Page 18 of Necessary Time

Colin

I’d liketo have you as a friend was not the same thing as I’d like to be your friend, and it had been four days since my birthday and I still couldn’t come up with a reason I’d used one figure of speech instead of the other.

I was thirty-eight.

Officially.

What good could come from making friends with my colleague’s barely legal younger brother?

It was that exact thought in my head when my phone vibrated with an incoming text message. I wasn’t overtly social and the burden of too many friendships wasn’t ever going to be mine, so I knew without checking the screen, the message was from Wesley.

Wesley: Do you go to bed as early as you have dinner?

I huffed a breath, daring a glance at the clock on my monitor before answering him.

Me: I can’t go to bed at five if that’s when I eat.

Wesley: Seven then?

Me: Are you asking if I go to bed at 7??

Wesley: Indirectly.

It was half after four, and I could start packing it in for the day with limited guilt in ten or fifteen minutes.

Me: I don’t go to bed at 7.

Me: What are you after?

Wesley: I’m bored.

Oh, to be young again.

Me: I’m at work.

Wesley: STILL???

Me: I’ll call you from the car in a few.

I dropped my phone onto the desk, face down, then turned back to the emails that needed replies and handled them. I organized a couple piles of papers, leafed through a project folder that I should have paid more attention to earlier in the week, but none of it was enough to warrant much care.

But it wasn’t just that.

I didn’t want to be at work because I wanted to be with Wesley.

And I didn’t understand what that meant, but I knew it wasn’t good. Because I was too old to be his friend, and any other reasons for wanting to be with him had to be so far out of the realm of possibility…

“Fuck it,” I muttered under my breath, powering down my computer and grabbing my bag and jacket. I managed to avoid Hendrix on the way to the garage, which was good because I didn’t want to explain why I was hanging out with his kid brother or why it had me so flustered.

In the car, I re-read the short text message chain between us, knowing I shouldn’t call him. Knowing that there were feelings in my chest that had no right being there. Knowing that it was a bad idea to think about them, to think about Wesley. I’d gone my entire adult life being able to deny where my real interests lay, and I wasn’t going to start indulging them now. Especially not about my co-worker's barely legal little brother.

But his eyes.

I pressed the call button, and Wesley answered on the first ring like he’d been sitting there, waiting for my call. Which I suppose he had been.

“Hey,” he said, voice full of excitement, as it always was.

“Hey.” My voice cracked, and I cleared my throat as I pulled out of the garage and onto the street. “What’s up?”