1
AURORA
"I said I was hoping to lose my virginity during my years here, not sleep with the whole of Kingston University."
I slam my third—or is it fourth?—cocktail on the bar, and Chloe nearly spits out her drink. Tiana just gives me that look, the one that sayshere we go again, but I'm past caring. The bass from the club's sound system pounds through my chest, matches the frustration that's been building for four years.
"Feeling dramatic tonight?" Chloe wipes her mouth, grinning like this is the best entertainment she's had all week. Her blonde hair catches the club lights, making her look like some kind of chaos angel. "You didn't sleep with thewhole university. Just, what, five guys?"
"Fifteen."
They both stare at me.
"Fifteen dates," I clarify, grabbing my drink back. "Not fifteen—you know."
Tiana's face softens, her dark skin glowing under the ambient lighting. She reaches over, squeezes my hand with those perfectly manicured nails. "Rory, you don't have to explain yourself to us."
But I kind of do, don't I? Because even I don't understand what's wrong with me. Fifteen perfectly decent guys. Some of them were hot. Most of them were smart. A few actually made me laugh. And not a single one made me feel anything below the waist except vague disappointment.
What is wrong with me?
"Maybe you're demisexual," Tiana offers, because she's the kind of person who actually reads articles about this stuff. "You need an emotional connection first—"
"I had emotional connections! Daniel and I dated for three months. Three months of hand-holding and deep conversations and him reading me poetry, and when he finally tried to kiss me, I felt like I was kissing my brother."
"You don't have a brother," Chloe points out, twirling the little umbrella from her cosmopolitan.
"Exactly. That's how bad it was. I invented a brother just to describe how wrong it felt."
Chloe snorts into her drink.
Glad to know my misery is entertaining her.
Maybe I am defective. That is the quiet fear I never said out loud, not even to myself. Like, there was a switch everyone else had flipped at puberty, and mine just… never turned on.
I know the theory. Know the anatomy. Know exactly how it wassupposedto work. I just never felt it.
And the worst part isn’t the lack of sex—it’s the way my friends look at me when I try to explain. Like they feel sorry for me because my intimate parts refuse to work.
I sigh, looking around for the hundredth time, trying to get my mind to enjoy today.
Around us, the club pulses with life—beautiful people in expensive clothes, drinking expensive drinks, pretending their lives are exactly what they want them to be. Lumière is the kind of place where you come to be seen, to matter, to forget that tomorrow you might go back to being nobody.
Tonight's supposed to be a celebration. I finished my chartered accountant program. Four years of balance sheets, tax codes, and financial statements, and I'm finally done. I should be happy.
Hell, I should be drunk and sloppy and making out with some random guy in a corner just because I can.
Instead, I'm sitting here mourning my dysfunctional vagina.
"You know what I think?" Chloe leans in, and I brace myself because Chloe's theories are always dangerous. "I think you've been dating boys when what you really need is a man."
Here we go.
"Oh my God—"
"No, listen! Think about it. All those guys on campus, they're what, twenty-two? Twenty-three? They're basically children. They still think pizza counts as a romantic dinner. Meanwhile, you—" she waves her hand at me, "—you've been running your father's books since you were sixteen. Laundering money for the family business. You're basically thirty in your brain."
"That's not how brains work," Tiana says, but there's weight in her voice. She knows what I am. What my family is. The Olivera name doesn't just open doors—it kicks them off their hinges, and sometimes people don't survive the entrance.
