“I... I...” I want to kiss her again.
“Wesley,” she whispers.
I smile, lazily. When she calls me by my first name a fire lights in my chest. But I can’t bring myself to put together the words to tell her that yet. My hands run restlessly over her soft, soft skin. I press my mouth to that softness because I can’t stop. Because it’s all I can think about: how incredibly right this feels.
She pushes against me. Everything is sweaty and sticky wherever our skin touches.
“Wesley.” Her voice is different now. “Get off,” she hisses.
I meet her eyes, trying to reconcile the impatience in her tone, the sudden stiffness in her body, with what we just did. But she won’t meet my gaze. Her jaw clenches and unclenches in that familiar way.
Pushing up on my hands, I pull out of her, feel my come wet my skin, stain the front of my pants; hear the wet splatter on the floor, my shoes.
Fuck.
I stare down at my dick, hanging out of my pants as horror rises up in me.
“I... I’ve never had sex without a condom,” I mumble. I am cold and unsteady for a completely different reason from only minutes before. A sickening sense of panic weighs down my postorgasmic euphoria. Corrine stands, pulling the two halves of her shirt together, wrapping her arms around herself. She looks at the floor and I follow her gaze. We stare at her panties, still lying on my shoe.
“Neither have I,” she says, barely above a whisper.
“Are you okay?” I ask, putting my dick away and pulling my own shirt together.
She lifts her head, scowling. “Yes. No. I don’t know.”
I rub my index finger back and forth over my brow. “It’s just that, that was...amazing. And then, now, you know.” I shrug. Now she’s freaking out.
“I’m on the pill. And I’m clean,” she says, almost defensively.
I nod, quickly. “Me, too,” I say. “I mean, I’m clean. I’m not on the pill. Obviously.”
She won’t look at me. With each passing second the silence pushes her further away, leaving me more and more alone. But I can’t bring myself to speak and I certainly can’t make myself walk out that door. This isn’t how I do things. This isn’tme. My hand tingles with the need to reach out to her, touch her skin, her hair. Offer her some sort of comfort. But maybe I just need the contact to comfort myself. I’m not sure she can give that to me.
“This was a mistake,” she says. The air leaves my chest in a rush. She could have just punched me in the chest instead.
Pressing her hand to her throat, where my lips were seconds ago, she swallows. “I regret... It was...inappropriate. I’m sorry.”
I hope my cheeks aren’t as red as they feel. Too many thoughts compete in my brain for precedence so I stand here, unspooled in her office. Doing nothing. Like the loser I’ve always known myself to be. Like a mistake.
“Mr. Chambers,” she says. Her voice is sharp and I blink up to her. “You’re dismissed.”
I can’t keep the flinch off my face. But her words do their job and get me moving. She opens her mouth but I shake my head. I can’t hear anything else she has to say right now. I don’t want this moment tainted any more than it has been.
I walk to the door, stopping with my hand on the stainless steel handle. The metal is cold and wrapping my hand around it freezes something inside of me. I turn back to her. Her face has changed, less remote, more scared.
“I don’t regret you, Corrine.”
Her face falls farther but I straighten. I won’t slouch or make myself smaller when I say this.
“And I’m not a mistake.”
My sister probably ordered the cake herself and got those ridiculously huge number balloons to announce our age to the general public. But I can’t bring myself to go see any of it. Even if I haven’t seen most of my friends for months, they’re still the people who know me best.
Especially Amy.
She’ll take one look at me and know that something is wrong, that I’ve done something I can’t take back.
I forgo my usual walk and take a cab home, going straight to the shower from the front door. My phone vibrates almost constantly in my pocket, filled with a mixture ofHappy Birthday!andDude, where are you?messages as my pants pool around my feet. I ignore them all as I turn on the hot water and take stock in the quickly fogging mirror, inventory the scratch marks down my chest, the bite mark on my collarbone. I can’t even remember when she did these things to me. I just know they felt good when they happened.
