I got so many views so rapidly for last chapter, more so than like half of the others got in that time period. Was like one guy reading it over and over again? You know who you are, random guy...
Lol, so a lot of this chapter is inspired by random events and people in my life.

I still hadn't confronted Phineas about changing our living arrangements. I can't say Phineas was exactly HAPPY when I decided to go to England for college. Not to mention, even though he tried to hide it and keep himself together, he was so sad when Candace moved out. It would be the most minor of things… the girls, and Irving, and Django… so many of us already lived in different places around the city, and that hadn't affected any friendships. Buford and Wynne, and Baljeet too, when they finally made up, would still be here with him. So this shouldn't be a big deal, right?

You don't quite realize love was living for someone else until you actually do fall in love. And Isabella wanted this. Isabella was an over-the-top dreamer and romantic… and honestly, so was I. In truth besides Phineas, I had no hesitations. And, in all seriousness… never before had we seen Phineas, not happy necessarily, just so… enlivened.

They say everyone is looking for love, but truth is everybody is just looking to be loved. What everyone wants is someone else to love them; the fantasies come before the realities. Everyone is selfish in that aspect. All Isabella wanted was to be treated as the center of attention, romantic or otherwise. All Baljeet wanted was to be treated as attractive and charming. All Buford wanted was someone he could be himself with. And all I wanted was for someone to really understand me, Ferb the oddball. That's the truth. When people imagine love, they only imagine it as making themselves happy. It's only after you meet one person, your true love, that you realize, all you want to do is make them happy.

"FERB!" I heard yelling. Phineas ran into the apartment. "Ferb! I… I need… help? Advice? I don't know."

Phineas could tell me anything. Phineas DID tell me everything.

He paced around, like he was puzzling over something. "I… I slept with Mishti last night."

I gave him a look. He was kidding me, right? He had to be kidding.

"No, Ferb, I didn't… We didn't…"

I gestured to his extremely obvious sex hair. Ha, I might have been able to get that past him every day, but it wasn't going to work the other way around.

"Ohhh…" He smoothed it back into place. "Okay, so maybe in the morning… FERB! That's not the point! I slept with Mishti last night. I slept with her. That's it." He said, confused. "We're like, we don't… are we not supposed to do that? I don't think we are." He sighed. "She had gotten upset, and I just wanted her to feel better. That's it."

Are you not supposed to do that? I suppose Phineas assumed I was the master of friends-with-benefits. I don't know. They spent almost every night together, but that seemed more like out of courtesy, to keep anyone from that horrible feeling when someone does you and leaves the minute after. Phineas and Mishti, but no sex… I would picture a pillow fight and doing puzzles kind of sleepover, they were so innocent. But this sounded a little… extremely… intimate.

Phineas still so seemed concerned by this. "I mean, she's my friend, I always help my friends… right?" He was talking to himself again. Sometimes I think Phin uses my silence as an excuse to talk to himself. "But she doesn't want…"

"Stupid chick…" We heard loud shouting and the door opened.

"Hey guys!" Wynne said chirpily. She, Kyle, and Buford walked in.

"Byoof, calm the fuck down." Kyle said.

"Calm? Me? I'm totally calm." He said sarcastically.

"What's wrong?" Phineas asked, concerned.

"He got into a 'fight' with Adyson." Wynne whispered to us. "Except, you know, it wasn't a fight."

"Huh?"

"Apparently she said something about how she thought he was ugly and scary when you were kids or something." Kyle said bluntly, as we all sat down in the living room.

I glanced at Buford. Were certain feelings for a certain girl coming up all of a sudden?

"I guess I'm stuck in a world where Adyson and Baljeet have turned into jackasses, and half of the gang are in gross fluffy relationships." He said bitterly.

Wynne draped her legs over Kyle's. "There's nothing wrong with being fluffy." She joked.

"Ok, so there's three kinds of girlfriends, Buford," Kyle stated. "The absolute excellence, like Wynne,"

"Aw. You're such a suck-up." She said jokingly.

"And Isabella," He gestured to me. "You know, the kind of girls you stay with forever and bring home to Mom and Dad. Then, there are the psycho-girlfriends. Like Ginger with her jealousy, or Adyson when she gets dumped."

"Yup." Buford said, somewhat sulkily.

