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“No!” I waved my hands in front of her in the negative. “No. We just kissed at the beach.”
“Okay, I think maybe you need to start at the beginning.”
Probably, because I wasn’t only confusing her, I was starting to confuse myself too.
“Come on.” She waved at me to follow her toward the kitchen at the back of her cozy little house. “I’ll make you a cup of coffee”—she looked back over her shoulder, taking me in—“decaf, I think. After I finish peeing, you’re going to tell me what the hell is going on.”
I nodded like one of those ridiculous bobbleheads as I collapsed into one of the chairs at her kitchen table. “Yeah, okay. Yeah. You go do that. I’ll wait here.”
She gave me a bemused look. “You okay for just a minute? You’re not going to lose your mind or something, are you?”
Now that some time—and distance—had passed, I felt myself starting to calm down. “I’m good. Go to the bathroom before you give yourself a bladder infection or something.”
She scuttled off to take care of business, and I sat at her table, gnawing on my thumbnail as I replayed the whole thing with Beau.
“He can’t make you feel like I can, and you know it.”
“I bet you’re drenched right now, baby. Is that for me? Or for him?”
“Do you think he’d be able to touch you like I can? That he could make you tremble the way you are right now?”
What the hell was wrong with me that I’d let him talk to me like that while I was on a date? And worse, what did it say that I actually found it incrediblyhot?
The answer was a resoundingyes; if he had put his hands down the front of my pants, he would have found me soaking wet. And it was all for him, because some sick, twisted part of me actually got turned on at having him claim me as his own.
What the hell was that?
Colbie came back a minute later and headed for her Keurig to make me a cup of coffee before joining me at the table. She pulled in a breath, as if she were bracing herself, and said, “Okay, start from the beginning, and leavenothingout.”
I took a deep breath before diving right in. “It happened back in college—the last year.”
Poor Colbie was going to get rug burn on the bottom of her chin from all the bombs I was dropping today.
“Back incollege,” she shrieked like a deranged pelican. “That was ten years ago! And you’re just now telling me?”
I massaged the front of my forehead, trying to ward off the tension headache I felt building inside my skull. “I know. I’m sorry. I wanted to tell you so many times, but I was embarrassed.”
That admission had her changing her tune. Worry infused her expression as she leaned in to place her hand on my forearm. “Embarrassed about what? He didn’t...” Her brows winged up. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”
“No, nothing like that,” I said quietly as I wrapped my hands around the mug, letting its warmth seep into my skin. “It’s just... That wasn’t the first time something happened between us—or almost happened, I should say.” I told her all about that day in his bedroom so long ago, how we were working on a project for Spanish, and for the first time ever, we were actually getting along. How I actually fooled myself into thinking we could be friends. I told her how I was convinced he was about to kiss me before his father got home, and how he’d reverted right back to the boy I knew the very next day.
Colbie’s face had gone hard as I talked. “God, what an asshole,” she hissed once I’d finished. “I’m totally poisoning his coffee the next time he comes into the shop.”
I gave her a tiny smile. I had the best friend in the whole world. “I love you for saying that, but I can’t let you go to prison for me.”
“Fine,” she grumped, crossing her arms over her chest with a pout. “But at least let me put something in it that’ll give him the shits or something. It’s the least he deserves.”
I let out a laugh and nodded. “I’ll agree to that.”
“Okay, so what happened in college?”
That story was going to be much harder to get through, but I did it anyway. “You know I lived with my parents the whole time so I didn’t have to pay for housing and all that?” As it was, even with a job and the few grants and smaller scholarships I’d gotten, I’d still ended up having to take out student loans in order to cover the rest. “Well, I’d been at the library one night, studying for a midterm, and I lost track of time. By the time I left, it was already dark out. Anyway, you remember that piece of junk car I drove back then?”
She nodded. “I remember. That thing was a piece of shit.”
“Yeah, well, it wouldn’t start. My cell was dead, so I couldn’t call anyone, so I did the only thing I could think of and started walking. I hadn’t made it off campus when I ran into a group of guys who had been drinking and were in the mood to start some trouble.”
I could still remember the fear I felt as I closed in on the three guys crowding the sidewalk, and it never failed to piss me off that men tended to think they had a right to do or say whatever they wanted to women simply because we’re smaller and maybe not quite as strong. It was bullshit that we had to constantly be mindful of our surroundings, that we had to weigh the dangers of going somewhere by ourselves, even if it was somewhere as simple as a jog, or we needed to carry a means of protecting ourselves at all times, simply on the off-chance someraging prick might feel he had the right to touch us without our permission or make us uncomfortable.
