Sometimes, on murky days, when the clouds settle low and the waves crumble limply, I begin to go places I shouldn’t. It’s not that I don’t trust Grey implicitly, because I do. If he says it, it has to be true. He would never lie to me. Never. So when something feels off, his lingering glance, an unprompted compliment, anything that just doesn't jive with what I know to be true, I go back to what he says. And what he says is that we are friends. But on those rare mornings, before I can get my head on straight, before I can wash away the ungrounded musings, I wander into an ocean of doubt. I think back to those lingering glances. The rare compliments. The moments in time when, to anyone looking in from the outside, it would look like we were a whole lot more than the Just Friends we claim to be. I relive those scenes, watch them again without the filter of his words, and they are so completely different. Like watching an M. Night Shyamalan movie the second time, after you saw the big reveal. It's a whole new experience. Some mornings I wish I could sit him down and ask him flat out what he was really thinking in a certain situation. See if it was as innocent as we both have insisted it is. Repeatedly. To anyone willing to listen. And loudest of all to each other. I want to know if he even remembers those small moments that felt so gargantuan to me. The ones that have been ingrained in my memory. We could play a game of memory boggle, where you check to see if, out of the tangled mess of letters, you got the same words as your opponent. "I got the one time you said you liked my hair in a ponytail and you didn't know why I didn't wear it like that more often," I say with my pencil held over my answer sheet ready to cross off anything he also remembers. "I got that one." We both cross it off our lists. "OK. How about the time we went camping and you begged Tommy not to make you share a tent with me?" "I remember that one, too," he says with a sly smirk. A sly smirk that I have no idea what to do with. The one that gets my mind spinning in the first place. Friends don’t smirk at each other like that. "I got that one day at the beach in Coronado when we just laid out and talked for hours," I wrap up my list. "We did? Remind me." Over the twelve years we have known each other, the amount of moments we have shared has to be in the thousands. The words shared, in the millions. Most of them I couldn't remember to save my life. But others? Others I have so deeply seared on my brain that I could recite every one, nail every inflection, every pause, every hesitation. But even in those memories, there are gaps. I remember that day on the beach in Coronado. Sometimes talking, sometimes just laying there. I know I was studying for my Organic Chemistry final, but I have no idea what he was doing. It's just a black hole in my memory. Was he reading a book? Napping? Or just staring at the sun? I have no idea. But I do know I was trying to memorize the valence electrons of the first thirty elements in the periodic table. Maybe because it was a futile endeavor while trying so hard not to think of Grey, shirtless, lying next to me. Grey looks down his list of Memory Boggle words. "How about when you came to watch my first college ball game?" That one? I remember every second. Ten Years Ago Sitting in the stands at Dedeaux Field in the heart of Los Angeles as the early spring sky turns to dusty pinks and purples, I watch my best friend in the one place he is completely relaxed. With hundreds of people watching, I would be a wreck, but on the ballfield, Grey comes alive. It's the one place in his life where he knows exactly what to expect. He scores a home run in the sixth inning of his first college game at USC, but he loses the game on an overthrow to first base. The winning run scores instead of Grey getting the last out of the game and becoming a hero. He is crushed. After pizza with the team and celebrating his first college home run, when everyone goes home, we head back to his dorm room. It’s weird, being inside his room. Looking at the place where he spends his time. Where he dreams his dreams. Where he chose to put the few things that belong to him. It’s intimate. His ring in a small bowl next to his copy of Following the Equator on the nightstand. The way he precisely folds each of his shirts to stack on the wardrobe shelf. The flannel pillowcase where he lays his head each night. It is like getting a little glimpse inside of him. A glimpse he doesn't often let me see. For all the time we’ve spent together, I never got to see his room when he lived at home. He had no idea what kind of mood his dad would be in and he didn't want to expose me to the darker ones. Now that his space is finally free from his dad’s mercurial moods, I get to see the inner sanctum. And I love it. But, the complete privacy in his dorm room, coupled with the fact that his bed is the only place to sit, is a recipe for disaster. Not wanting to give me the wrong impression, Grey has been fidgeting near his bookcase since we got in here. I flop face-first on his bed. "You really should have told me we'd be standing the whole night in that place. I wouldn't have worn these boots." I try to flip them off using only my feet, but the nine-hole Docs are stubborn. No answer from Grey. Instead, he picks up a book. Slides it back on the shelf. Picks up another. Like he's never been in his own room. I sit up to untie my boots and slip them off. "You ready to settle that bet?" he says with renewed spirits. "Sure thing, Steele. But how do you plan on proving Connor was a giant condom for Halloween in eighth grade?" "With this." He pulls his eighth-grade yearbook off the shelf and sits down on the edge of the bed beside me. He flips through the pages until he gets to a page of Connor looking like a giant jellyfish instead of a condom and laughs. "I didn't say it was a good costume. Just that he tried." "Oh my gosh. How did I not know that?" Maybe it was because Connor and Greyson were big, cool eighth-graders while I was a tiny sixth-grader just trying to make my way between classes without being shoved into the bushes. He slowly turns the page, taking a nice long stroll down memory lane, until he arrives at the page with the only picture of me in the whole yearbook. I may have played sick on picture day that year. But I was caught by surprise when the yearbook photographer crashed our lunchtime meeting of the math club to get a club pic. He rubs a finger across my tiny face peeking out from behind the shoulders of two older boys. "How did I not notice little Charlie Sands back then? You were such a little cutie." "Maybe because you spent your lunch at the cool kids' table while I