by Jamie Shaw
I grab a light leather jacket from the coat closet and toss Leti my keys, leading him into the hall outside my front door. “Joel is going to be there.”
Leti locks up for me, pausing long enough to show that he’s weighing his words. “I thought you two were done?”
“Turns out, I love him.” When his jaw drops, I shrug and say, “Go figure.”
He bursts out laughing and throws his arm over my shoulder as we navigate the hallways of my apartment building. “So you’re going to tell him at Mayhem tonight?”
“I’m going to try.”
“Say it to me,” he prompts when we get to my car, opening the passenger-side door for me.
I put my hand on his shoulder and flutter my eyelashes up at him, saying in a 1960s-romance vixen voice, “Oh, Leti, you hot chunk of man, I love you.” His laugh makes me smile.
“I think I just went straight for a minute.”
“It was only a matter of time.” I wink at him and get in the car, rubbing my hands over my thighs when I realize I’m really, seriously about to do this.
“Don’t be nervous,” he says when he slides into the driver’s seat.
“I’m not,” I lie.
“Don’t be.”
“I’m not,” I say again, and he pats my knee.
“Good.”
By the time we get to Mayhem, the club is pulsing with music and swimming in a thick cocktail of perfume, cologne, and sweat. Layers of people are packed in front of the bar, but since that’s where I know Rowan will be, I grab Leti’s hand and start weaving. I’m the small end of our human wedge, tugging him through the open space people make for me and hearing him make apologies for his wide shoulders the whole way.
“Hey,” I say to Rowan when we finally get to her and Adam. I release Leti’s hand and we both wipe hand-cooties onto our clothes.
Rowan hands me her full drink, and I gladly suck it down. “That dress is killer,” she says.
I glance down at myself, getting an eyeful of cleavage. “I may or may not have caused a few heart attacks on my walk over here.”
“That tends to happen when you torpedo through a crowd towing a big purple chunk of man behind you,” Leti quips, and I crack a smile.
“Chunk of man?” Rowan asks with a lifted eyebrow.
“Her words, not mine,” he says with a thumb in my direction. I smile and shrug while I finish off Rowan’s drink and covertly scan the bar for Joel.
“Alright, who’s dancing with me?” I ask, and Adam takes that as his cue to go outside for a smoke break. Rowan and Leti both follow me toward the dance floor, and I get swallowed by the crowd with my two best friends.
“He’s not here yet,” Rowan says as soon as we’re far enough away from Adam.
“Are we sure he’s coming?” Leti asks. He’s at my back, and Rowan is at my front. I rest my hands on her shoulders and try to pretend my heart isn’t balanced on a tightrope waiting for her answer.
“Yeah. Adam texted him to make sure.”
“Adam knows?” I ask, my cheeks flushing.
“Of course not,” Rowan scoffs before I send myself into a tailspin. “What kind of a best friend do you think I am? I just told him I was worried about Joel and thought he could use a fun night out and to make sure he was coming.”
“And he bought it?”
Rowan nods. “It was true, so yeah.”
With Leti at my back, I mouth to Rowan, I’m nervous.
She smiles and shouts over my shoulder to Leti. “Leti, do you know what I love best about Dee?”
“Her wardrobe?” he shouts back.
“Her heart!”
“Not her butt?”
Rowan and I both laugh, and she says, “Her attitude!”
“Her boobs!”
I completely lose it, laughing so hard I have to stop dancing and grip Rowan’s shoulders to stay upright. By the time I collect myself, I have an unshakeable smile on my face, mirrored by Rowan’s bright blue eyes and rosy pink cheeks.
I dance until my thighs are burning and my hair is sticking to the back of my neck. “Drinks?” I ask during a lapse between songs, and we make our way back to the bar.
My heart teeters precariously on the wire while I scan the bar for Joel, and it nearly falls when I realize he’s still not here. Before, I couldn’t bear the thought of telling him how I feel. Now, every second that he doesn’t know feels like a second we’re drifting further apart.
