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And then we’re on the porch.
Izzy’s got her arms looped around my neck, and she’s pushing up on her toes to kiss me. It’s easy. It’s simple. We’ve done it a million times before.
Just like we’ve said goodbye a million times before…
Not knowing this one would be the last.
Blink, and there’s Jeremy pulling up in his car.
Blink, and he’s bent over in nothing but surprisingly tight boxer briefs, jeans pooled around his ankles. The knobs of his spine poke out through his pale, dusk-lit skin, and my fingers are flexing at my side, itching to brush over them.
Blink, and I’m back home, in the bathroom, clutching the edge of the sink, ravaged by the sudden, blazing need to get off—to just get off.
It was her, and then it was him, and?—
A rushing sound fills my ears. The edges of my vision blur.
My fault…all my fault.
What did I do, what the fuck did I do?
I love her, I love her, I love her.
A frown tugs at my features. And it’s no longer my voice in my head, pleading desperately to an uncaring universe—I take it back. Please, please, I’ll never take her for granted again—but my therapist’s voice.
“I have no doubt you love Izzy very much… but is that why you’re holding on?”
“Two things can be true at once… But something will always come along and tip the scales eventually.”
“Exactly,” Jeremy murmurs when I take too long to respond, pulling me free of my circling thoughts. “It’s been years. You’re hard up. You know as well as I do that a little bit of friction can go a long way.”
There’s a stoic sort of edge to his voice—almost clinical, like he’s reciting facts from a textbook. Makes me… makes me almost believe it’s true. Except?—
I wasn’t hard up for it when we were seventeen.
My brow knits, and I lower my gaze to some spot on his chest, running through what happened then, what he’s saying now…
“Not to mention how-how emotional you were. Drunk and emotional. Tensions were high. And given who I am to you…how close we are…” He shakes his head, his voice turning quiet. “It was a perfect storm for-for something like that to happen.”
My throat closes up.
I wasn’t drunk back then either…
“It was purely chemical,” he goes on stiffly. “Biological. Nothing else.”
Chemicals…
Hormones…
That’s what I chalked it up to over the years, anytime something would remind me of what happened. It’s the excuse I always used to slam the door on that line of thinking.
I was a hormonal teenager.
A stiff wind could turn me on.
Hell, once I popped a woody in the movie theater over watching Captain America use his bare hands to stop a helicopter from flying off. Like, come on, that?—
My brain just sort of… glitches out.