spent mine at Maths club." "You mean Math Club." "Oh, no. I mean Maths Club. Erik Blackton thought we sounded so much cooler calling it Maths Club, like the British do. Like there was actually a way to make doing math cool. Oh my God, I was such a geek." "You weren't a geek, just a little too smart for your own good back then. You came into your own well enough." He studies my face like he's assessing whether he can still see traces of that little geeky girl as he brushes a strand of hair out of my face. Up to that point in my life, I thought sexual tension was just a turn of phrase. But that day I could see it in the air like a smog bubble over the LA basin. I think that when your usually quiet train of thought becomes a howling screeching train of what the hell is going on here, it makes it difficult to carry on even the most basic of conversations. And all the silent gaps between us just fuel the engine. "I hate this," he mumbles. What is that supposed to mean? You hate me being here? You hate that you can see that I like you and that is making you uncomfortable? Or you hate that pursuing your dreams of playing pro ball has separated us so much? I'm not waiting for him to explain. "I hate that you live so far away now." He looks up at me with those puppy dog eyes, eyes that I have really missed seeing on a daily basis while he's been here. Talking on the phone is great and all, but it's not the same when I can't read the expression on his face. Of course, the expression I'm seeing right now is doing more to confuse than to enlighten. "I know. And you have to drive all this way just to hang out for a couple of hours, and then drive back home after." A small voice in the back of my head whispers, I don't have to... He kicks at the untied shoelace on his black Converse. Then looks at me. Then back to his lace. He looks like he's trying to study my reaction as much as I am his. I finally string together a thought that doesn’t involve me inviting myself to sleepover. "Yeah. But it's not like I could miss your first college game. You know how many times I've had to listen to you talk about how one day you'd play college ball and then get recruited to play for the Cubbies?" The Chicago Cubbies. The halfway-across-the-country Cubbies. Who play in the cold and windy and oceanless Chicago. Yep, this is only going to get worse. He runs his hand over the short hair at the back of his head. "I just don't like the thought of you driving home so late." From somewhere deep, that voice proposes, I don't have to. I may have taken Precautions before coming here. Packed some extra insulin and maybe some clothes. Just to be responsible. Not because there was something that felt different about this visit, even before I came. No. I simply don't want to be caught somewhere without insulin. Or a change of clothes. You never know what might happen. He bends down to tie his lace. Maybe that's his way of telling me to get the hell out of his dorm. Then he unties it. And unties his other shoe. He's never had a problem just outright telling me it was time to go, but maybe college Grey is more subtle. He slips off both shoes and stares at them. Then gets up and walks to the wardrobe on the other side of his room to put them away beside the other pairs of shoes aligned perfectly along the bottom. I spin around and lean up against the headboard so I can still see him. But he just stands there, staring into his wardrobe like it has the answers to the universe. Like it's screaming 42 at him. He pulls his head out of his butt, I mean his wardrobe, and begins a hundred sentences that will never be completed. "I..." He runs his hand up and down the edge of the wardrobe door, picking at an invisible splinter. "It's..." He peeks out from behind the safety of the doors. "Do you..." Then he turns back to that damned wardrobe. Maybe it knows what the hell he's talking about. Without even looking my way, he sort of whispers, "I don't want you driving too late." It almost sounds like he's thinking about inviting me to stay. Maybe he’s got a little voice feeding him messages, too. But he only has a twin bed. And that’s a huge leap from twelve years of friend-land to sleeping together. Sure. It would just be sleeping, but still, a gigantic, gargantuan, unsurmountable jump. He must not know what to do with that thought either, because, without warning, he pulls his shoes back from the shoe parking lot and slips them on and we somehow end up walking to my car. Like we're walking to our execution. Each step slow. Premeditated. Intentional. He opens my door and hangs on the outside. Picks at the rubber liner. Taps on the glass a few times. Looks up at me. "Thanks for coming to see me play. It helped to see you in the stands when everything went wrong." Come on Sands, say something. Anything. Instead, I lean in and, stupidly, try to hug him through the door. He steps around it and wraps me up in a bear hug that lasts a second longer than necessary. "I really did need you here today." As I drive home that night, or rather sit in endless LA traffic, those moments in his room flash in my mind. When he brushed the hair out of my face. Said I came into my own just fine. The way he was so slow to ask me to go. Hesitant. The slow shuffle to my car. Under normal circumstances, I would think he was considering kissing me. Asking me to stay. But, by the time I arrive home that night, I have convinced myself that I read him wrong. That I misunderstood. That it was all some sort of weird girly spell I must have fallen under to ever think he had any of those feelings for me. So, I cling to the one thing I know will get me through the continual confusion. His word. His word is clear. He said we are friends. So it must be so. Everything else has to be my imagination. But on those murky winter mornings, even years later, when I replay those pauses, the looks, I doubt my strong conclusions. Maybe he was wavering. Maybe he wanted more. His inner dialog could have been shouting at him. Trying to persuade him to tell me. To act on it. It is only a momentary doubt, though, because I quickly remind myself of what I know. I listen to that voice of reason. And I push down that other voice. Shove it far, far away. Far enough that I can’t even hear the distant whisper of what it is telling me. And everything is good once again. Until that voice says the one thing that could shatter my finely constructed world. What if that voice, that teeny, tiny voice, the one I push so far down and readily dismiss, what if that voice is right? Could my best friend in the world be lying straight to my face? Could he have lied to me for years? Years. Could he really want more? And what would that do to us to try?