I miss him. I miss him so much that I can’t even think about it without tears threatening to form. It’s been a full week since I’ve seen him, two weeks since he could stand to look at me.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” I tell Rowan and Leti before we get to where Adam, Mike, and Shawn are sitting at the bar.
“Want me to come with?” Rowan asks, but I shake my head. I need a minute to myself to pull my game face back on.
“Nah, I’ll be right back.”
I turn on my heel before she can argue, weaving through clusters of people to get back toward the front of the building where the cleanest bathrooms are. When I get there, the women’s bathroom is taped off with a sign that deems it “Out of Order,” but I push open the door anyway and duck under the yellow tape. The other bathrooms are at the other side of the building, and I need the alone time too much to wait. In front of the wall-width mirror above the sinks, I take a deep breath and begin freshening my makeup, mentally rehearsing what I’m going to say to Joel.
I love you. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I want to be with you.
In my head, he furrows his brow at me. You broke my heart, and now I’m supposed to take you back?
I brace my hands on the sink and close my eyes, telling myself over and over again that it’s only been two weeks. You can’t stop loving someone in two weeks—not if you ever really loved them at all.
When I leave the bathroom, I’m telling myself not to worry, that everything will be fine, that he’ll want me and we’ll have each other. But when I get close to the bar, I see him, and my heart slips off the wire.
He’s walking toward where Rowan and the guys are gathered, his arm around a girl with long blonde hair and a dress even shorter than mine. He’s smiling, he’s laughing. His blue-eyed gaze is traveling around the room, and my heart is breaking.
When his eyes land on me, his smile falls away. Tears flood my vision, and I turn on my heel to race back toward the bathroom, turning this way and that to melt through the crowd. I push through the press of bodies and duck under the yellow tape, slamming into the bathroom door and stumbling inside.
He was happy. It’s only been two weeks, and he’s happy without me. Two weeks, and he’s happy with someone else.
Ugly tears are dripping onto the floor when the bathroom door pushes open and Joel ducks under the tape. He stops and looks at me, and all I do is stare back at him while letting the tears fall. There’s no use trying to hide them.
“No,” he says, his long stride eating the distance between us. He takes my face between his hands and stares down at me. “No. You don’t get to do this.”
A tiny sob sounds from inside me. Even though my heart is breaking, it feels so right having his hands on me. I want to press them tighter against my cheeks. I want him to hold me.
“You don’t get to do this, Dee,” he says again, his voice cracking. He brushes his thumbs over my wet cheeks and presses his forehead against mine. “Stop crying,” he says in a voice so soft and sad, it breaks my already crushed heart. “You don’t get to cry.”
I want to tell him I love him. But what would be the point? I thought he would be better without me—now I know I was right.
Joel’s lips brush over mine, his blue eyes closing. “You don’t get to do this anymore.” He kisses me again, and my fists bunch in his shirt as I kiss him back. Tears are pouring down my cheeks when he says, “You don’t want me.” He says it between kisses growing increasingly more insistent, and when he backs me up against the wall, he kisses me so deeply
that the sound that comes from my lips is more moan than sob. In the next instant, he’s lifting me into the air and I’m pushing my hands under his shirt, needing to feel his skin on my skin and his lips on my lips.
A spark flares between us, and we’re lost. Our kisses are bruising and frantic. My dress is being pushed up, his pants are being unzipped, and my panties are being yanked to the side.
When he sinks inside me, my fingernails dig into his back and a low moan crashes between us. His. Mine. Tears are still dripping down my cheeks, and when I open my eyes, his eyes are glassy too. I hold his face between my hands and kiss him desperately as he thrusts inside me over and over again. We breathe each other as he takes me, kissing and pulling and never getting close enough. I want to tell him I love him, but when I remember the girl waiting for him back inside the club, the way he laughed with her, I can’t. Instead, I kiss his mouth, his jaw, his neck, his ears.
