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“I point blank asked you if you strip. You said no. You lied.” Her flinch was subtle, but I didn’t miss it. I should have stopped there, but that flinch only pissed me off more. “Tonight, I had to hear one of my housemates describe your tits to me. And he’s not the only one who’s seen you. A lot of them watched you take your clothes off. You really think I want to be with a girl like that? Whoevery-fucking-one of my friends could close their eyes and picture naked?”
A long stretch of silence settled between us. I focused on her black nails picking at her fishnet stocking. She was unraveling them, making a wider hole with each pick.
“Is that it?” I lifted my eyes to her. She barely blinked. “Or is there more?”
“Nothing, Helen? You have nothing to say?”
She rubbed her lips together, and all I wanted to do was reach out and smear that lipstick all over her face with my fingers. I didn’t.
“No.” She flipped her pretty hair behind her back. “We’re done, so no. You don’t owe me anything, I don’t owe you anything.”
“Deacon.”
She nodded once. “Yeah. Deacon. Is that all?”
“Hel—”
Reaching behind her, she threw the door open. And then she was gone, racing up the stairs and disappearing inside her dorm before I could get her full name to leave my throat.
I knew I was in the right, but I didn’t feel righteous. Not after last night. Not after we’d opened up to each other, fell asleep together, tore apart regretfully at sunrise. I’d been thinking maybe this could be real. Maybe I was ready to start something deeper. If I did with anyone, it would have been her.
A bitter laugh clawed up from my chest when I imagined Andrew finding out my girlfriend was a stripper. He’d have a field day with that, revoke my tuition, disown me. Whitlocks didn’t lower themselves that way—barring the time he’d screwed my eighteen-year-old stripper mom in the champagne room without protection. But we didn’t talk about the circumstances surrounding my conception because, like I said, Whitlocks didn’tdothat.
Even if I was in a position to tell my dad to fuck off, I wouldn’t. Not for Helen. Not when she’d lied, omitted, made a fool out of me. I would never knowingly be with a woman who sold her body to other men. I saw what that did to my mom. I wasn’t interested in a replay.
Helen wasn’t who I thought she was in the beginning. I figured that was why my chest felt like it was being pounded in one spot with a hammer and chisel—disappointment that the woman I knew didn’t really exist.
It couldn’t have been anything other than that.
