It’s never felt like that before.
Like losing a limb.
Immediately, I’m annoyed, so when he tries to help resituate my dress straps, I shove his hands away and fix them myself.
This is sohumiliating.
He sits back in his seat, wrenches off the condom, and sighs. “Elle, I didn’t mean?—”
Shoving open the passenger door, I shake my head, gathering my coat in my arms. “Save it,Boy Scout. You’re not the first guy to use me, and you probably won’t be the last, because evidently I can’t learn a goddamn lesson.”
I scramble out of the car before he can reply and slam the door shut, ignoring the fact that he didn’tactuallyget anything out of the encounter, and watch him peel out of the parking lot without another word.
Wrapping my hair in a towel,I move down the hall, sliding a key into the lock of the door to let myself inside. After showering, exfoliating, and flossing, I feel like an entirely new person, able tonearlyforget the embarrassment at Lethe’s.
Aurora’s sitting on her bed, her blond hair wrapped around heatless curlers as she paints her toenails pink. Her blue eyes find me as I discard my bathrobe and slippers, diving beneath the covers of my bed with my laptop.
I hadn’t expected her to be awake when I got back tonight considering the state she left the bar in, but in truth, she rarely seems to leave campus at all these days. Most people at Avernia College go home for winter break, but Aurora transferred dormrooms and claimed to have some online fashion show to work on, so she was still around when I got special permission to move in early.
Normally, the four dorms—Erebus, Cadmus, Rhadamanthus, and Blessed Hall, making up the aptly named Elysian Dorms—don’t allow anyone new in when there are no RAs, but the dean was willing to make an exception.
Or rather, my parents didn’t give him another option.
“How’re we doing?” Aurora asks, eyeing me with a lifted brow. She seems to have sobered up quite a bit.
“I’ll live,” I tell her, sliding my heating pad out from my pillow and fitting it over my stomach.
Those earlier crampshadbeen PMS, as it turns out. Or rather, an endo flare-up triggered by the early stage of my cycle.
The thing about chronic conditions like endometriosis is that even when the symptoms are only moderate, the threat of pain looms over you forever. It consumes your life. Even a few years after my diagnosis with stage two, I still struggle to anticipate the days when the pain is tolerable, minimal, or excruciating.
And while Idothink the idea of birth control is pro-feminist like I told that sexy stranger, it’s also loaded with its own issues and not a real fix. It doesn’t stop the disease from spreading, it just alleviates the symptoms.
There’s no cure, so all I can do in the meantime is manage it.
Orgasms sometimes help, so pairing my earlier encounter with the heating pad and pain meds I just took, I’m hoping I’ll be able to sleep tonight.
So long as I avoid dreaming about the Primordial Forest, that is.
“What’d you end up doing after we left?” Aurora continues.
“Oh. Um…nothing, really. Just drank a little and called an Uber. Fed a couple of wayward pigeons. I don’t really remember much beyond that. Must’ve had more to drink than I realized.”
“Ew. Birds are fucking terrifying.” Her nose scrunches up. “Anyway, don’t blame yourself. It’s Lethe’s, and why I avoid that place like the plague. No one ever seems to remember what they did once they leave.”
“Are you saying my memories will magically disappear?”
“Depends. Did you drink the tap water?”
I shoot her a horrified look. “When have you ever known me to do that?”
She laughs. “Fair enough. You really didn’t meet anyone when we left though? That seems so unlike the Noelle I remember.”
A flash of that stranger’s green gaze flickers in my mind, and panic seizes my chest at the thought of her knowing what I did. Of knowing he rejected me.
“Nah,” I lie, rolling to face the cement wall. “Just thought it’d be nice to hang out in one of the few attractions available in Fury Hill.”
She snorts. “Yeah. If Lucy hadn’t roped me into coming here, I’d be at Pratt and going toactualfashion shows and five-star restaurants on the weekends—not stuck here pretending everyone doesn’t wear the same polyester skirts and tweed jackets all the time.”
