Did She Say Anything About Me?!

I want my friends to be happy. I do. And most of the time, I don't care who or what they decide to engage in coitus with, or with what frequency, duration, or intensity. Besides, close friends who haven't gotten any in a while often don't hold back about their inner frustrations, and then one can wind up on the receiving end of something like this:

However, I've been bearing witness to a unique beast lately. I call this beast When Two Mutual Friends Do The Nasty. It's currently happening between one of my best friends, HawkingGirl, and another friend that lives in her neighborhood, UpstairsGuy. And while I love HawkingGirl and think UpstairsGuy is a cool cat, lately I've been privy to conversations such as this:

What's funny is that when HawkingGirl and UpstairsGuy started fluffing their feathers for one another one month ago, they paraded their flirtatiousness openly in front of everyone we knew. They looked at each other a little too long, and then they started reenacting the tradition of making up poor excuses to go somewhere else and fool around:

And then one night, it happened.

I received a message at eleven the following morning from HawkingGirl notifying me that out of boredom, she had bagged UpstairsGuy during a drinking-and-jumping-on-the-trampoline session the night before.

That's right, the trampoline. What I initially thought about was this:

Then I thought, "Good for you, HawkingGirl! GO GET THAT SHIT!"

And then I thought, "DRAMA!!!"

And the drama came, soaked in drama-filled goodness, in three drama-filled steps, with crunchy drama filling.

Step 1. When two mutual friends hook up, the first thing that they do is interrogate their friends about one another when the other person is out of earshot. While they both care what the other thinks, they go to great lenghts to let everybody know that they could care less.

Step 2. The "blind spot" phenomenon, which is probably my favorite subtlety of the hookup. It happens when - even when they're talking to each other, they go out of their way to look at everything in the world except one another.

Step 3. The final step in the When Two Mutual Friends Do The Nasty phenomenon occurs when the mutual friends start acting strangely about hanging out with one another in public together - even if there are going to be other people around. It's as if they're together, everyone will immediately expect them to get married, right there on the spot.

As a result, I keep having conversations like this:

And you know something? Every single time this situation occurs, all I want to do is this:

And I swear, one of these days I will.

-V