Day 9

7:00 am

Despite my slight hangover, I got up at 6 a.m. to shower, grab a coffee, and hid myself away in my room before Brad woke up. I stuck a note on my bedroom door that said "big work problem! See you at lunch." Now I'm in here, writing this. I feel like shit about it, but after the semi-drunk knee stroking incident, I don't see how we can face each other without talking about it. And we can't talk about it without the rather huge chance that he's going to tell me "sorry, man, I was drunk, I don't swing that way," and then I'm going to feel stupid for having enough hope to even develop a crush, and then I'm going to spiral into disappointment and feel stupid for even feeling entitled to disappointment.

God fucking damn it. Brad is awake. I heard him walk up to my door, read the note, and shuffle away again. I just want to pop out the door, say "just kidding!" and... I don't know, make him toast or something. Ugh. This is the worst.

Okay. Gotta start work. That'll get my mind off this. Hopefully.

11:00 pm

Okay. Day 9 over. No confrontation over last night, surprisingly, but a whole lot more confusing shit to deal with.

At noon, I left my room for lunch. I could hear Brad moving around in the kitchen, dishes clattering around. I was shaking when I finally opened my door and stepped out into the living room, but Brad was distracted. He was opening the front door and picking up a large package.

I asked him what it was when he came back inside and he tisked his tongue and said, "Never you mind."

He took the package to his room and I got kind of freaked out and said I had a big work problem going on and should probably eat at my desk while I worked. Brad sounded disappointed, but he said, "Oh, okay. Let me just make you a sandwich."

I offered to do it myself but Brad wouldn't let me. I wished he had gone into his room to open the package. I could have stolen my lunch and hidden away in my room. Instead I had to stand there at the breakfast bar while he made me a BLT with bacon he had just cooked up. I was trying to think of something to say, but he beat me.

"What's your work problem?" he asked. "Is it that Ian guy?"

Thank god he said that, because otherwise I would have babbled some made-up story that doesn't make sense. But no, I had a ready-made story about Ian's incompetance that I could Frankenstein into some kind of big problem I could be solving in there.

"Sounds like it sucks," he said when I was done. "Are you going to be working late, or...?"

When he asked that, his voice was so... soft. Like he hoped my answer would be "no," but he was bracing himself for disappointment. Despite how scared I was, I couldn't disappoint him. So I told the truth.

"No, I should be done at the usual time."

"Okay, good. I thought we could order pizza for dinner. The place down the street is doing contactless delivery. Then do you want to play Cards Against Humanity?"

I pointed out that there were only two of us. He said, "We can just add random cards to each round so it's like we're playing against an NPC."

So I went back to my desk and ate a sad lunch alone, listening to the rustling sounds of Brad moving around the living room. I wondered what he was doing. What was the magic trick of the day? I heard the sounds of him opening up the package and wondered what the hell was in there.

As soon as I stepped out of my room in the evening, Brad was all over me. Asking me how the day was, whether the problem with Ian was solved, if I was stressed out. Asking if I wanted a beer (the answer was yes). Asking if I wanted Guinness or some fancy fruity local beer (always the fancy kind). Asking what kind of pizza I wanted (anything, whatever he felt like).

Once I had a beer in hand and the pizza was on its way, I sat down on the couch and relaxed. It's funny—I wasn't stressed out because of a work thing, but I was stressed out from worrying about me and Brad, so I kind of let myself show that stress. Brad dragged over the ottoman and I put my feet up and, as he checked out my bruise, made up a couple things I dealt with today, all the while kind of replacing each of them with the way he was making me feel.

"Yeah, you know, it sucks to worry about how you're coming off to someone. Like, does Ian think I'm an asshole? When I have to check in with him about his work, am I coming on too strong?"

"I can't imagine you coming on too strong," he said, laughing. "You're, like, the nicest person I've ever met."

"Well, you don't work for me," I said, hoping I wasn't blushing as much as I felt like I was. "I may seem nice, but I'm a real hard-ass boss."

He looked up at me and raised his eyebrows like he doubted me. So, of course, I had to convince him.

"Seriously, I'm militant about my weekly reports. If I don't have your weekly report by Friday afternoon, man, you'd better watch out. I'll be in your inbox for sure."