"And, then you know, there are the heartbreakers, like Vanessa."

"Yeah. Or Mishti." Buford laughed.

"What is that supposed to mean?" Phineas asked instantly.

Buford stared at him. "Well, you know, how gorgeous they are, and how with Ferb and Baljeet…"

"And how she's so…" Kyle faltered.

Wynne rolled her eyes. "They just want to say Mishti is– "

"She's not a slut!" Phineas yelled very loudly. We all stared, taken aback. "That's what you were going to say, wasn't it? Right?"

"Phin, we weren't…" I began.

"Shut up! I know that's what they were going to say! They all said it about Isabella too! Well, she's not! If you think she is, there's something seriously wrong with you! There's nothing slutty about Mishti!" He declared. "Mishti… Mishti is perfect." He glared at us all again, and stormed out.

"Whoa." Kyle said.

"Ok, what the hell has gotten into these nerds?" Buford asked.

"We didn't say anything!" Wynne cried. "I wasn't going to say anything like that!"

"Ferb, we never really… I know you think we're assholes, but we weren't serious about anything we said about Isabella and you." Buford said, in earnest. "I think you know by know, we had always kind of been rooting for you two."

I nodded. The poll. Still so strange.

"We don't think Mishti's a slut!" Kyle exclaimed. "Mishti is a perfect human specimen."

"You… you don't think, maybe, in the back of his mind, HE thinks that, do you?" Wynne asked. "And that's why he suddenly got all defensive."

"No." I said quietly. "No. He yelled at us, he got so mad at us, because… she thinks that."

I feel like I suddenly learned what happened that night between those two. Isabella had broken up with me because she felt like being friends-with-benefits was somehow a lowly thing to do. I can't imagine how awful she might have felt if she had done it with someone else, someone she barely knew, an acquaintance… a stranger. Mishti wasn't doing anything wrong, but if this was bothering her, Phineas would do anything to keep her from getting upset. Phineas always wanted to fix everyone's problems. So how could he not want to fix Mishti's?

Come over.

I rolled my eyes. I was hiding in my room again. Jesus Christ. I didn't really want to mess with Phineas right now though. He got mad at us, and evidently Mishti wasn't in the mood to see anyone either.

I'm naked.

I rolled my eyes again. As enticing as that sounded, as previously stated, I was currently hiding from Phineas and Mishti. I slowly opened the door, and saw none other than Phineas and Mishti sitting in the kitchen.

"Hey Ferb!" Phineas gestured to me, sounding perky and normal. I walked over to them. They were both fully clothed, which gave me the feeling Phineas had found his own answer on what people should or should not do with their friends-with-benefits, and as I had noticed, Phineas and Mishti just liked… hanging out.

Fine, jerk. I'm coming over there.

It took only two seconds after that text for the door to open. "Ferb, you jerk… oh, Mishti, and Phineas. Right." Isabella said awkwardly.

"Hi Isabella." Phineas and Mishti chimed together.

"Umm, yeah… oh, whatcha' doin'?"

"Hey, we have four people, why don't we break out the old video games?" Phineas said.

"Oh, so you don't want to build a skyscraper in a half-hour then, Phineas Flynn?" Mishti remarked.

He arched an eyebrow. "Are you being sarcastic? Because I can never tell." Wow, Isabella was right. I'm pretty sure Phineas wouldn't be able to spot sarcasm if it made the speaker blink bright colors, before Mishti. He didn't seem to require an answer from her, because he went off to rapidly pull things together.

"Am I allowed?" Isabella asked, as she wrapped her arms around my neck.

I kissed her hand. "Of course you are, my love."

She leaned closer to my ear. "And I'm guessing these two are the reason why you couldn't leave a millisecond after I texted you."

"Please save me." I whispered.

She giggled. "Trust me, I am working on it."

Phineas returned with a mountain full of cables and wires, and started messing with the TV. "Mishti?" We glanced over at her. "You wanna play?" Isabella asked.

She was staring at herself in her compact. Mishti practically lived in my house now, so this wasn't the first time I had caught the girl staring at herself in a mirror or camera phone. It seemed to be the one fault she had besides cluelessness… she was vain. Not abnormally so; I'm sure Isabella had done just this many times before… when she was younger. Mishti was as vain as a teenager. Just like how Phineas had never grown up, I see she hadn't really either.

