Page 38 of His Reckless Freshman

Caroline Mason.

Yeah, she still goes to Nolan U, and I do see her occasionally.

It hurts every time.

I’m over her.

I am.

But one glimpse of those red curls and it all comes back. Every shitty detail of that ordeal stings like a fresh cut.

Staying where I am, I wait for her to move completely out of range before continuing my walk to class.

No women.

I set that goal for a reason, and I need to keep it at the forefront of my mind.

I’m not fucking up my year over a girl. My heart obviously can’t handle casual flings, so I just don’t need to have any. Girls are not worth the trouble.

13

JOLIE

Like the good girl I am, I go to all my classes today, but I’ve been struggling to concentrate. My brain keeps torturing me with reruns of date night, then my totally unsettling conversation with Ben.

He made sex and masturbating and all the things I was taught not to want sound like this amazing thing.

I mean, what if he’s right?

What if sex is incredible and I just had one bad experience?

But it really was bad… to the point where I don’t even want to pop into the Nolan U Star office. I’ve been actively avoiding it.

The article I’m working on is coming together and it’s due first thing tomorrow, so I really have to get over myself. I want to be a journalist, and this is such a great experience for me. I can’t let my evening with Kieran put me off. I can’t screw up my future ambitions because I let myself get swept away in the moment.

Swept away? That sounds almost romantic.

It was anything but.

Maybe that’s why it was so awful. I mean, he was sweet and everything, but once we started making out, it felt almost like a well-rehearsed dance, like he’d done it a bunch of times already and it was just the routine. There was no connection, barely any eye contact. He was just having sex, and it almost didn’t seem to matter who was underneath him.

The more I think about it, the easier it is to reach that conclusion.

He hasn’t called me to check in, hasn’t followed up with a text or anything. He’s obviously not hankering for a repeat.

Carina did warn me he asks a lot of girls out.

What’s the bet that he’s the master of one-night stands and I was just too stupid to realize it?

Seriously, why did I let myself get caught up that way?

Because you were curious. Because you were on a high-speed train and you were too afraid to jump off.

Plunking into my chair, I open my laptop and try to focus on this article. Nylah’s not here right now. I think she said something about eating dinner at her parents’ house.

“One of my conditions of moving out is going there for dinner every Wednesday.”

She made it sound like a chore.