by L. A. Casey
“I’m goin’ to get c-cleaned up,” I stammered, trying to hold back the tears I wanted to shed.
“No.” Damien frowned. “Please, we have to talk about this. What I mean is—”
“I don’t think anythin’ you have to say will make me feel better.” I cut him off, trying my hardest to keep my emotions in check.
“Alannah—”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s fucking not,” he countered. “I knew this was a bad idea. Just look at how upset you are! This is why I’ve tried to stay away from you. You’re a good girl, and I knew you’d let your emotions take centre stage. This was a mistake!”
His words were the truth, and I think that was why they pained me so much.
“You were right. This was a mistake, but I’ve made it.” I swallowed. “And I’ll learn from it, too.”
Damien reached for me, but I moved farther away from him and headed towards the door I assumed led to a bathroom.
“I don’t want to speak to you anymore, Damien,” I said as I opened the door. “Just … Just go away. Please.”
I never wanted to speak to him again.
“Lana.”
“Alannah,” I said, my hold on the door handle tightening. “Me name is Alannah.”
I entered the bathroom, closed the door behind me, and locked it. Numbly, I relieved myself and cleaned up as best as I could with small pieces of tissue paper. The evidence of blood reconfirmed that Damien had just taken my virginity, and it brought a bitter taste to my mouth. Instead of leaving the bathroom, I leaned my back against the wall and slid down it until my behind hit the floor.
I wasn’t sure how long I sat there, but it was long enough for the tears that flowed from my eyes and splashed onto my cheeks to dry. Between my thighs felt strange—like a sweet tenderness I couldn’t shake. I thought I heard raised voices, and when I heard a knock on the door, I flinched.
“Lana?” I heard my name being softly spoken. “It’s me. Can I come in?”
Bronagh.
I stood, moved over to the door, unlocked it, and then sat on the closed lid of the toilet. Bronagh entered the bathroom and quickly closed and locked the door behind her. She kicked off her heels, bent down to her knees, and then reached forward and engulfed me in a tight hug. When I put my arms around her, I released a pain-laced sob.
At that moment, I was both hurt and mortified. I realised I had thrown myself at Damien like I had no shame, and now, shame was all that filled me. I couldn’t begin to form the words to tell Bronagh how forward I behaved for fear that she would judge me, so I kept my mouth shut.
“It’s goin’ to be okay, Lana. You’re strong and won’t let an annoyin’ American prick get you down, right?”
I managed a snort as I pulled back from our hug. I grabbed some tissue to wipe the snot running from my nose. I was a mess, and I knew I looked as bad as I felt.
“Ye’know somethin’?” I sniffled. “I know Nico is your fella, but I thought he was the prick and Damien was the nice one. I was so wrong. Nico is honest and has always been ’imself whether you like ’im or hate ’im. Damien, though ... he is like a snake in human form. I hate ’im.”
I couldn’t fault Damien for being upfront before we had sex, but the lies he spewed during and the bullshit shit excuse he had for saying them afterward angered me.
“If it makes you feel better,” Bronagh interjected. “Dominic really is a prick, I had a huge fight with ’im before I came in ’ere.”
I started laughing through my tears, but I frowned when Bronagh sat down on her behind and winced at the contact. It was a reminder that she was no longer a virgin either, but her first time had been magical, while mine had the magic sucked from me ten seconds after ending.
“I just realised we both lost our virginity tonight to the twins.”
“Well ... at least we can be sore and hate them together.”
I was still upset—that didn’t even begin to cover it—but I laughed at Bronagh’s joke, and the carefree sound helped a tiny bit. Even with my friend by my side making me laugh, I couldn’t help but feel like a layer of stone had just sealed itself over my heart. I silently vowed that I would never willingly put myself in a situation where I would feel pain like this again.
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
I called Bronagh’s name when the silence surrounding us was snatched away, and a loud thumping noise could be heard from outside. I didn’t know how I knew, but I knew Damien had left the room with the door open and fled down the corridor and back into the club. Getting as far away from me as he possibly could.
The fucking coward.
Bronagh looked at me when I spoke.
“Yeah?”
“Are you ready to go back outside?” I quizzed. “I can hear ‘RAMPAGE’ bein’ cheered now that they’ve stopped the music for the fight.”
Things were a blur of activity as Bronagh jumped to her feet, put her heels back on, and pulled me out of the room and back down the corridor to the club. Bodies of all shapes and sizes crowded around the platform where Nico and another fighter stood. I couldn’t concentrate with the noise and sea of people surrounding me, so when Bronagh broke through the crowd to reach Nico after he won the fight, I stayed just long enough to hug her when she returned to my side. The second she became solely focused on Nico, I slipped away from her and headed out of the club.
When I got outside, no one was around, not even the bouncers who had granted us entrance to the club hours before. I was glad to have a moment’s solitude so I could try to wrap my head around what happened. I sat on the curb and fought off a fresh batch of tears.
This is a disaster.
There was never going to be a ‘Damien and Alannah’ in the way I wanted, and he made sure of that. No, we made damn sure of that. He took my virginity, but I was the eejit who practically begged him to take it. For that, I had no one to blame but myself ... and my godforsaken hormones.
