Part Two
Two days and a box of Tums later, Sydney’s peculiar stomach ailment finally seemed to have disappeared. She just could not understand what had started it. Little did she know the answer was right in front of her.
That evening, Michael called her as he often did to ask for her advice. While to him Sydney was just one of the guys on his hockey team, he was also well aware that she was, in fact, a woman. Whenever he needed womanly advice, which was more times than not over an issue with a girlfriend, he would call her and they would hash it out for a while until Sydney flat out told Michael, the idiot male, what he was supposed to do.
On that particular evening, Michael’s queries related to Alice and the razzing he received from their teammates earlier that week. He was uncertain if he should follow their advice and ask Alice to move in with him if he was not one hundred percent certain moving in together was something he wanted to do. Upon receiving this question, Sydney fought the urge to throw up into her cell phone.
For some reason she did not understand, something about Alice Watson made her skin crawl. Alice simply rubbed her the wrong way. Maybe it was her ugly haircut. Perhaps it was her ever-perky demeanor. Or it may have just been the fact that she just seemed so damn perfect Sydney wanted to beat her with a hockey stick until she cried. Whatever it was, though, she could not stand to be in the same room as Alice for more than a few minutes at a time. Giving Michael advice as to how to properly please his girlfriend was more than she could take.
“Um, I dunno Michael.” She shifted uncomfortably on her couch. She had only a few minutes to come up with a plausible and not rude response and frankly she was having great difficulty with that. “If you really don’t want to move in with her you shouldn’t. I mean, how awful would it be if like a week later you were like, ‘yeah you have to move out now’?”
“That’s a good point,” he sighed. “But I don’t know what to doooo. Tell me what to do Syd,” he whined slightly.
“Michael,” Sydney sighed heavily, rubbing her fingertips across her already wrinkled brow. “I can’t tell you what to do in this case, but if you want my advice you should think about it for at least a week since it really is a big decision.”
“You’re right,” he resigned. “Thanks Syd; you’re the best. Talk to you soon!” With that, he hung up.
Once she heard the click on the other end of the line, Sydney shut her cell phone and tossed it towards the other end of the sofa. Then, she stood and began to pace around her coffee table, wringing out her trembling hands as she did so. When Michael had been asking for her advice, all she wanted to do was absolutely demand that he break up with Alice. No, not even that. She wanted to give him an ultimatum; break up with Alice, or lose her as a friend. With this, she surprised herself. That was a completely irrational, not to mention unfair, thought, so why was it swimming around in her brain?
She pondered this thought and paced until the answer hit her. She did not want Michael to be with Alice because Alice was not good enough to him. Sure, she was perfect to the point of repulsion, but she was just too… vapid. She didn’t care about Michael, either. In all of their relationship, Sydney had only seen Alice at two of Michael’s hockey pick-up games at the very beginning of their relationship. She vaguely remembered Michael mentioning in passing that Alice disliked hockey. This was baffling to Sydney. Hockey was such a huge part of Michael’s life, disliking hockey meant disliking part of him.
As she continued to pace, practically wearing holes in her carpet with her constant footwork, Sydney listed dozens of poor qualities about Alice. Qualities that Alice lacked and she possessed; qualities that, in her mind, were imperative to a woman who would be Michael’s significant other. It took her the better part of half an hour to notice she was comparing herself to Alice and, when she consciously did so, she came to an earth-shattering realization: she did not want Michael to be with Alice; she wanted him to be with her.
Somewhere between the hockey games, double dates during which they did most of the talking and ignored their partners, and the late-night phone calls over four years she had fallen in love with Michael. No longer was he the self-centered showoff she met when she was just twenty-one years old. He had matured into a man she respected; a man she cared for; a man she loved.
“Oh my god,” she sighed, sinking down into her couch. She pulled a cranberry colored pillow into her lap and hugged it tightly as her mind continued to spin. How could she not have realized? How could she have been so stupid? So blind? She was in love with Michael.
In four years, she had not had a boyfriend that lasted longer than a few months, the longest of which being a six month on-again-off-again relationship. She had chalked it up to a dry spell combined with a busy work and hockey practice schedule, but perhaps there was a deeper reason. Why did she need a boyfriend, when she already had a significant number of males in her life, Michael being the foremost of all of them.
Why did one need a boyfriend? To lift heavy things? Michael already did that whenever she asked. Someone to call and say goodnight too? That was Michael, of course. A back massage after a long day at work? Well, not after work, but Michael was known to give a massage after hockey practice as long as he received one in return. True, there was the physical companionship a boyfriend brought that she was lacking, but most of the time she was too exhausted or battered from hockey to think about sex anyway. For all other things, there was Michael.
Michael was the man she compared her boyfriends too as well. If he did not like hockey that was an immediate deal breaker. A Yankees not a Mets fan? Oops, gone. Loved basketball? See ya. The rest left all by themselves, unable to handle the closeness between Sydney and her male teammates-slash-friends. It really was quite a one-sided pattern that she was entirely oblivious to until that exact moment.
After an hour of scrutinizing every aspect of her friendship with Michael and every part of her dating life, she realized that she was in love with Michael. This, however, brought about another problem – what was she going to do about it? She surely could not tell him her feelings. He would either laugh at her or politely tell her he did not feel the same and, frankly, she did not know what was worse. To add more terror to the situation, any revelation of her true feelings would surely bring their friendship to a screeching halt and that she knew she could never handle. In the end she decided she just needed to ignore her feelings. After all, she had gone years not knowing they were there; she could certainly continue that pattern at least for a little while.
