I laugh. “Good. Now, please, for the love of God, tell me your ‘slightly embarrassing’ story already.”
She sighs. “It’s not really fair to make me follow your exciting ‘King Dong of the Prom’ story with a boring story about nine months of unintentional sexual hermitude. Talk about a boner-killer.”
“Come on, dude,” I say. “You’re filibustering.”
“Okay, okay,” she says. She lets out a long exhale. “It’s just so stupid.”
“I love stupid. Wait ’til you meet my younger brother.”
She pauses, apparently gathering her thoughts. “Nine months ago, I broke up with my boyfriend—this guy named Stu—after finding out he’d cheated on me ten gazillion times during our two-year relationship.”
“Ooph. What a dick.”
“Total dick.”
“Did you love him?”
“I did. I was absolutely decimated when I discovered his extracurricular activities. I’d had no idea. I’d trusted him completely. So, of course, I felt completely blindsided and betrayed, but I think the worst part was feeling like I had a defective ‘picker,’ you know? Like, I couldn’t trust my own feelings anymore. I couldn’t understand how the hell I didn’t see his true colors in all that time?”
My chest tightens sharply. Shit. When Samantha finds out about my quick turnaround with Olivia, is she gonna think I’m hiding my true colors from her? Shit. All of a sudden, I’m thinking maybe I should tell Samantha all about Olivia tonight, just to avoid possible misunderstandings later?
Samantha continues, “I think I was just razzle-dazzled by Stu’s good looks and charm and the whole ‘quasi-celebrity thing’ and I just blindly trusted.”
“Hold up. Stu was a quasi-celebrity?”
“He’s an athlete. It doesn’t matter. So, anyway, that whole experience really shook me to my core and made me really skeptical about love and my own judgment, and then, on top of all that, a mere three months later, I...” She trails off.
I wait.
“And, um, three months later, my heart still hadn’t mended, so I decided to take a break from dating and work on myself for a while. So, now,voila,here I am.”
I narrow my eyes. She’s totally bullshitting me, obviously. She was clearly about to say something different about the three-months-later thing, but I decide to leave it for now. “So what’s the ‘slightly embarrassing’ part of that story?” I ask. “Your lying-ass prick of an athlete-boyfriend cheated on you and so you took a break for a while—a long while, granted, but, still, there’s nothing embarrassing about that.”
“It’s embarrassing that he cheated on me.”
“Why? Him cheating on you reflects poorly onhim,not you. Seriously. To think otherwise is completely fucked up.”
She exhales with relief.
“Is that seriouslywhy you didn’t want to tell me?”
“Yeah. I mean, he cheated on me fortwoyears and I had no idea. Not a shining moment for me. Plus, I don’t want you thinking I’m, you know, asexual or something because I’ve gone so long without sex. Trust me, I’m most definitely not asexual, I assure you.”
“Well, yeah, obviously. I’ve got no doubt your motor runs hot. It’s wafting off you.”
She blushes.
“I’m guessing you’re actually a little vixen when you get going.” I scoot closer. “So has it been really hard for you to, you know, go without for nine months?”
“Excruciating. But, you know, I’m a Virgo. I’ve got high standards. Plus, like I said before, I’ve got a battery-operated-boyfriend who’s been very faithful to me—he loves me and no one else.”
“But this whole time you haven’t been tempted to have sex with some guy not up to your standards? Just for the fuck of it?”
She shakes her head. “I’m just not wired that way.”
“Wow. There hasn’t been a single human guy you’ve been attracted to in nine months?”
“That’s not what I said.”