Joel shudders against me, his fingers gripping tighter around my thighs and his hard body pinning me to the wall. I kiss away the sounds coming from his parted lips while he empties inside me, and afterward, his head drops to my shoulder and he slowly sets my heels back to the tile. My arms are still around him, and I don’t want to let him go, but then he lifts his head and stares into me with bloodshot eyes and tear-stained cheeks. His voice is raw with an emotion I feel in my own bones. “I can’t do this anymore.”
When his blurred form turns away from me, I don’t stop him.
When he walks out the door, he doesn’t look back.
Chapter Twenty-Four
AFTER JOEL WALKED away from me, I wanted to fall to my knees. I wanted to collapse and cry until I had no tears left to shed.
Instead, I ran after him.
It took a few seconds for my feet to move, but eventually, something clicked in my brain. A desperate voice said, this is your last chance, and I took it. I swung open the door, I pushed through the crowd, I searched for him. And I froze.
He was leaving—with her. My gaze lowered to their joined hands, and I stared at them until they were burned into my brain. Then, the hands disappeared, and I knew with crushing certainty that my chance with Joel was gone. The chance had passed two weeks earlier in an empty pool, and now it was too late.
I left Mayhem as soon as I was sure Joel wouldn’t still be in the parking lot. In my car, I texted Rowan to tell her I had changed my mind about telling him how I felt. I asked her to give Leti a ride home, and I also asked, very politely, for her to please give me my space.
She showed up at my apartment half an hour later, but by then, I was already numb. It was easy to tell her that I had simply decided I didn’t want to be tied down, that I was sure Joel wouldn’t want to be tied down either. She argued with me and repeatedly asked me if something had happened, but I had no intention of ever telling her about what happened in the bathroom.
Gradually, days turned into weeks and she let it go.
I thought of Joel every day, every night, but I eventually stopped crying about him. He never texted, never called, and neither did I. I avoided Mayhem, and even though I still got asked out on dates almost anytime I bothered brushing my hair and going out in public, I turned them all down. Instead, I focused all my energy on finishing my classes and making T-shirts for The Last Ones to Know.
THE WEEK BEFORE finals, Rowan drags me to IHOP and I let her because I’ve come to a decision she needs to know about sooner rather than later. We sit in a booth, we place our orders, and we’re both carving into high stacks of strawberry pancakes when she says, “How do you think you’re going to do on your finals next week?”
“Honestly?” She waits expectantly, and I give it to her straight. “I’m not even going to bother taking two of them because there’s no way I can pass the classes even if I ace the finals.” Her lips part like she’s going to say something, but I don’t leave her time to interrupt. “Two others are papers, and I’ve already started working on them, but I’ll be lucky if I pass the classes with Cs. The other one is the marketing class, and I better get an A on that one or I’m seriously going to burn the entire school to the ground.”
Rowan’s worry lines are deep when she says, “You really can’t pass two of them even if you ace the finals?”
“Don’t look at me like that,” I say. “I tried, Ro. I really did. I mean, you saw me, I—”
“I know you did,” she assures me. “You’ve been working really hard . . .”
I take a deep, heavy breath. “I promised my dad I’d get my grades up . . . but the damage was already done before midterms. I couldn’t get caught up, and then . . . stuff happened.” I don’t need to say what stuff. I stopped saying Joel’s name a few weeks ago. “It just wasn’t going to happen.”
“There’s always next semester,” she suggests after a while, forcing a smile at me even though her eyes are still sad.
I take another weighted breath, knowing I have to tell her and hoping I don’t cry. “Ro . . . I’m not coming back next semester.”
She stops cutting into her pancakes to stare at me. “What do you mean?”
“I’m going home. I’m not coming back. I—”
“You’re not coming back?”
My eyes start to sting, so I close them. “I just can’t be here anymore. This isn’t working out for me.”
