“Selene, you can’t rule out even the possibility of dating other dudes just because you knew a giant asshole in New York,” Bailey scolded me, and I gasped.
“Yeah. Sure, you lost your virginity to him, but maybe just chalk that up to experience,” Janel added airily.
“You can’t live the rest of your life chained to his memory,” she added, sounding more concerned. I just stared down at the table, considering her words and lost in thought.
How could I forget Neil?
When I first met him, I thought the same things everyone did: that he was beautiful but uninteresting. I thought he was living his perfect life, sleeping with all those different women just because he could. After that first night, when I hadn’t been able to sleep because of Jennifer’s screams, I had bought some ear plugs, not that he’d ever known or cared. And then on the couch when he grabbed a handful of my popcorn? I realized how overbearing he was.
I’d hated him, couldn’t stand him at all. Especially when he treated me like a kid and tried to lord his greater experience over me. He sneered at me whenever I didn’t understand something; when I wasn’t on his level sexually; when I blushed at dirty jokes.
I had even been with someone else, but after I met him, I couldn’t do anything but want him.
It might have started off shallow and careless, but I always knew there was something different about him.
Every day was a new discovery.
He was special.
A total disaster, which is why I couldn’t hold a grudge or really hate him.
I couldn’t bring myself to hurt him even after he’d hurt me so badly once again.
All I could do was…thank him.
13
It disgusted me, what I had become because of her.
Neil
We were lost, she and I.
Yes, truly lost.
For fourteen days.
It had been two weeks since I’d let her walk away, since I’d made the best possible choice, and since I’d freed her from the spiderweb she’d gotten herself wrapped up in. Two weeks since I’d last smelled her coconut perfume or saw her ocean eyes.
“Neil! Are you getting up? You need to go to class,” railed Logan, bursting into my room.
No, I didn’t really feel like getting out of bed. Logan had been nagging me, and I’d been giving him the old “five more minutes,” but the truth was, I didn’t feel like doing shit.
I didn’t want to get up and face my days, which felt monotonous and dull. I didn’t want to go out to a club or a party. I didn’t want to be surrounded by women just waiting to open their legs for me. Not that I could actually have a real fuck with my anorgasmia. I was still following Dr. Lively’s advice to avoid sexual intercourse, and I was getting good at it.
Truthfully, I didn’t want any eyes on me except a specific pair of crystalline ones, deep as the ocean.
I simply did not feel like doing anything at all and I didn’t know what was going on with me.
“Five more minutes, Logan,” I muttered for the umpteenth time, burying my head under the pillow.
“You already said that. Five minutes ago. And it’s been thirty minutes since I came in here to beg you to get your ass out of this bed!” he snapped and then sighed. I required a lot of patience.
But I didn’t care how many times Logan scolded; all I wanted to do was sit there alone and wallow in my correct-but-shitty decisions.
I really was rotting.
And that wasn’t like me.