"Politely inquiring?" he joked.

"Politely?" I scoffed. "No, I'm like, 'Hi Ian, I notice it's 2 o'clock and I don't have your report yet. Kindly send it along at your earliest convenience. Regards, Adam.' I hit him with a 'kindly' and a 'regards'! The double-whammy of business-speak."

"Damn," he said. "How about 'as per my last email'? Ever deploy that weapon of mass destruction?"

"I won't hesitate to drop that bomb when I need to."

"Stone cold Adam Garrett," he said.

"That's me."

Brad was about to say something, but then the pizza arrived. He pulled himself up from his crouching position to go pick it up. At that point, I felt better. Maybe we didn't have to talk about anything from yesterday. It's in the past, right?

We ate the pizza, watched a couple episodes of some crazy Netflix crime show, and played Cards Against Humanity, and boy oh boy, the cards really were against humanity tonight. Some of the insane sentences I had to read out include "She's a lady in the streets, an old dog full of tumors in the streets" and "As Teddy Roosevelt said, the four manly virtues are honor, temperance, industry, and necrophilia." Then I got the absolute worst combination, as if the cards had conjured up the worst possible thing for me to read out in light of my feelings.

"'What's the gayest?'" I read off the black card. I flipped through the white cards and read out, "'Overcompensation'... 'Emma Watson'... 'Bad emotions I don't want.'"

Jesus. I've never felt more seen. I wanted to pick "bad emotions I don't want," because it was obviously so perfect, but that felt too close to the truth. So I picked "Emma Watson."

Brad nodded thoughtfully. "Not my card, unfortunately."

I couldn't stop wondering if his was "overcompensation" or the bad emotions one.

And then—this fucking game, I swear to god—Brad read off a black card, "'I tell you, it was a non-stop fuckfest. When it was over, my asshole looked like...'" He turned over the white cards. "'The flaming wreckage of the International Space Station'... 'Foreskin.'" He snorted. "Or 'Homework.' Hmm..." He pursed his lips and slid them back and forth across his teeth. He selected "homework" as the winner and said, "Something to do."

That was mine. My face was absolutely on fire, just as red as it felt. I reached for the card, revealing that that was mine, and he burst out laughing.

"Damn, that was good," he said. "You're so good at this game."

I won the game after we tallied it all up. It was ten o'clock—not really late enough to go to bed, but I didn't know what we were going to do.

"Hey, did you learn a magic trick today?" I asked.

Brad grinned. "I thought you'd never ask. Hold on."

He went to his room and rummaged about for a moment, and when he came back, he was holding something rather large behind his back.

"So I tried to learn a proper trick with this," he said, "but it's far beyond my skill level. So, um... pick a hand. Except they're both holding the same thing."

"Uh, right," I said.

He shifted the thing he was holding behind his back around to the front and said, "Ta da!"

It was a plant with lots of long, thin leaves, sitting in a top hat. Brad carefully took the plant out of the hat, revealing its normal ceramic pot, and put the top hat on his head.

"Yesterday when you were sad, I thought I'd get you a plant," he said. "It's a spider plant. It can sit on the windowsill in your room. Do you like it?"

My eyes were prickling with tears but I managed to say, "Yeah, I love it" like a relatively normal person.

It's sitting on my windowsill right now, just across from my bed. It looks like a green afro in a little green ceramic pot. Tomorrow we're going to name it. I have a couple ideas, but I want to hear what Brad thinks.

Jesus. If I had known a week ago that we'd be naming a plant together...

Okay, this is bad. I'm thinking of plant names for us to decide on and we haven't even had a "hey, what's going on between us?" talk, or done anything more than flirt and lightly touch each other, that's kind of a problem. And it's not even reciprocal touching—he's touching my foot and ankle and knee, bumping my hip in the kitchen, tousling my hair, but I'm terrified to touch him the way he touches me.

Oh. Hey. He's touched me... oh god, a lot of times. Maybe I should be touching him back. Maybe he's been waiting for me to do that, this whole time. Whoa. I think I've just made a breakthrough.

Okay. Tomorrow, I'm going to do it.