When she slides into my side of the booth, I open my eyes and look at her. She takes my hand. “Dee, I know you miss Joel, but—”
“This isn’t just about Joel,” I say, and it’s the truth. The past few weeks have been some of the most miserable of my life, but while part of my brain insists that it’s all because of a certain boy I can’t forget, the other part knows that’s not entirely true. It’s also because I’ve honestly been giving college my all, and the more seriously I take it, the more wrong it feels, like I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing or in the place where I should be. Over the past year, I’ve tried to quiet the voice, convincing myself that it’s just because I’m lazy or disinterested—because everyone with half a brain goes to college, right?—but it’s gotten to the point where I no longer care what the voice says because I just want to go home.
I want to go back to a place where subjects like math and biology don’t matter. Back where homework doesn’t exist and boys are predictable. Back where I can figure out who I am, because right now, the only thing I’m absolutely sure of is who I’m not. I’m not the same girl who accepted that college was her only option. I’m not the same girl who obsessed over Joel, or who let Aiden drool all over her, or who thought she could use Cody as a pawn to get what she wanted.
And I’m definitely not the same girl who blamed herself for what Cody did.
The girl I am now knows better. Even though there are days when I still think about that night, each time Cody’s face enters my mind, I become more and more sure that I didn’t deserve what happened. A kiss, even one that I enjoyed, does not equal consent. I was not to blame for what he tried to do to me.
It wasn’t my fault.
It took me a while to believe it, and some days, it’s still hard, but I know Rowan was right when she told me I did all I needed to do when I told him that one word: “STOP.”
Before that night, I was broken, and after, I was destroyed. It was a broken girl who turned Joel away when he told me he loved me, and a broken girl who watched him leave Mayhem holding another girl’s hand. I’m still trying to put myself together, but I need to be able to think to do that, and that’s the last thing I can do when every single breath I take in this town pulls at the fissures of my completely broken heart. If my future doesn’t involve college or the only guy I ever gave my heart to, I don’t know where that leaves me, but I need to figure it out.
“It’ll get better,” Rowan says. “Next semester—”
“My mind’s already made up, babe.” The corners of her lips start slipping into a frown, but my voice stays sure. “I’m moving back home at the end of the month. I already talked to my dad.”
Rowan shakes her head, her blue eyes welling with unshed tears. “What about me?”
I smile and smooth her hair over her shoulder. “You’ll be fine. You’ll stay here with Adam and finish school and be awesome, and we’ll visit each other. And we’ll talk all the time.”
“Dee . . .”
I pull her in for a hug, and she squeezes me close. When the server stops by to ask how we’re doing, she takes one look at us and gives us another few minutes.
“What will you do?” Rowan asks when she pulls away. She wipes her eyes and sniffs in the rest of her tears.
“Call Jeremy, see what he’s up to.” She chuckles when I bring up the name of the lifeguard, and I force a smile even though I’m lying out of my teeth. I have no interest in seeing anyone, especially considering it’s taking all of my energy just to crawl out of bed in the morning.
Last week, Rowan told me Joel got his own place, and I asked her to stop giving me updates. She told me she didn’t think he was seeing anyone, and I told her I didn’t care.
I’m happy that he finally has a place he can call home, but I don’t believe for a second that he’s been alone all this time, and I hate that some other girl is the one who got to sleep in his bed first. Or at all.
“I actually got an email from Van last night,” I say, showing Rowan my phone to distract us both. This will make her happy, and hopefully that will help me block Joel from my mind for another five minutes. If I take life five minutes at a time, maybe I’ll never need to think of him again.
“From Van?” she asks.
“He wanted to let me know he finally got in touch with his marketing people. I got an email from them half an hour later with a contract attached.”
“Seriously?” she says, her face lighting up. “You’re going to make T-shirts for Cutting the Line?”
I force another smile, hoping it looks as excited and genuine as hers. Last night, when I got the email, I should have danced, screamed, called my best friend and freaked the hell out. Instead, I burst into tears.
All I could think was, This should make me happy. I should be happy. Why am I not happy? But there I was, crying into a box of tissues.