Jealous Tech Support

The heatwave hit our city like it had a grudge, and my apartment on the fourth floor turned into a bread oven by seven every night. So I did what everybody in the building did. I climbed out onto the roof with a cheap fan and a bag of ice and complained to anyone who would listen.

"Forty degrees with the humidex," I told Antonio, flat on my back on a lawn chair, sweating through a t-shirt I had given up on. "Forty. I'm twenty-four years old and I'm going to die on this roof and they'll find me looking like a rotisserie chicken."

"You're so dramatic," Antonio said. He was sitting cross-legged on a blanket with his laptop open, working on some logo even though it was almost ten at night. Twenty-five, freelancing at all hours, still somehow the most relaxed person I knew. "There's a breeze. Feel that? That's free air conditioning."

"That's not a breeze, that's the building exhaling."

He laughed at me, that easy laugh he'd had since college, and I felt the thing I always felt, the warm stupid flip in my chest, and I did what I always did with it. I shoved it down and changed the subject.

We'd been best friends since sophomore year, when he sat next to me in a stats class and copied my notes and then bought me a burrito as payment and that sealed our friendship. Five years. And for the last eight months we'd lived in the same building, him on three, me on four, which meant he came upstairs constantly to steal my wifi and my leftovers. I told people it was annoying. It was the best part of my week.

"So," he said, still typing. "I've been meaning to tell you something."

"What."

"You know I've been kind of seeing someone."

My stomach did a thing. A small, ugly, twisting thing. "Seeing someone," I repeated, like a robot. "Like dating. Like a date thing."

"Yeah, a guy. Devon. He's a nurse, works nights mostly, so we've been doing dinners and stuff. He's really sweet." Antonio said it casually, the way he says everything, but he was watching me a little, I noticed. "You'd like him. I want you to meet him."

"Cool," I said. "Cool. That's cool. Why wouldn't that be cool?"

"Because you just said cool four times."

"Five," I said, and he laughed again and I laughed too and I told myself the twisting feeling was protective. That was the word I picked. Protective. I'd known him five years, I was allowed to be protective, same as a brother would be. Not a brother, obviously, but like, a friend who is protective. A guard dog. A very normal guard dog who was suddenly thinking about this Devon guy's jawline and hoping it was terrible.

"So you'll meet him?" Antonio asked.

"Sure, yeah, obviously. When?"

"I'll figure something out. Maybe this weekend."

"Maybe," I said, and I filed the weekend away in the part of my brain where I keep things I intend to lose on purpose.

* * *

Here is where I have to admit something, because this is a story about me being an idiot and I can't skip the idiot parts. When Antonio texted me Thursday about a group hangout, Sebastian and Hannah and a couple other people from our old crew, all meeting Saturday at the rooftop of Sebastian's building, drinks and games, everybody's partners invited, I read it and I thought, huh, if Antonio comes, Devon comes. And then I thought, well. Antonio never checks group chats. He's terrible about it. Terrible. It would be so easy to just... not forward it.

So I didn't forward it.

I told myself it wasn't sabotage. It was forgetting. I forgot. People forget things. It was a hot week, my brain was soup, nobody could prove anything.

"You coming Saturday?" Sebastian texted me.

"Yeah definitely," I typed back, with a clean conscience, because I am a garbage person with a clean conscience.

Saturday came and I put on the shirt that makes my shoulders look good and I told Antonio nothing, because he was on a date, a late lunch that had apparently stretched into the evening, and I walked the twelve blocks to Sebastian's building feeling like a genius and a criminal at the same time. The plan, if you could call it a plan, was that Antonio would have a nice quiet night with Devon, Devon would remain an abstract concept instead of a real man with a real face, and I would drink two beers and come home and stop being weird about it. That was the plan. It was a bad plan. Plans made by jealous guard dogs are always bad plans.

Sebastian's rooftop was packed. Fairy lights, a kiddie pool full of ice and beer, Hannah's playlist booming off the neighboring brick. I was there maybe forty minutes, deep in a conversation about Sebastian's terrible new couch, when I heard a laugh I would know through a hurricane.

I turned around and there was Antonio. And next to Antonio, holding two drinks and smiling like he was glad to be there, was Devon.

"You didn't tell him," Hannah said, materializing beside me with the speed of a woman who has smelled drama. "Nathan. You didn't tell him about tonight."

"I forgot," I said.

"You forgot."

"There was a heatwave."

"He's holding a cooler with your name on it. He brought a cooler, Nathan. It has your name on it in marker."

And it did. NATHEN'S BEER, spelled wrong, in fat silver letters, with a little smiley face. Antonio came over weaving through the crowd with Devon behind him, and Devon said, "Hey, Nathan, the cooler's for you, I hope you like cheap lager," and stuck out his hand, and his jawline was excellent, which felt personally unfair, and I shook it and said something like "hey, yeah, cool, cool," which was now apparently my whole vocabulary.

"You forgot," Antonio said to me, not angry, just quiet, which was worse. "Saturday. Group chat. You forgot."

"Didn't see it."

"You answered it. Sebastian said you said you'd bring the speaker."

I had, in fact, promised to bring the speaker, which I was currently holding. Sebastian appeared in my peripheral vision holding a second speaker, because Sebastian plans for everything, including me.

"Nate," Antonio said, and Devon had drifted off toward Hannah, politely, like he could sense weather coming, "can I talk to you? Over there? For a second?"

"Yeah," I said. "Sure. Cool."

"Stop saying cool!"

"Okay."

He led me to the far corner of the roof, past the kiddie pool, into the shadow of the stairwell door, and turned around and crossed his arms, and he wasn't smiling anymore, and the heat was coming off the tar roof in waves, and I realized with total clarity that I was about to have a conversation I had been dodging for about two years.

"So," he said. "Start talking."

"I'm talking," I said. "I'm here. Talking. This is me talking."

"Nathan."

"Okay so funny story," I said, and I could feel the bad joke assembling itself in my mouth like it had a boarding pass. "You know how sometimes your phone just, like, eats a message? Mine does that. It's a defect. I should sue the manufacturer."

"You answered the chat."

"There's no proof of that!"

"Sebastian has screenshots, Nate."

God bless Sebastian and his preparedness. I looked out over the roof, at the fairy lights and the kiddie pool and Devon laughing at something Hannah said, and I said, "Wow, he really is charming, huh," and it came out with the warmth of a parking ticket.

Antonio stared at me. "That's what you've got?"

"What? I'm being nice."

"You said his name like it was a disease."

"I did not."

"You said 'Devon' the way you say 'spam folder.'"

That was technically true but I wasn't going to hand it to him. "He's great," I said. "Great guy. Nurse. Nights. Very sturdy handshake."

"Sturdy."

"Solid grip. Good bone structure. Look, some people have those."

* * *

Here's the part I really can't skip. Three days before the party, Wednesday, the heat so bad the whole city smelled like hot pavement, I was taking the trash down the fire escape, four flights, sweating through a shirt I had already accepted was ruined, and there on the third