"Sure." She answered, not really looking away. "Hmm, Isabella, what do you think of this color?" She pursed her lips. She was wearing a dark red lipstick.

Isabella sat down next to her. "I like it. Although, I normally wear pink. Don't you normally wear pink?"

"Yes." She nodded. "But, oh…" She sighed, as she glanced across the room, to where Phineas was hooking up the game. "Red has been growing on me." She said seductively.

To Isabella's dismay and our glee, actively calling Mishti as her partner in the soccer game we had chosen wasn't working out in the competitive troop captain's favor.

"Mishti, stop pausing the screen!" Isabella exclaimed, frustrated.

"I'm sorry!" She said. "What button do I press again to move?"

"The ones shaped like arrows!" Isabella shouted.

"Face it, Bella, you're done." I said confidently. "We're ten goals ahead."

"And he shoots… and he SCORES!" Phineas shouted. "Eleven!" He and I high-fived.

"Damn you two, I would be winning if Mishti didn't pause the screen every minute or pass to you every time!" Isabella growled. She hates losing to me.

"You picked her." Phineas said.

"That's because she's great at everything!" Isabella cried.

"Yup. Except video games." Phineas said cockily.

"Hey!" Mishti exclaimed.

"I'm sorry." He apologized. "But you're SO bad! Ow! Ow!" He cried, laughing at the same time, as Mishti started beating him with her cushion.

"Hey, no violence." I announced.

"Take it back!" She cried.

"No, no…" He laughed. "You're too bad to take it back."

"This game is so over." Isabella said angrily. "I forfeit. We are just a pack of idiot kids!"

"Sore loser!" I called.

"Ow!" Phineas exclaimed. "Mishti, stop!"

"Say I'm the best at this game."

"But you're not. OW."

"Say it!"

"Fine, Mishti, fine. You're the queen at video games, just like you're the queen at everything else!"

"Thank you." She said sweetly, returning to her ladylike position.

"Ferb, why are all my friends abusive?" Phineas asked.

"Ok, I'm going home." Isabella said. "Ferb, there will be a rematch!" She said, defiantly.

"Ok." Mishti said, yawning. She leaned close to Phineas. "Phineas, I'm getting… hungry." She said, really suggestively.

"Yeah, I… oh. OH." He sat straight up. Well, finally. It seems like Mr. Oblivious was learning a lot from being friends-with-benefits. And… I'm out. I made a mad dash to my room before anyone could do anything to anyone.

It was funny, that as weird as it had initially seemed… Phineas seemed like the first person to successfully test out the "friends-with-benefits" theory and not have it blow up in his face. He wasn't the kind of person to fall in love with a friend and he might have picked the perfect girl to join him. As he continuously put it… they were "just friends". Yup. There you go: two twenty-something friends get to have sex with each other and stay friends, with zero consequences, if you don't count Baljeet. And it was working out astonishingly well. Phineas and Mishti just had fun together. Yeah, they had friendly fun and yeah, they had… sexual fun… but maybe I was the only one who noticed that Phineas really, really adored hanging out with Mishti. Enough to yell at all of us in her defense or fight his best friend for her. Clearly, more than any girlfriend he had ever had and shockingly, even more than Baljeet, based on the current feud. Maybe even more than Buford, Bella, and… me. And tragically, the stupid idiot still only thought of them as friends. I REALLY hope he didn't think of Mishti as a sister like he did with Isabella. I feel like that's mainly because we had grown up with Isabella. Mishti had just fallen into his life. Everyone had always said… Phineas wasn't the kind of person to fall in love. Except… he was. I knew Phineas. Phineas fell in love with things almost instantly, and strongly. With a new goldfish. With a sea monster. With a weird pet we got when we were little named Perry. Phineas had just never fallen in love with a girl. Until he woke up in bed next to one. And no matter what he said or how much he tried to deny, Phineas had never felt these feelings about anyone but Mishti. Phineas could do anything and everything but, really, can he juggle sex and friendship without falling in love?

Because I couldn't.

If anyone is getting bored by all my fluffy lovey goo... I think what I'm doing right now will be pretty important in upcoming chapters... I think. Pretty please review.

Love, Silver