my only tenuous connection to reality would be the one person I could not reach out to.
    This was a really fucking bad idea.
    I checked my phone. Ten after ten already. I was late. I quickly sent her a text.
    BE THERE IN A MOMENT SORRY LATE
    She wrote back damn near instantly.
    Ok. Hugs. :)
    Oh, come on. Seriously? Hugs? That was the absolute last thing either one of us needed to be doing.
    After our way-too-open morning run and breakfast, I’d worked hard to reestablish normality. It was necessary. But we were still spending a huge amount of time together. The next Thursday morning, at six am, she’d shown up on the green without a word, in running shoes and a significantly less revealing outfit than the first day. That was a relief. If she’d only known how my breath had caught when I’d seen her that first day.
    Better she didn’t.
    So, not only did I follow her rules, I made up my own.
    No flirting.
    No excessive eye contact.
    Above all, nothing that could be