The Problem with Emerson

11 | The Problem with Confidence

THE PROBLEM WITH CONFIDENCE was that it was painfully fickle.  It could be there in abundance one moment and suddenly gone the next.

Currently, Brie's was nowhere to be found.

She had been moping for a solid twelve hours. The longest she and Emerson had gone without communicating was the summer before grade five, when his family had gone to India for two months. At ten, they hadn't yet had cell phones, so it had been a very lonely summer for Brie.

But those two months felt like nothing compared to this day of icy radio silence.

Kissing Emerson had been a mistake. Brie had made a lot of mistakes in her life, but the biggest was letting her desire take control yesterday. Because no matter how much she had wanted it, Emerson clearly hadn't, as he had pulled away from her lips almost instantly.

There had been a moment of awkwardness, suspended in the air between them, before Brie had fled, mortified. She hadn't been able to grasp how one action had taken their friendship and shoved it down the drain, but it had, and now all Brie could do was try to pick up the pieces of herself that shattered the moment she saw that look in Emerson's eyes.

"If you're not going to study, then go home," Erica said, eyes still drilling holes into her anatomy textbook. "You're distracting me with your pencil-tapping and your knee-bobbing."

Brie's eyes, which had been aimlessly scanning the university library, settled on Erica. "Shit, sorry," she apologized, dropping her pencil on the table with a clatter.

She felt bad, distracting Erica from studying for their last exam, which was later that morning, but her mind was hopelessly fixated on what a total screwup she had become.

Erica groaned, finally looking up from her reading and meeting her friend's eyes. "Fine. You have five minutes to spill your guts before I go back to studying my ass off."

Brie bit her lip, hesitating. Erica tapped the nonexistent watch on her wrist, and Brie's heartbeat jerked into overdrive. "Okay, so, I may have kissed Emerson yesterday," she admitted, all in one breath.

Erica blinked. "I'm sorry. Did you say that you kissed Emerson? Like, out of the blue, you just planted one on him?"

Brie nodded. "And fucked up our friendship in the process."

"I get the nervousness now," she said, gesturing to Brie's knee that was still jiggling beneath the table. "Wow. I can't believe you actually had the guts to do it. I'm proud of you."

Brie narrowed her eyes at the awe in Erica's voice. "It's not a good thing, dude! I'm completely screwed! My relationship with Emerson is in the garbage. Platonic or not, he doesn't want anything to do with me."

"Well, he had to have wanted to kiss you on some level, otherwise he wouldn't have let it get that far."

"Maybe.  But he did end up pulling away, once he realized how much of a mistake it was."

Erica patted Brie's hand comfortingly.  "He'll come around, Brie.  He probably needs time to absorb everything.  This is all brand new to him, so you'll just have to be patient. Give him some time to let it sink in."

Brie bit her lip as she nodded, though she wasn't at all comforted by her friend's reassurance.  "You're probably right," Brie admitted. 

Erica winked.  "I'm always right."

With a small smile, Erica returned to her studying.  She said nothing about Brie's jittering after that.

...