“If you feel like talking,” Gerald says, adjusting his glasses, “my door is always open.”
With that, he walks away, leaving me standing in the middle of the quad as students flow around me. My feet feel like anchors, rooted in the concrete path.
Something is growing in my chest. Not anger. Not yet.
Doubt.
What if I’m not special to him? What if it’s all just a lie?
August is peak. He could get any, or as many women as he wants. Maybe I’m just the latest one on the menu with the physicality he was looking for. He saw my innocence and decided to take advantage of it with his dashing good looks and his charming competence that makes him so sexy and alluring.
There could have been countless other front-row girls. Countless tutoring sessions.
Oh God. I think I’m going to throw up.
Slowly, I turn and walk back to my dorm, dragging my feet like they’re sealed in cement. I don’t cry. Not yet. Not out in the open where people can see.
God, I should have seen this coming. A know-nothing girl like me with an older man like August? It’s something out of a fairy tale, and life isnota fairy tale.
I’m numb as I make it to my door and take the stairs up to my room. I drop face-first onto the bed and lie there silently, trying to calm the countless questions plaguing my mind.
My phone buzzes, nearly shocking me out of my skin. It’s a text from August:Thinking of you. Thursday?
My fingers start to move on their own, but I stop them. No, I’m not responding.
I lie on the bed for another hour, doubting every decision I’ve made since I came to this school.
It buzzes again:Jessie?
Again, I don’t answer.
On my bedside table, my notebook sits open to the page I was writing on earlier:Now I am his.
Tears drip from my eyes, blurring the ink. I snap the cover shut and fall back.
This is the first time I’ve actually fully closed the notebook since the day he called me a good girl in his office. Back when I was innocent and naïve and every cell in my body believed that his words actually meant something.
How could I have been so stupid?
10
JESSIE
It’s beenthree days since I closed my notebook, and I haven’t opened it.
All my memories about August, the things we did, the way he made me feel—it’s all in there. And I’m doing my best to ignore it.
But it pains me, sitting on my bedside table like it’s glaring at me. Was everything I wrote in it stupid? Because that’s how I feel now. Every morning I walk past it and cringe, and every night before I go to bed, I sigh, my eyes welling up with tears.
I don’t touch it. Because if I do, I’ll have to read it. And reading it again will bring up feelings inside that I cannot feel right now. I simply won’t survive.
Instead, I go to class. Nothis class.I e-mailed the registrar about switching professors, and now I sit in the back of a different lecture and take notes on my laptop.
I eat meals I don’t taste. I study things I don’t absorb. I take cold showers that don’t even bother me and lie in bed at night, staring up at the ceiling, ignoring the toy beneath my pillow. It’s just another reminder of him. The man who taught me how to use it.
Who taught me so many things…
I’m such an idiot.
