As I slowly came back to myself, I began to wonder if I’d gone too far. It was difficult for Neil to communicate with words, and he unsurprisingly preferred a silent language of signs and actions that I had to interpret. I should have expected his silence.
I had gone hard on him, attacking him with no warning when he’d answered my call with the intention of teasing and laughing with me.
What if I’d gotten it all backward? What if I should have been questioning Alyssa and trusting Neil?
Wouldn’t it have been better to at least hear his side of the story as well?
I’d treated him the way everyone else always did—like I was some tyrannical judge handing down sentences without even giving him a chance to defend himself.
Me, the one who was always making such a big deal about how important it was to talk about things. I had made a huge mistake.
“Selene, come inside.”
I startled when my mother rested a hand on my shoulder. I whirled around, phone still clenched in my frozen fingers, and stared into her eyes. She looked solemn and stern.
It occurred to me that she had likely overheard my whole conversation, and I suspected it had only given her a worse impression of Neil.
I didn’t have the strength to argue with her, though. I didn’t want to have a conversation about Neil or what had happened, so I just gave in with a nod and followed her inside, bearing all my misery along with me.
I’d been choosing to walk a perilous path for months now, trying to follow a deeply troubled man, and only now was I starting to come to terms with the harsh reality of my choices…
3
“I wasn’t going to let myself be hurt by her or anyone else.”
Neil
On edge.
That’s how I was feeling.
I hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep because of that fucking girl.
Selene had an incredible capacity for changing my mood. Not that it was particularly difficult, but she had become an expert at it.
I hung up on her the night before because she didn’t deserve any explanations from me. From what I could decipher, Alyssa had told her a completely false version of what happened with the kiss, and Selene had believed her immediately without even hearing me out.
Wasn’t she the one who was always saying how important it was to communicate verbally? But what had she done instead?
She hadn’t let me get a word in edgewise.
Feeling disillusioned, I continued to stare into the smoke from my cigarette as it dissolved into the sex-saturated air.
“Mmh…” Jennifer mumbled next to me, one leg hooked over my waist.
I clamped the cigarette between my lips and looked up at the ceiling, my head propped up with one arm underneath it. Blondie was plastered against me, naked and sleepy, while I felt like I was wrapped in chains. A prisonerof the sick coping mechanisms that I’d likely never be able to completely banish from my life.
“How can you smoke like that first thing in the morning?” It was Alexia who spoke that time, lying on my other side. I turned my gaze to her and found her also still half-asleep. She was naked as well, and her hair was mussed, and her eyelids were barely cracked open. Her breasts were pressed against me, and her hand was resting on my stomach. She moved her fingers, stroking me, and I moaned in appreciation. Usually, those kinds of obscene theatrics pleased me, but, in that moment, the idea that I’d fucked the both of them was repellent to me. I could smell them, their skin, and their saliva on me, and a rictus of pure disgust twisted my face.
I shouldn’t have done it.
When Selene called me the night before, she wasn’t interrupting anything except one of my practice sessions with the heavy bag. I wasn’t with a woman the way I’d led her to believe because I wanted to get under her skin.
I hadn’t slept with anyone else since I’d gotten back to New York, but after her unexpected little speech, I couldn’t deal with the miserable feeling in my chest.
I felt like I needed to get back to the place I belonged, back to my world. So I called up the Krew girls to remind myself of exactly who I was and that I didn’t belong to anyone, least of all to Babygirl.
I wasn’t going to let myself be hurt by her or anyone else. Never again would some girl be able to wound and shatter me the way that Kim had done.
