AllFreeNovel
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“You really quit?”
“Trying.” I open the beers and hand her one. “I need to sit.” I grab the chips and head for the couch, where I turn the TV on to an infomercial for some kind of food chopper. She follows me in and takes a seat on the other end.
We watch this skinny, hyped-up sales guy try to convince us we’ll fucking die if we don’t have his chopper.
I can smell her, her hair and her skin, her detergent, the deodorant she wears that’s oranges and spices.
“Do you think I’m fucking up?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“You want to wait a sec and find out what it is I’m asking about?”
That makes her smile. “No.”
“Because I was asking about Frankie.”
“Hmm.” Her grin is self-satisfied. Knowing.
I’ve seen her smile like that when she had my balls in her palm and she was trying to decide just how she wanted to suck my dick to most effectively drive me out of my mind.
“You think I’m fucking up with Frankie, or you think I’m fucking up in general?” I ask.
She just looks at me with her eyes big and round, like, Go on.
“What else?” I ask. “I’m fucking up with you, too? Fucking up my whole future? Fucking up with school, and—and just more or less everything, huh?”
She’s inclined her head, like she wants to nod along with every question I’m asking. It’s patronizing, but I don’t mind. She’s got on jeans and this soft shirt with buttons partway down the front, and it looks like it’s been through the wash a thousand times, except I’ve never seen it before. I think she must have bought it that way. It’s unbuttoned so low that the way she’s sitting just now, I can see the middle part of her bra. There’s a useless little bow there, sewed onto that spot. Her jeans are tight and faded across her thighs, and everything about her clothes and her hair falling down out of the knot she tied it up in makes me want to rumple her.
Makes me want to test the texture of those jeans, find out if her shirt is soft against my face, if it’s softer than her breasts, even though I know nothing is.
It doesn’t help that her shirt is the exact color of her pussy.
“Just say whatever you want,” I tell her. “You look like you’re gonna die if you don’t.”
She shakes her head. “I’m not saying anything until you do.”
“What am I supposed to say?”
She sips her beer. “Something about how you’re doing.”
“I’m doing fine.”
That gets me a huff of laughter. “Something true about how you’re doing.”
“You say that like I’m lying all the time.”
She considers this. “No, you’re not lying. You’re bullshitting me. Which is funny, since I know exactly how you feel about bullshit.”
The first real conversation I had with her, I gave her a hard time for telling me she was fine when she wasn’t. It was bullshit, I told her. The way people went around all the time suffering and claiming to be fine—why couldn’t they just say what they felt? Why did everyone have to be so fucking polite when they were dying inside?
That was the night she told me that every day she lived through since her pictures turned up online was the worst day of her life.
I understand what she meant better than I did a year ago.
I drain my beer and set it on the coffee table. I’m tired, buzzing, confused about why she’s dressed so touchable, sitting relaxed on my couch, sipping her beer, watching me like she can see inside my head. Like she knows exactly how fucked-up it is in there, but she doesn’t mind it one bit.
“You want me to tell you something true?” I ask.
