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She frowns and straightens. “It wasn’t her fault. I should’ve been okay by then, ready. It had been a year since you and I had broken up. I’d gotten used to being alone, had actually come to enjoy it. All that time for my hobbies. Eating alone at restaurants like some mysterious madam. But then the dating started, and I couldn’t seem to stop it. I’d get over a new guy by falling for the next. I never really liked them all that much once I got to know them, not really.” She gives her head a little shake, forces a smile. “It doesn’t matter now, anyway.”
I take her hand. “I get it.”
She quirks an unconvinced eyebrow at me. “Really.”
I nod. “I used to go stir-crazy if I was alone two nights in a row. I’d call up my brothers, friends, anyone I could to go out with me. At the club, I’d end up with some girl whose name I couldn’t even remember. We’d go through the motions. I’d wonder if this was all there is.”
By now, we’ve given up on the line for the buffet. We head back to our rooms to find that room service has finally delivered.
While we sit at the table in the corner of my room and eat broiled sausages and potato wedges, Wynona bites her lip.
“What?” I say.
“I never thought it was like that for guys,” she admits.
“Never thought what was?”
God, she looks pretty right now in that dress. If we weren’t eating, then I’d...
“I thought hooking up was all fun for them.”
I shrug. “It can be. You feel like a badass when you get her in bed, but... when it’s almost every weekend or near about... it gets old.”
Wynona’s been chewing that sausage for way longer than necessary.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Just...” She chuckles a bit self-consciously. “It’s not important.”
I shrug.
She glares at me, then sighs. “I just always wondered if there was something wrong with me. Something everyone else had that I was missing.” Her eyes narrow a little. “They always made it seem so fun, hooking up. Like a big ha-ha, no big deal. Like this in-joke all the cool kids knew.” She looks away. “But when I tried it, it felt... horrendous. Empty. Like two bodies I had no acquaintance with rubbing together. Like animals. Like two sex dolls at a shop, two robots, two...”
Her shoulders are bunched up, and I cover them with my palms. “Hey... it’s okay. I’m here now.” I pat her head against my chest. “It’s okay.”
Her face is grimaced. “It’s not, though. You want to know what kind of original I am, Emerson? I was so sure I just needed to be different, just needed to be more like them. I just needed to care less and have fun more and let loose. You remember, our parents were really strict, mine and Josie’s, an old-fashioned pair. I thought they didn’t have a clue. So, I tried it, piss-drunk, and it was the worst night of my life.”
I stroke her head. “Hey... It’s okay.”
She digs her forehead into my chest. “But it’s not, Emerson, don’t you get it? I was lying there, with my mind screaming at me, Please stop, please don’t do this, please, please, will you just stop, I’ll do anything if you’ll just stop. And I didn’t. Because I wanted it to stop hurting so much. I wanted to stop caring so much. I wanted to believe them, to get it. And even after, when I went through the charade with boyfriends like so many cards in a deck, talking more but saying less. Both of us aware, in some foggy back-part of our mind, that we were placeholders, patches for broken hearts that couldn’t work right.”
“Wyn...” I say, more than helpless, useless.
Her eyes fill with tears as she looks at me. “So, if you’re wondering who I am, Emerson Storm, it’s that. Someone lonely and pathetic who makes bad decisions.”
“Why?” is all I can think to say. “Why are you telling me all this?”
“Because I’ve never told anyone, and because if I didn’t, it would wait, and I would be scared of ruining things.”
“Why would it ruin anything?”
“Why wouldn’t it?”
I take both of her hands and clasp them, clasp them hard. “You don’t get it.”
She looks away. I turn her head back to face me.
“Wyn. I like you—not what you’ve done or who you’ve been. I like you now. Here. That’s not going to change, whatever happened.”
Her eyes look like they want to believe. “Even if I can’t trust you, can’t trust myself?”
I shrug. “Maybe you shouldn’t for now. If you’ve let yourself down, since I’ve let you down, it only makes sense that you wouldn’t trust yourself or trust me. You’ll have to earn your trust back. I will too. We will. Together.”
