But all she had were excuses.
“It just doesn’t know the difference between fake and real, all right.”
“Yeah, but you loathe me. And I’ve barely touched you in any sort of decent way. It just cannot be the reason you’re shaking like this. It can’t be. Tell me it isn’t, Emmett. Tell me that’s not a fucking thing.”
“Look, I’m sorry I am the way I am.”
“And what way is that, exactly?”
“A horny mess.”
More silence then, worse than the first.
Mainly because she felt him jerk on the wordhorny. Then had to wait for what that jerk had meant.Him getting out of the tent and walking directly into the nearest bear, she thought, about a second before he saidthisinstead, in a voice that seemed just a little grave and quiet and pointed: “And you think I hate that. That I would find it embarrassing.”
“I know you would. Hell, you hate it when I’m loud about a nice burger.”
“So you make a lot of noise, then.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But that’s what you mean. You mean you moan when you make yourself come. Maybe even when you don’t. Maybe just when it feels good, when you get to a certain point and you’re so turned on that you can’t help it,” he said, and okay, now she was getting a little concerned about the turn this was taking.
Because had he just used the wordcome?
While asking her about how out of control she got?
I’m gonna be if you keep talking like this, she thought. Though of course she couldn’t allow him to know that. “I don’t ever let myself get that way now,” she said, sure and certain that this would end the discussion.
It didn’t. He carried on in that same low voice.
“Because of me. Because of what I did to you back in college. All that stuff you said on the stage.”
“You didn’t do anything to me back in college, all right. I just thought you were different from other men, that was all. I thought you were something else. It’s my own fault that I put that on you, and then let it affect me too much when you were just… the way you are. When we are just very different people.”
“That’s a generous way to look at it.”
“Even if it wasn’t, you didn’t make me feel embarrassed, sex-wise.”
“So who did, then? Christian? The other guy—the man bun?”
She thought of both men when he said it. Christian, almost as big as Miller but slyer in the face, morewashed-out somehow, hair less thick, stubble less lush. Handsome, she had thought him at the time, but now when she looked back he seemed faded. The kind of thing you loved when you weren’t sure you had options.
And Derek—he was even worse that way.
She could barely remember his face, even though he’d been the first. Her first college boyfriend, her first anything boyfriend, really, and now here he was consigned to one single sad, embarrassing memory.
Him saying she got too excited, for a girl.
“Yeah, he kind of… he thought I was too much, too,” she said, finally.
“And that’s why you think you should never let anyone else hear.”
“I never even like hearing it myself now. In fact I can’t recall the last—” she started to say. Then realizedwhatshe was saying and tried to stop. To go back, before he imagined she meantthe last time I masturbated.
Though if he did think so, he didn’t let it stop whatever he was driving at. And he wasreallydriving at it now. “But something about this situation is bringing it out of you anyway.”
“It doesn’t matter if it is, it’s just pretend. All of your softness is pretend.”
