I now felt like a mama wolf with five cubs who finds about 50 coyotes completely surrounding her den. This was not the question I had wanted or anticipated. “Ah-um-uh,” I said, temporizing while sounding a bit less coherent than an orchestra warming up. My first instinct was to tell them that we were all such good friends, why make things weird? But I don’t like to lie, and I especially did not want to lie to these two women. “Uh, why do you ask?” I asked meekly.
Lisa seemed taken aback in turn by my question, and hesitated. Lee rushed in to support her. “Don’t answer questions with questions. It’s rude,” she snapped at me, some of the peevishness that had led to the “fuck offs” the day before back in her voice. “Don’t sit there looking so innocent. Are you telling us that you never thought to ask one of us out?”
“Um, the thought had crossed my mind,” I grudgingly admitted, hating myself for going that far. I felt like the tide was washing the sand out from underneath my feet.
“Okay then,” Lee said, almost triumphantly. “Then why didn’t you?”
I opened my mouth, unsure what excuse was going to come out when Lisa rejoined the fray. “And if you had gone ahead, which one of us would you have asked?”
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
That was the nuclear question. My eyes darted back and forth between them and realized they were looking back and forth between me and each other like hawks. Hawks who were not going to settle for a non-answer. ‘The thought had crossed my mind’ had been enough for them to hang me with.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I took a deep breath. It was better to be slain as a lion than as a lamb.
“And that is why I haven’t asked either of you out,” I almost shouted. “Which the fuck one of you would I ask?” They shut up at that, which sucked, because it meant I had to go on. “You two are my favorite women on Earth. Sorry, Mom,” I added, looking over my shoulder in an attempt to lighten this miserable confession. “And I like you independent of the fact that you two are also the hottest girls at this school, as far as I’m concerned,” I added, thinking in my panic that depositing a little flattery in the account would do a guy good when it came time to pick through the rubble after this clusterfuck.
I sighed. “Asking either one of you out would mean having to pass up on one of the best women I have ever known. How the hell could I choose to pass on either one of you?” I said, rushing faster and more emphatically with each phrase. I took a cleansing breath, then pushed on. “I suppose I could have flipped a coin. Believe me, that ‘crossed my mind’, too. But it would be a skeezy way to resolve such an important issue. And it would not solve the other, far more complex reason that I haven’t made a choice.” I paused for a moment, then rushed on. “For every one good thing that could come from asking one of you out, there were ten things that could go wrong, and a few more that absolutely would go wrong!”
My gave swiveled back and forth some more, and they both looked taken aback at my sudden fervor, and confused at my last diatribe.
“Let’s look at the math on this,” I said, which drew groans from both of them, because they hate it when I go all ‘look at the math’. I briefly experienced a relived feeling that they would still groan like normal at that phrase, as if, for a moment, nothing had changed and we were just wrangling about history trivia or something.
But we were not, and everything had.
I plunged on, like an idiot.
“There are four basic cases I have had to consider. Possibility One,” I said ticking it off on the fingers of my left hand. “There is some minor chance that each of you would welcome me asking them out. What chance? I have no fucking idea. There is also a much greater chance,” I went on, ticking off a second finger, “that neither of you is actually interested in going out with me. Finally, there is also an indeterminable chance that one of you does, and the other one does not. And vice versa, of course,” I said, ticking off fingers three and four. I had stopped looking at either one of them and just stared at the floor as I ground on, baring my dilemma to them both–my dilemma that they had created. “That means that no matter which one of you I asked out, I had one chance at happiness, while the other three out of four possibilities would end in utter fucking disaster.”
“What?” One of them asked quietly, I don’t know which one.
“If neither of you were interested, but I did ask one of you, then both of you would be laughing at me,” I ground out, holding up two fingers. Before they could deny it, I ground on, “Oh sure, we’d soon enough laugh and move on as friends again, but forever after, I’d be just a little pathetic in both your minds, and it would Poison. Everything.”
“Next,” I continued after the shortest of painful pauses, with now one finger raised, “If you both somehow actually wanted me to ask you out, and I went ahead and asked one of you, I would certainly be pissing off and hurting the other, which would suuuuuck.”
“And what if one of you did like me, but I asked out the other one?” I asked, my eyes a little haunted as I spoke out loud all this horrible calculus that had occupied my mind for months. I waggled my ring finger. “I’d be making my friendship with the one of you I did ask out forever after awkward–see the first scenario. Worse, I would be being super hurtful to the one of you who had actually wanted to be asked instead. And worst of all, in this case and the one before, I would likely be putting a hole, possibly below the waterline, in you two’s friendship with each other, which I am Not. Going. To. Do.”
We were all silent for a minute before I felt compelled to fill the quiet with more words. I had some other complaints, now that I was rolling. “For a long time, I kept trying to talk myself into taking the leap regardless, taking that awful chance. But lately, I’ve just been numbly letting things roll on as they have been, and for two reasons,” I went on significantly. “First, neither of you has given me the first damned signal that I had an opening to step up and ask. And believe me, I. Have. Been. Looking,” I said, openly glaring at them both. “And second…”
“Second,” I went on after a breath, “we go back to the start. If I have to choose, how the fuck do I do that? You are both equally amazing friends, in exactly the same way. And you are both equally smoking hot, in totally different ways.” I had blown way past the point where I might have been able to salvage at least our current relationship, and I had already realized that. Whatever form of friendship, if any, I had with them going forward, it would be utterly changed. But until that moment, I had not realized how fucking angry I was at this situation, and at them, however unfairly. And I was still rolling. “So, if one of you actually does want to go out with me, since this is the fucking twenty-first century, why don’t you ask me instead, and let me out of this horrible box?”
With that, I clamped my mouth shut and glared at both of them, dying a little inside. No, I was dying a lot.
The two of them just stared at each other, sheepishly at least. Then they looked down. Lisa heaved a deep breath and said softly, “We’re sorry George.”
Lee added, “Yeah. We didn’t meant to… We didn’t want…” She trailed off.
Lisa said to Lee softly, “I think it’s our turn to fuck off.” Lee agreed just as softly. They both rose and turned toward the door.
“You never need to fuck off from this room, ever,” I called just as softly after both of them. “Please,” I added as my door clicked shut.
I sat alone, in the dying light of late afternoon.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.