“I don’t want to talk about it,” I mutter, rubbing my hands over my face.
Which is, of course, a green light for Caty to talk about nothing else.
“Sweetheart,” she says, leaning back against my pillows like she’s settling in to stay awhile. “Please don’t tell me you’re freaking out that you lost your v card to a guy. I thought we were past this. You sucked his dick. He sucked yours. You had his big sausage fingers?—”
“Caty!”
“My point is that all of that was pretty fucking gay, Beck. I don’t see what there is to panic about now. Let’s move on to acceptance and telling your best friend all the dirty details.”
“It’s not that,” I groan. “I’ve accepted it, or whatever. I’m not about to come out and join a parade or anything, but it’s whatever. I just… I didn’t expect it to feel likethat.”
“Like what? Did it hurt?”
“No, that’s the thing. I thought it would. I didn’t think it would be awful?—”
“—because of the aforementioned fingers…”
I narrow my eyes in warning. “I can’t talk to you about this if you’re going to make fun of me. I don’t even know how to say the words, I’m not going to be able to handle any kind of humiliation.”
Caty drops her bag of pretzels and scoots to the end of the bed to wrap her arms around me from behind. “I’m sorry. I use humor to make heavy things easier to talk about, but I promise you there is nothing but support and acceptance in my heart. I am here to talk about anything and everything you want. And while I’ll always be honest, I’ll never ever judge you or think less of you as a person. I love you, Lincoln Beckett.”
“I love you, Catherine Hunt.”
“I promise to keep my comments about Brody’s weirdly thick, meaty fingers to myself even though I couldn’t think of anything else when we were locked in that study room together. It’s why I had to flee. I was going to start making inappropriate comments at any moment and knew I wouldn’t be able to control myself once I got going.”
I can’t help but laugh at my best friend’s antics. “You don’t even want to know about what happened after you left,” I mutter.
“Oh, I absolutely do. In detail,” she says, pointing a sharply manicured finger at me. “But let’s not get distracted. I want to know why you have such big feelings about finally getting dicked down.”
At this point, I’m surprised my eyes haven’t gotten stuck in my head, because between Caty and Brody, it seems I’m constantly rolling them so far back I can see brain matter.
“I liked it. Um. A lot.”
“Yes, and…”
“That’s what I’m having a hard time with.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Me either, really. And yeah, I totally get that all that other stuff we did was pretty gay or whatever, but this… The fact that I liked it as much as I did… I mean, Caty—I saw fucking colors I didn’t know existed, okay? I felt it in my hair follicles, all the way down past my toes. And then he was looking in my eyes and kissing me and saying things…”
“That’s amazing though. That your first time could be that beautiful.”
“I just didn’t think I was like that.”
“Like what?”
I don’t have the words to explain what I’m trying to say without sounding as disgusting as the voice in my head. It’s not that I don’t know that my brain is twisted—I’m very aware. But I can’t help putting myself in a new category, one my father would absolutely abhor and describe in the worst ways. A category of men he finds distasteful, weak, emasculated and unworthy to be called real men.
I sigh deeply. “It’s one thing to enjoy the occasional blow job from a pretty guy that looks like a girl. It’s another thing entirely to like being called a good girl by a brick shithouse of a man whose giant dick makes me feel like I’m on another planet.”
“Ohh, I see,” Caty says, pursing her lips. “So you’re hung up on the bottom-shaming, heteronormative bullshit that big, strong jocks like to throw around in locker rooms.”
“It’s complicated, okay?”
“It’s really not though,Becky. You like men. You’ve always known that. You just convinced yourself it didn’t count because you weren’t the one on your knees. And now you’re having ameltdown because you took it up the ass and think that makes you extra gay or something, or a worse version of gay, or some other absolute ridiculous nonsense.”
“Don’t call me that. And that’s not it. Or at least not all of it. Besides, those guys didn’t count.”
