Part Three
For days after, I avoided you. I didn't know how to face you again with the peculiar feeling so intense. Likewise, you made no attempt to contact me. Our daily lunches came to a halt. I spent that time instead locked away in my office, claiming a mountain of paperwork I'd put off too long.
I had to figure out a way to banish this feeling, but how? I could not ignore you for the rest of my life. We're best friends and already I felt lost without your usual, comforting presence. I didn't know what to do with myself. I didn't know how to fix it.
When I saw you again one Sunday afternoon at the Burrow, there was no trace of all we silently shared that night. You were all smiles, happy and relaxed.
Everything was fine. We exchanged hellos and hugs. It wasn't easy for me to pull away. And I noticed how you didn't give me the customary kiss on the cheek. I could lie and say it didn't hurt. Not even a little.
Again I tried to convince myself it wasn't real. Those stolen seconds of silent, painful conversation were purely my own imaginings. I won't say that made me feel any better. How could I be imagining such things about my best friend? My best friend who was happily with my other best friend who also happened to be my beautiful girlfriend's brother?
The guilt, I believed, was surely enough to tear me apart. But I covered it with a smile, greeted the people I considered family, the very people I felt I was betraying, simply by having this peculiar feeling. I smiled and I laughed. I was the perfect boyfriend. The perfect son. What I had always wanted to be.
You kept your distance. Whenever our eyes met across the long table, a feeble smile would twitch upon your wine-stained lips before you looked hastily away.
And I found the feeling intensifying. Despite the pain of it, I wanted - needed to see it in your eyes, too. I needed to know I wasn't alone. Sick as it sounds, I was developing a love-hate relationship with our agony.
I didn't see it that night, nor for many nights thereafter. The only way I knew it was real was by how you kept me at arms' length. Never too close, never alone. A cordiality that seemed cold and foreign compared to our old, comfortable friendship. I felt as though even that was slipping away.
But what could be done? How could I see you every day, feeling how I felt? How could I stand the rejection when you pulled away from my embrace too soon? How could I stare at you desperately, willing you to reveal the same sinful thoughts running through my own mind?
How could I even expect it of you? You, the most morally conscious person I've ever had the fortune to know and admire?
And so the days passed.