“You were at the party too.”
“No, dear. I was in the house where the party took place. That’s totally different.”
“You were drinking,” I added. I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t care if I was right or wrong, I just couldn’t stand seeing him with her. Not after what we had done the night before. Not after that orgasm, after him touching me, him kissing me…
“Yeah, I drank one beer, in my own home, at a party I didn’t organize. So no, I don’t plan on lifting a finger, get it?”
“You’re a jerk,” I murmured, turning around and continuing sweeping.
“I’m a what?” he said, getting up and walking toward me.
“You heard me, jerk.”
We faced each other, both clenching our teeth, until he finally thought better of it.
“Taylor, someone here seems to need you!” he shouted. Then he asked me in a voice so soft no one else could hear it, “Something bothering you, little princess?”
“Just forget you ever knew me.”
“You sure you want me to do that?” He stared straight into my eyes, and without warning my stomach filled with wild butterflies.
“What is it now?” Taylor asked, hurrying down the stairs.
“Nothing,” Thiago said, sitting back down beside Maggie.
“We could help out a little,” she offered, looking at me with false sympathy. “I don’t mind.”
“We’re fine, thanks,” I responded.
I left the broom to help Taylor with the last couple of trash bags, and we went outside to leave them on the curb.
“I’ll grab a quick shower and we can bounce, OK?” he said as we walked back up the stairs.
“Great,” I said, falling back on his bed, where I should have wound up the night before. Where his lips should have kissed me passionately. Where his hands should have gripped me.
Why did I have to fuck everything up?
I took out my phone and looked at my Instagram again. Now that people could no longer comment on the photo with Kate that I’d deleted, they were insulting me through DMs. It was weird to me that Taylor hadn’t brought it up. So I told him the whole story when he came out, a towel wrapped around his waist.
“Someone really hacked your account?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said as he sat down beside me. “Someone is tryingto mess with me, and I have no idea who it is. First the lockers, now this…”
“People are crazy. I’ll tell you one thing, though. If I find out who’s doing this, they won’t try anything like it again. I swear.”
“Don’t worry about it, babe,” I said, stroking his stubbly chin. “It’s probably just some bored loser.”
I didn’t say anything about the weird account, @omv_ovamat, or the message from it. I don’t know why. Maybe I didn’t want to admit aloud how much people hated me. I was already ashamed enough, without having to add on all this extra bullshit. I saw Momo again in my mind, and I wished I could forget that creepy face and everything related to it.
Once Taylor had gotten dressed, we walked downstairs and drove straight to the library. I tried not to notice that Maggie’s car was still there even though she and Thiago had disappeared together.
Of course, as luck would have it, half the student body was at the library that day. Midterms were coming up, and a lot of projects were due. It wasn’t easy to get through my readings on female sexuality with Taylor right there next to me. He kept cracking jokes, but still, I found the information interesting. Did you know a large number of men still think the clitoris is an invention? Or that a lot more lesbians achieve orgasm than heterosexual women? Or that 68 percent of women have admitted to faking an orgasm at least once?
The more I read, the more fascinated I became, especially about the gaps in our understanding of female sexuality and sexuality in general. There were so many myths and so much prejudice about women’s pleasure that I wanted to share all the statistics I’d discovered with everyone under the sun.
“Wait, so the clit is inside the body too?”
We were looking at a drawing describing how the clitorisis an organ that measures four inches long and has more than 8,000 nerve endings. “I guess,” I said in a low voice, looking at the drawing. “Look at this: It says, ‘It wasn’t until 1998 that Australia’s first female urologist depicted the anatomy of the clitoris in its entirety. It is the only human organ designed exclusively for pleasure.’”