Damien pursued our intimacy with no illusions or lies coated in pretty words—until he got what he wanted. Beforehand, he said he didn’t want a relationship, he just wanted sex, and for me to feel so broken over him keeping his word was foolish. In the back of my mind, I’d silently hoped that once we had sex, Damien would want to be with me. If that wasn’t the dumbest misconception filling the heads of teenage girls around the world, then I didn’t know what was.
The pain in my chest was nothing like I had ever felt before, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. I needed Bronagh. I needed my friend. I heard a noise behind me, and I wasn’t sure why, but because I thought of Bronagh, I just assumed it would be her. I wanted to look around, but a sudden case of dizziness struck me, and I had trouble remaining upright. Just when I thought my head and vision were clearing, I felt a hard knock on the back of my head like someone had hit me, and it was followed by my body falling backwards.
It didn’t hurt, and the first thing I thought of was that if someone hadn’t hit me then I was passing out because I had drunk alcohol for the first time. I figured my emotional roller coaster had pushed my body into stress-out mode, and as a result, my mind just switched off. I was glad of it. I was glad when I found myself facing darkness because, at the current moment, darkness was a more welcoming sight than the thought of Damien Slater. But I wasn’t granted that peace. Before I completely lost consciousness, the last thing I heard was his words.
It’s not that I can’t keep you, Lana; it’s that I don’t want to.
Damien didn’t want me, but what hurt the most was that I knew deep down, I’d always want him no matter what happened between us. I’d never let him or anyone else know it, though. Damien might have hurt me, but I would never give him the opportunity to do it again.
He said he didn’t want me, and for as long as I lived, I’d never forget it.
Present day ...
I awoke with a start.
I shot upright and placed a hand on my chest, feeling my heart slam into my
ribcage as it pounded erratically. My breathing was laboured, and instead of waking from a dream, it sounded like I had just completed a marathon. I closed my eyes and tried desperately to calm myself to no avail.
I hated when tears suddenly welled in my eyes, and I couldn’t stop them from spilling over the brims and splashing onto my cheeks in big fat droplets. I sniffled as I carelessly wiped them away with the back of my hand. I raised my knees to my chest and hooked my arms around them, hugging them tightly.
Even in sleep, I was miserable.
Both my personal life and family life were falling apart around me, and it seemed everything I did to stop disaster from striking was only adding fuel to the fire and destroying everything I cared about faster. At the moment, my personal life was in tatters and took centre stage.
Almost every single night for the last few months, I’d relived the night I lost my virginity in detail. I hadn’t dreamt about that night in a long time, but the recent appearance of him back in my life seemed to bring it all tumbling back down on top of me like an avalanche of emotions I couldn’t escape.
I closed my eyes, and as usual, every thought switched to him.
Damien Slater.
I didn’t want to think about him, but it seemed I had no choice in the matter because my mind always drifted to him. To be so hung up on the boy who broke my heart in secondary school was pathetic, and I knew it was, but I couldn’t seem to get over it, no matter how hard I tried. I had accepted it, of course, but I could never get over the pain I felt when I thought about him and what happened between us.
I opened my eyes and scowled at myself, like always, when I realised how much of a gobshite I was. I had lost count of the times I wished to go back in time and slap myself silly for making the stupid decision that messed up everything. I closed my eyes once more, leaned back against my headboard, and clenched my teeth when Damien’s handsome face flashed across my mind.
The bastard was haunting me.
Half of the time, I didn’t know where to start when I thought of him. He was in my life for such a short amount of time, yet he had such a significant impact on it. My involvement with him shaped the woman I had become. As much as I hated to give him any credit, he was the reason I’d never let another person get intimately close to me. It was because of him that I built the walls high around my bruised heart.
I hadn’t always been so guarded, though. For a long time after he left me, left the poxy country, thoughts of him would consume me until I was sure all that remained was puddles of tears. That boy ... no, that man ... broke my heart, and I let him do it. Not only did I let him ruin me, but I also practically begged him to do so. My teenage infatuation with him went far beyond one’s first heartbreak because before we became intimate, I cared for him deeper than a new friend should have.
I saw the best in Damien even when he didn’t see it in himself.
Six years ago, I gave my heart and body to the new womaniser at school, and when he rebuffed my heart and only accepted my body, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I was devastated. I felt like I was cheated out of a magical first sexual experience because Damien became a completely different person after we had sex and didn’t remain the sweet boy who promised to keep me when I asked him to. The words he spoke were lies laced around fiery passion.
Lies. Lies. Lies.
“Stupid girl,” I cursed myself.
I pushed my bed covers away from my body and got to my feet. Rubbing my tired eyes as I walked forward. I ended up walking head first into my wardrobe when I misjudged the location of my bedroom door. I hissed in pain as I moved my fingers from my eyes to the now throbbing spot on my forehead. I looked over my shoulder, and through the dark, I glared at my ajar bedroom door.
The layout of my new apartment was still taking some getting used to.
