Best Friends Cross the Line at Midnight

I’ve never told anyone this—not my roommate, not the guys on the basketball team, not even the girl I dated sophomore year who kept asking why I never brought anyone home. But I’m telling you now, because the secret has been sitting under my tongue like a hot coal ever since Cassidy’s twenty-first birthday, and if I don’t spit it out I think I’ll choke on it.

Kofi. That’s me. Twenty-two, Black, third-year poli-sci, built like I still live in the weight room even though I haven’t touched a free weight since midterms. Cassidy is—was—my best friend. White girl, five-six, freckles scattered across her nose like somebody flicked a paintbrush, dirty-blonde hair she always wore in that messy knot that made me want to pull the elastic out with my teeth. We’d been inseparable since the second week of freshman orientation, when she spilled an entire iced coffee down the front of my white T-shirt and then spent twenty minutes trying to blot it off while laughing so hard she snorted. That was it. Instant. Study partners, late-night dining-hall runs, the person I texted first when anything good or shitty happened. Everybody on campus assumed we were fucking. We weren’t. Not until that night.

Her apartment was a second-floor walk-up three blocks off campus, the kind of place that always smelled like vanilla candles and the cheap lavender detergent she used. It was her birthday. Twenty-one. I’d brought a shitty grocery-store cake with blue frosting and a half-melted plastic candle, plus a bottle of cheap champagne we’d already killed by ten. We’d been watching movies for hours—first some rom-com she forced on me, then the action flick I picked to even the score, then whatever garbage was still streaming while we sprawled on opposite ends of her too-small couch. My bare feet were practically in her lap. Her legs were stretched across my thighs. Ordinary. Safe. The way it had always been.

Except it wasn’t ordinary, not really. Not for me. I’d been half-hard for most of the second movie, watching the way the blue light from the TV slid over the curve of her thigh where her sleep shorts had ridden up. Cassidy had on this thin white tank top, no bra, and every time she laughed her tits moved under the fabric in a way that made my mouth go dry. I’d jerked off thinking about those tits more times than I could count—late at night in my dorm, hand wrapped tight around my cock, imagining what her pale skin would look like flushed under my darker hands, what sounds she’d make if I got my mouth on her. I’d never said a word. Best friends don’t cross that line. Best friends don’t ruin four years of easy laughter and shared notes and knowing looks across crowded parties just because their dick gets stupid around freckles and a soft laugh.