Page 26 of The Friend Zone Experiment

“I understand,” he said.

Renee sighed.

“Do you think I’m a huge slut?” she said plaintively.

That succeeded in making Ket Siong raise his head. He looked taken aback. “No.”

“Good. Obviously it’s fine if casual sex is your thing,” Renee added conscientiously, thinking of Nathalie, whose amorous adventures prior to marriage Renee had always regarded with respectful admiration. “But I don’t usually—last night was the first time I’ve ever taken a guy home like that.” She smiled. “As you said, you’re not just any guy.”

Ket Siong reflected her smile back at her, but she seemed to have made him more depressed than anything else.

He said, “Back then… it didn’t end well between us.”

Maybe it had been a mistake to refer to their shared past.

“No,” said Renee.

“I’ve always been sorry for that.”

Renee didn’t want to go over that old ground.

“It’s fine,” she said quickly. “Ancient history.”

Ket Siong shook his head. “I didn’t handle it well.” He didn’t seem comfortable talking about how they’d parted, either, but it was clear this was important to him.

“It’s not how I wanted things to go,” he said, with an effort. “I felt I didn’t have a choice.”

“Because you were leaving London,” said Renee, who desperately wanted this part of the conversation to be over.

Ket Siong hesitated. “That was part of it.”

Renee could have asked what the other part was, but she knew the answer. She’d spent enough time brooding on the ill-starred evening that had ended their friendship.

She’d pushed things too far, dragged Ket Siong into something he’d later realised he didn’t want. It would have hurt less if Ket Siong had pretended he wanted to stay friends after. But the fact was, he hadn’t trusted her not to make things weird again.

And he was probably right. Renee had been head over heels for him, and she wasn’t used to being into a boy without him returning her feelings. The guys she’d dated at that age might not have treated her well, or turned up on time for dates, or valued her achievements. But she’d never had any difficulty getting them todateher. She wouldn’t have been great at keeping things platonic with Ket Siong.

He’d had to leave the country anyway. From his point of view, there had been no reason to maintain the connection.

“I get why you did it,” said Renee. “I’m not going to pretend it didn’t upset me at the time. But it was a long time ago, Ket Siong. We were both so young. There’s no need to dwell on the past.”

Ket Siong was turning his cup over and over in his hands. He put it down.

“I understand you’re not interested in… that now’s not the right time for a relationship,” he said. “But I meant what I said. I’d like to keep in touch.”

“Keep in touch,” echoed Renee.

“It was good, when we were friends,” said Ket Siong. “Wasn’t it?”

That, Renee couldn’t deny.

If this was a guy Renee had pulled at a club, or even an old acquaintance from uni, it would have been easy to decline further contact. But Ket Siong was different. She knew he only ever said what he meant. She could trust him to respect the boundaries she’d drawn.

And it wasn’t like Renee had loads of friends. It had been exciting when Nathalie announced she was moving to London, butthey hadn’t seen all that much of each other since she’d arrived with her family a few months ago. With a big job, a small child, and a husband, Nathalie was never quite as available for cocktails and gossip as they both would have liked.

Renee was busy, too, of course. Even though Nathalie was the only close friend she had in London—the one person she might ring up in an emergency, or suggest lunch to for no particular reason—she barely noticed her isolation, day to day. It wasn’t like she’d had many friends she could rely on in Singapore, either. She was used to being on her own.

That didn’t mean she didn’t know it was a problem. Her therapist used to suggest it might be an idea for Renee to be less guarded with others, allow people to get close to her. Or rather, she’d listened and asked questions until Renee herself came to that conclusion. But it was one thing to recognise that something might be a good thing in theory, another to execute.