I had recently moved into a spacious two-bedroom apartment in Upton thanks to one of my best friends, Aideen Collins. I had mentioned to her that I needed to move out of my old apartment due to a ridiculous rent increase, and she told me a newly furnished apartment was available in her building for the same price I had always paid in rent. I couldn’t believe my luck when I found it had two large bedrooms instead of one single room, and a separate sitting room and kitchen that were both more than generous in size. The furnishings were stunning, too. I practically leapt onto the estate agent who showed me around and told her I’d take it.
That was a month ago, and I was still walking into things during the night. I put it down to my recurring dreams—no, not dreams, nightmares—and simply hoped that they would stop; otherwise, my friends would start to think I was secretly getting beat up if fresh bruises kept appearing on my face. I could say “I walked into my wardrobe” only so many times before they got suspicious.
I left my bedroom, flipping the light switch as I went, and headed into my bathroom where I relieved myself. After I washed and dried my hands, I heard a ping come from my bedroom. The sound had me furrowing my eyebrows as I walked over to my nightstand. I picked up my phone, removed the charging wire from its base, and pressed the home button. I sighed when I saw I had received a text, a text from a person who I didn’t want to speak to.
Dante Collins.
I touched the screen to open his message and rolled my eyes as I read the text.
Booty call?
For the first time in days, I hit reply to a message.
No, thanks. Our ‘booty calls’ have become a problem.
The problem being that all my friends and Damien now knew about a relationship I wanted to be kept private. I sighed, sitting on the side of my bed, and kept my gaze downcast. One week ago, I was only dealing with family drama, but now, I had to add fuck buddy and ex-lover drama to the mix. I never thought I’d willingly want to be plagued with just the guilt of knowing my father was having an affair and doing nothing about it, but dealing with that and now the drama with Damien and my friends made me want to get into bed and stay there forever.
I lay back on my mattress, staring up at the ceiling, and thought back to a week ago.
Starting out like any other day, I woke up, had breakfast, and then spent most of the day flicking back and forth between sketching, painting, and designing a website for a client. My work had been the only escape from my life as of late, so I tended to immerse myself in it as often as I could, especially with the knowledge of my father’s secret affair.
I was doing a good job of blocking it all out when Bronagh sent me a text message and asked me to hang out with her and Georgie. We spent the morning together, and as usual, we had fun. It all went wrong when we stopped by Ryder and Branna’s house at lunchtime. Damien was there, and he was his usual friendly self. However, my past with him made me suspicious of that friendly behaviour.
He was trying with me.
I knew he was trying, but I didn’t know what he was trying. He could have genuinely just wanted to be my friend, but in the back of my mind, I was reminded that the last time he wanted to simply be ‘just my friend’, I was left heartbroken and humiliated to boot. For that reason alone, I kept him at arm’s length. If he walked into a room, I walked out of it. If he struck up a conversation with me, I politely shut him down. If he looked at me, I made it a point to look away and ignore him. I had been doing it since he returned home over a year ago, but that day, something in my attitude towards him changed.
He asked me out for lunch, and I suddenly felt like my private relationship with Dante was a noose around my neck. It was a bizarre feeling, but I felt like Damien had a right to know I wasn’t available. Not because Dante and I were in a friends-with-benefits relationship, but because I didn’t want him to have the false hope that something might develop between us. Not that he had any hope at all or wanted anything other than a real friendship, but I wanted to be as upfront with him as he had always been with me.
I knew he wouldn’t disregard the warning as foolishly as I had.
“How are you goin’ to get there?” Aideen
had asked me when I told her about my meeting to interview a potential assistant for my graphic design business. “I know your car is at me da’s garage gettin’ a diesel pump repaired.”
“I was goin’ to walk.”
“I can drop you,” Damien offered, straightening up from playing with the kids. “Ry and I don’t need to be back to work for an hour and thirty minutes.”
I was hesitant. “I don’t want to be a bother.”
“You’re never a bother,” Damien said, his cheeks flaring with a little bit of heat. “We can get lunch or something after your interview, if you aren’t busy?”
Shite. Shite. Shite.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?” Damien asked, crossing the room, frowning.
I avoided looking in Aideen’s direction, knowing what I was about to say would set her off.
“I’m kind of seein’ someone.”
Everyone went deathly silent, even the kids; it was like they knew something was up.
“Who?” Bronagh asked first.
“Yeah,” Damien said, his voice shockingly low. “Who?”
“It doesn’t matter who—”
“It bloody well does!” Bronagh cut me off.
I looked at my friend. “I was goin’ to tell you, I promise, but I knew you’d tell Aideen, and I didn’t want a big deal made of it.”
“Why would she tell me?” Aideen quizzed with furrowed brows. “And why would a big deal be made of it?”
I groaned and put my face in my hands.
“Oh, my God!” Bronagh suddenly gasped. “It’s one of ’er brothers, isn’t it?”
“What?” Aideen asked, her eyes wide. “You’re goin’ out with one of me brothers?”
I looked up, and instead of looking at Aideen, I looked at Damien as I said, “Yes.”
Damien balled his hands into fists. “Which Collins?”
I swallowed. “Dante.”
My chest constricted with pain when I saw the hurt in Damien’s grey eyes.