I had to laugh at myself. It was the only thing I could have done to avoid cursing myself out so badly I’d never be able to look at myself in the mirror.
“Fuck me,” I said.
“I’m still willing,” Cole said with a smirk. I laughed. “But seriously, Lilly. I only want to go at your pace. You’re not fucked in the head. We all got issues, and we all gotta work on them at our own pace.”
“But with sex?”
He shrugged.
“I got issues with being honest with my brother,” he said. “Wouldn’t you rather have the capacity for being honest than the capacity for getting laid a lot?”
He may have meant it as a rhetorical question, but it didn’t seem that way to me.
“I just want to make sure that what’s best for you is what happens,” he said. “I like you too. Do I wish that I was getting to have sex with you? Of course.”
How can you say that with such ease?It was remarkable—he said it with the same neutral tone someone would have when saying they wished they’d gotten pizza instead of burgers.
“But if I like you, I have to accept your boundaries. I have to do what’s best for you. So... here we are.”
“Here we are,” I said in a resigned tone. “I’m sorry, Cole. I wish I could make you feel good. But anything... even just touching you, as thrilling as it was, created a lot of anxiety. I guess I have to be super comfortable with the person before anything happens.”
“Hey, no worries,” Cole said.
The ironic thing was the very way in which he handled himself made it so much easier to consider him being the one I lost my virginity to. He had such aplomb, such grace, such ease... the other Reapers were almost certainly bigger brutes and assholes just by comparison, but my father had been wrong. Not all Reapers were rapists, murderers, and criminals.
In fact, whatever the complete opposite of rapist was, Cole was.Respectful.
“Well, I don’t want to be in your hair any longer than I have to be,” I said. “I can get a train ticket for this evening and be on my way.”
“You sure?”
I swallowed.
“It’s not like I’m going to change my mind in the next day and sleep with you. And even if I did, what would that lead to? I’ve still got to get out of here. My father knows I’m in the area. If I sleep with you and then leave, I don’t know how I’d be able to look myself in the mirror. I would feel like such a whore, really. Maybe other girls could do it more easily, but—”
“You can’t, and that’s fine,” Cole said. “Don’t compare yourself to anyone else. Let me look up some tickets, one second.”
Cole stood up—again, revealing those muscles that so turned me on and so put the fear of God in me—grabbed his phone, and sat back down on the couch. I leaned on him because I wanted to and because I wanted him to know that I cared about him. I hadn’t rejected him so much as I had rejected my sexual self.
We scrolled through a few options for the evening, starting out of Union Station in Los Angeles. There was one that departed at six p.m., or about two and a half hours later, and got into New Mexico around eleven a.m. the next day. I probably wouldn’t sleep for shit on the train, but I was not in a position to bargain with life for anything right now. If I had to go without food until I got into Albuquerque, so be it.
“That one look good?” Cole asked.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
“You sure? You go to New Mexico—”
“I don’t care where I go so much as that I’m leaving this place,” I said. “Maybe Dad will find me out there. But he’s going to have to go way out of his way to do so. And I’ll be all the way out there. I just need... I need a new start.”
“I know the feeling.”
What do you mean by that?
“OK, I’m buying the ticket now.”
“Wait, what? Cole, I’m—”
“You got cash only. Do you really want to spend any more time there than you have to?” he said. “Let me buy it now. It’s like eighty bucks; for me, that’s nothing. If you feel that bad, you can send me some money when you get a job and get on your feet out there.”
