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He pulled on his clothes and turned back to me. Even fresh out of bed, with his hair a little messy from sleep and his stubble more prominent on his face, he was gorgeous. For a moment, I almost convinced myself that I had been overreacting to all of this, that I would explain it to him and he would back off and apologize and then we could move on.
But he had hidden something from me. Something important. Something that would have changed the way I went about this if I had known. He was younger than he said he was, by a good few years, and I had a connection to his family that I wasn’t going to be able to shake just like that. This had been a bad idea. I would chalk it up to bad luck and move on, but I wasn’t going to be able to do that until he got the heck out of my house.
"Are you going to tell me why?” he asked, and I thrust his phone into his hand. The last thing I wanted was for him to come crawling back later on looking for the damn thing. I shook my head.
"I’m sure you’ll figure it out," I replied, and I opened the door.
"See you later?" He asked hopefully, and I shook my head.
"Please," I told him, putting on my best teacher voice to tell him to get out of there once and for all. There was no way that I could put up with having him around me for another second, not after what he had done. Just thinking about it made my entire body shiver like I had been dunked in cold water.
He raised his eyebrows and walked out the door, and he shot me one last look before I could close it. Without thinking, I darted forward and kissed him on the cheek; a learned response, if anything. I instantly regretted it. Well, not the chance to have been close to him again for a split second, but the fact that I had managed to send him yet another mixed message.
I closed the door quickly in his face and leaned up against it, listening until I could hear his footsteps heading down the stairs and away from me. ThankGod.He was out of there. What a relief. Just being around him made my head feel like it was going to pop.
I couldn’t believe I had let myself get involved with him, even for one night. I made a mental note to check out the family history of anyone that I got involved with. Nobody was going to slip through that net again, not a chance in hell. And I would put up the cut-off for my age range too, because if I hadn’t let Mallory convince me to slide it down again, none of this would have happened in the first place. I should have stuck to my gut. I should have trusted that the old version of me knew just what she was doing.
In fact, term was back in just a couple of weeks. Maybe now was a good time to remind myself that I would have to get back into my old mindset. This new version of me had been a nice idea for a joke, for a laugh, for a hot minute, but I had better things to do with my time than sit around and pretend that I knew how to date again.
Because, clearly, I had no damn clue what I was doing when it came to that. Clearly I was just going to stumble into any number of ridiculous roadblocks until I gave up on it all again. Better to just jump forward a little in time and get over this whole little trip. It hadn’t worked for me. I had tried a half-dozen dates now, and even the one that had gone well had actually gone badly – I just hadn’t realized that until the morning after it had happened.
I shook my head at myself, pissed that I had allowed myself to feel anything at all for that man. For that boy, really. Just because he had talked the talk, walked the walk – just because he had fucked me better than anyone ever had in my entire life before...
I pushed that straight to the back of my head. None of that mattered. Not one part of that mattered anymore. Because I should never have been dumb enough to let it happen in the first place. I should never have let him into my bed and I knew it. I should have trusted the guy instinct inside me that told me to lay off, leave off, let us get to know each other a little better before we did anything like that, because God only knew how much I would have hated it if something like that came around to bite me in the ass again.
I went to make myself another coffee, but I found that my hands were shaking near-uncontrollably. I couldn’t stop thinking about him, about the picture that I had seen on that phone, about the way it had made me feel to know that I had allowed myself to be misled like that. He must have known. Hemusthave known. There was no way that this could have been a coincidence on his part, could it? He didn’t just run into me by chance, and then have to figure out why I was booting him out of my house with a face like damn thunder.
I needed to talk to someone about this. I needed to make sure that I hadn’t totally overreacted to what had happened between us. I had kissed him before he left and I knew that I was sending mixed signals but it was hard to care when I felt so mixed-up inside myself. One half of me wanted to just lay hands on him, drag him back inside the house, tell him that I had been wrong and that I wanted more and that I was sorry for jumping to such unflattering conclusions about him. The other half...
There was no way that I could tell anyone about any of this. Best to keep it to myself and hope that I could write it all out of existence, even inside my own head, too. I couldn’t imagine sitting opposite one of my friends and coming clean about the way that I had climbed into bed with someone who had been astudentuntil so recently – ugh, and he was so much younger than me too, I was practically a cradle-snatcher.
Suddenly, all the effort that I had put in to change myself, everything that I had done to try and make my life better, it seemed to fall apart in an instant. I couldn’t do this anymore. It just wasn’t who I was, not really, not when it came down to it. And look at the mess it had landed me in, trying to change who I was, trying to fit into some mould that I knew in my heart had never been made for me.
Time to go back to what I knew. Time to embrace who I really was. And time to forget that any of this had ever happened at all.
I could hardly wait to put it all behind me.
Chapter eight
Do it in the classroom
AssoonasIsaw him standing outside the school gate, I knew that I was in trouble.
It had been three weeks since my date with Joseph, and I knew that he had been back on the rig for that time; what a relief, knowing that I didn’t have to concern myself with running into him out and about. But still, the memory of what had happened that night was still heavy in my head, and I would have rather just forgotten about the whole thing.
I had spoken to Mallory about what had happened, because God only knew that I needed to get it off my chest; I shifted the age difference a little, just to make sure that I didn’t seem like too much of a creep, and filled her in on the general details. She had listened, and it looked like her jaw was ready to drop off by the time I got to the end of it.
"You’re actually serious," she asked, once I got to the end of the story. It wasn’t phrased as a question, but more as a statement, as though she was convincing herself of the fact.
"Yeah," I agreed. "I know, it sounds crazy, but-"
"You kicked him out?" She asked. "You really kicked him out, even though it was that good between you?”
"It’s not that simple-"
"I think you’re just looking for a way to get out of being with someone," she told me bluntly. "It’s been so long and you’re still nervous about it, aren’t you?”
I glanced away from her. In the time since he had left, that had crossed my mind, if I was being honest. I didn’t like the thought that this was all sprung from some kind of self-protective measure, but I knew that it wouldn’t have been so easy to justify if that was the case.
