Carbs

By Andrew Maynard

Annie told Kyle that her grandpa had a heart attack and she’d have to bail on what was supposed to be a double date at the Olive Garden, so now Kyle sits across from Jen and Eric on the lonely side of a four-person booth trying to think about anything other than the profound hand job that mangled what once was a perfectly balanced tricycle with defined systems (Jen and Eric dating, Kyle, a little jealous but mostly cool with being third wheel) into this wobbly clusterfuck of a dinner party that can barely enjoy oversized plates of Fettuccine Alfredo and endless breadsticks because it’s hard to eat when you know you’re a bad friend, and Kyle knows he is a bad friend, though he can’t possibly tell Eric about the hand job because it would ruin everything they built, and a 12-year friendship is worth more than—Kyle’s train of thought is derailed as he and Jen make eye contact at the precise moment her long fingers curl around the end of a golden-brown breadstick and like deja vu Kyle is back in the back of her Honda Civic where she made him promise, mid-jerk, that he’d never tell Eric, and he won’t, he can’t, and he accepts the fact that he’ll never be the person he thought he could be, because that person would never get a hand job from his best friend’s girlfriend, no matter how much he loves her—and Eric picks up his phone and apologizes, but he has to leave, because he’s on-call, and Kyle didn’t know being on-call was the responsibility of a dermatology PA, but when Jen tries to get up, Eric insists that she stay, because there is still fettuccine on their plates and a half-full basket of breadsticks and more drinks on the way, and now it’s just Kyle and Jen, alone for the first time since what Jen thought would be the last time, and she doesn’t regret giving Kyle the hand job because it snapped her and Eric out of the stasis of a stalled relationship, and he’s been so much more present since she told him, and she just knows that they have what it takes to get through this, and if they can get through this they can get through anything, but man she wishes Kyle would stop being such a puppy dog about the whole thing, the way he looks at her is so pathetic, and she didn’t know it was possible for a grown man to put so much weight into a handy, and Kyle and Annie both understand that the heart is a spider web capable of trapping and feasting on small, beautiful joys and being swiped into oblivion without notice, but what they don’t know is Annie’s grandpa’s heart is totally fine, and Eric is not on his way to the office but Annie’s apartment where he’s been going weekly since he found out about the secret hand job, and Eric and Annie intend to do things to one another that make a hand job seem more like a handshake on the spectrum of philandering, and the waitress sets down Jen and Kyle’s drinks and smiles and says, Is there anything else you need, and the answer is, of course, yes, but neither is ready to admit it.

Andrew Maynard is a teacher and writer in Richmond, Virginia. His stories and essays have appeared in HAD, DIAGRAM, Mud Season Review, True Story, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere.

Art by Ryan Meadows, a 24 year old queer artist and hairstylist living in Phoenix, AZ.